I know it’s from the Daily Mail, but the underlying story is important – it looks like the growth of CCTV in Britain may be one of the first casualties of the recession…
This just bears out what I’ve noticed in discussions with Local Council CCTV people recently – there is a massive argument going on behind the scenes about who will pay for CCTV monitoring. At a recent Users’ event I attended, some local government officers were suggesting that the police should pay local authorities for the use of cameras, which of course the police saw as ridiculous. Other operators argued for a competitive model where ‘successful’ money-making operators could take the ‘business’ of other authorities. And some, like Worcester are just mothballing their monitoring operations.
It brings up another bigger issue which has been bugging me for a while which is that when it comes down to it, it will probably not be resistance that is the biggest enemy of surveillance, but capitalism. The size of the surveillance industry may not be big enough to counter the losses incurred through increased border controls, and the imposition of inefficient monitoring practices…
ubisurv 