The Daily Telegraph reports some welcome political promises, which we will which hold them to in the future, from the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis regarding CCTV surveillance cameras.
Tories pledge to curb use of CCTV camerasBy James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:49AM BST 21/05/2008A Conservative government would put strict new limits on the use of surveillance cameras, David Davis, the shadow home secretary, pledged on Tuesday night.
Mr Davis told the Society of Conservative Lawyers that the widespread use of closed circuit television (CCTV) risks infringing civil liberties.
He proposed new rules on the use of CCTV and penalties for people and bodies that use the cameras to invade the privacy of the public. He also promised measures to improve the quality of CCTV footage to aid prosecutions.
Mr Davis said: "There is no argument for having CCTV which both infringes on our civil liberty but is of such poor quality it does nothing to protect us or provide evidence to bring perpetrators of crime to justice - as happens now.
"Conservatives would ensure any CCTV has to be maintained at sufficiently high standard to provide evidence admissible in court.
"We would also strictly limit access to these images to the police and other relevant agencies until they get to court, and set a mandatory punishment for breaches of these rules that infringe the privacy of the individual."
Britain is one of the heaviest users of CCTV in the world, with more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras across the country, one for every 14 people.
This figure is only an out of date guesstimate, made over 5 years ago, but the Labour government Surveillance State has never bothered, or perhaps never dared, to research a more accurate or up to date figure.
See "monitored on CCTV 300 times a day" etc. soundbites
There needs to be a level playing field, with CCTV regulations legally enforced , fairly and equally throughout the United Kingdom. This does not happen at the moment.
- We would support the use of far fewer, but properly run and properly maintained CCTV systems, which are all registered with the Local Council planning authorities..
- Providing that they are physically small, as most CCTV cameras are nowadays, it should be made easier to mount them closer to the ground. Under the current "no need for planning permission" building regulations, they are at least 2.5 metres off the ground, like advertising signs etc, to prevent people colliding with them by accident. This would give better pictures of people who currently succeed in obscuring their faces with hoodies or baseball caps etc.
- Residents should be able to legally object, for free, to the siting CCTV cameras which snoop on them or their children, or which are used as a form of intimidation in disputes between neighbours.
- This would aid the Police in serious crime investigations, especially where time is of the essence e.g. a missing child as they would not have to waste time and resources literally knocking on doors and trying to find out who, if anyone has some relevant CCTV footage.
- The Government and the insurance industry should mandate open standards for CCTV image data transfers formats and connector cables. There are far too many incompatible proprietary data compression formats and cable end connectors in use.
- There should be a legally enforceable CCTV image Data Retention period which is equal to or greater than the Data Protection Act Subject Access Request time limit to reply of 41 days, by which time most "CCTV evidence" is usually destroyed. Alternatively, the Data Protection Act should be amended to reflect the fact that most CCTV camera systems are on daily, weekly or monthly data re-formatting or overwriting cycles.
- Where CCTV evidence is "seized" by the Police or the security agencies etc, it must not be kept and stored indefinitely. All copies must be proven to have been destroyed after a suitable Data Retention period. Extensions to such Data Retention periods must be independently reviewed.and not simply be rubber stamped automatically.
- The regulations and legislation should a increase the number of CCTV Warning Signs, with up to date contact details of the Camera Operators - what is the point of a "deterrent" which nobody knows about ?
- "CCTV" should also include all the "see through your clothes or your children's clothes" scanner and imaging technologies such as Passive or Active Millimetre Wave, TeraHerz or Back Scatter X-Ray etc.
- There must be criminal penalties for the abuse of CCTV and other such systems
The Tories are just giving the public a sop in order to win the next general election.
As long as the politicians don't antagonize too many voters once they are elected, they are free to break their promises at will.
@ Michael - it is up to the public to make sure that the politicians do not break their promises without incurring the political consequences.
Hopefully these days, as politicians' speeches and statements are made available online, it has become easier to keep reminding them of what they promised in the past.
Excellent set of proposals folks - if even half of your suggestions were implemented, that would go a long way towards converting an arbitrary and ineffective surveillance system into a targeted and balanced tool.
The Conservative's proposal looks to me like a straightforward reaction to recent reports criticising the farcical way CCTV evidence is currently used - according to reports only 3% of crimes are solved by those 4.2 M+ cameras!
I note Mr. Davies didn't expand on *how* the Tories propose to ensure systems produce evidential quality recordings... or who will pay for the upgrade...
@ Mary - so even the BNP are calling Hazel Blears' community snooping plan "fascist" ?
Your comment has been moved and edited under the more appropriate Spy Blog article published on May 13th:
Hazel Blears and Sergeant Flanderka - "tension monitoring" i.e. snooping on local communities
which predates most of the other commentary on this topic by either the mainstream media , or other political blogs etc.
There was no need to re-post, without attribution, almost the full text of the BNP article, a URL link would have done.
wtwu wrote: "@ Michael - it is up to the public to make sure that the politicians do not break their promises without incurring the political consequences."
Just like it was up to the public to stop Britain from assisting Bush in occupying Iraq, both economically and militarily? Ditto for impromptu protests close to the Houses of Parliament, the abuse of legislation enacted for the prevention of terrorism and serious organized crime, etc.
Call me cynical, but we've been here before, haven't we? 1997, when things could only get better.
I'm old enough to remember what the Tories were like in power, their utter contempt for anyone who wasn't wealthy, their infatuation with empowering corporations at the expense of the public (which Labour has zealously embraced), and their belief that they had a God-given right to govern, and were doing us all a favour.
The entire political system is broken. "Fool me once...", as Bush would say - but without mangling the phrase!
@ Michael - so what can we do to improve this dire situation ?
I agree with Michael, and can also remember pre-1997 days. Politicians will make all kinds of policy promises before being elected, but may then do the exact opposite when in office. Manifesto pledges are not worth the paper they're written on, and have no legal status.
Most of the proposed regulations seem reasonable - especially the idea that CCTV images should be of sufficient quality to be admissible as evidence in a court case. However as CCTV quality improves it will become increasingly tempting to use the technology as a replacement for real policing. Audio enabled CCTV may become a kind of "policing by megaphone" or "telepolicing".
On the multiple incompatible standards problem actually at present this seems to be playing in our favour, since it's a barrier to producing a centralised state spying apparatus. In time though open standards will become available and it will become technically a simple matter for any authorised government official to view any camera at the press of a button, just as George Orwell described.
I don't know what the real costs of the massive CCTV empire may be, but it will be a tidy sum. Given the abject failure of CCTV to prevent crime - witness recent official comment - perhaps the sensible thing might be to scrap it completely and use the cash saved to put extra policemen on the streets.
The whole philosophy of CCTV is skewed. At best it is merely a convenient means of recording some aspects of criminality and criminal events. There was a time when the cops seemed to believe that their function was to prevent crime. Now it seems that they regard their job as being one of recording crime and, once in a while, apprehending criminals and/or furnishing evidence for prosecutions which are likely to fail. What are they really doing - apart from watching monitors and computer screens, that is?
Sorry if this one has already been linked a thousand times - from FailBlog, entitled "video surveillance fail", an amusing fightback against CCTV
http://failblog.org/2008/05/29/video-surveillance-fail/
(this seemed the most appropriate item to link from)