David

What’s Wrong with Video Surveillance?

Occasionally, you need to simplify and clarify. Someone asked me the other day, “so, what’s wrong with CCTV anyway?” Here was my quick answer.*

1. Does CCTV prevent crime?

The prevention of crime was the main rationale for CCTV in Britain back in the early days in the 1990s, and this rationale is still the main one currently in the USA…

But meta-evaluation of valid studies of CCTV by Welsh and Farrington, recently published as Making Places Safer by OUP, shows the following: that studies can only show a positive correlation between reduction in rates of crime and the installation and operation of CCTV in limited situations, namely in car parks and the like. This is because car theft is a more rational form of crime (the perpetrators are often professional criminals and they do not want to get caught). Most crime, especially street crime and violence is not so rational. People do not generally look up in their violent drunken haze and think ‘ooh, there’s a camera, better not kick this guy’s head in’.

According to Martin Gill and co.’s work evaluating 14 schemes across the UK, only 1 resulted in a clear reduction in crime over the longer term. CCTV can have temporary effects in reducing crime (and police studies always seem to be done in these early months and hence are very misleading), but over the years after installation, unless other things are done, the crime will return to similar levels. It’s those other things that are done – more community volunteers, neighbourhood watch schemes, better street lighting, economic regeneration – that make the difference to crime rates. People who think they ‘know’ it’s down to CCTV are just looking at A and B and thinking changes to A must be a result of B, without considering C, D and E…

What can be useful in this regard, knowing that temporary reductions can be made, is to use CCTV in targeted, temporary and flexible manner – i.e. if you are going to have video surveillance at all, make it moveable and used to target specific areas where there have been sudden increases in crime.

So, so much for prevention…

2. What about solving crime? Surely CCTV gives us lots of evidence?

Well, not as much as you might think. The biggest study of street robbery and CCTV in London (the city with the highest density of cameras in Europe), commissioned by the Metropolitan Police, showed that only 3% of such crimes were solved using CCTV . And, figures released in 2007 through Freedom of Information Act requests, showed that 80% of crime in London still goes unsolved even with this infrastructure.

3. But at least someone’s looking out for us – right?

Studies of control rooms show that the professionalism and seriousness of operators is increasing but there is still evidence that more time is spent on anti-social behaviour and dealing with ‘unwanted’ people than the potential for serious crime, particularly in shopping districts. Who is watched and why is also complicated by family and social connections, especially in smaller towns. CCTV systems are also increasingly difficult to watch as the numbers of cameras and screens increase; there aren’t enough staff, however well-trained they are, to do a really efficient job in most cases and computer analytics are not good enough (yet).

In addition, there is the growing issue of cost. There were originally subsidies for installing CCTV in Britain in the 1990s, but running costs, maintenance and replacement have to be covered by the operators (usually Local Authorities) and there is an ongoing row going on behind the scenes between LAs and police in the UK about who pays for it.

Now costs are starting to bite, exacerbated by recession and new Tory efficiency savings, some local authorities have even started to either combine their monitoring with others – meaning even more distant and less efficient watching and in some cases have stopped watching the cameras live at all (in many countries this dead recording is normal anyway).

4. What about the Courts?

The only undoubtedly positive effect seems to be that it encourages criminals who are caught to confess and plead guilty, which saves court costs and time – although of course, guilty pleas mean that the criminals are punished less and out of prison quicker (if they go in at all), which might be felt not to be an advantage by some!

Summary

Video Surveillance, particularly fixed CCTV, is expensive, inefficient and has all kinds of negative social side-effects. Public money would be better spent on improved street lighting, schemes for community involvement and economic regeneration. CCTV certainly isn’t a ‘Panopticon’ because actually it doesn’t actually ‘see’ very well at all nor does it actually seem to alter behaviour as much as states would like in itself, but it does appear to contribute to the decline of social trust and decreasing personal responsibility, which are partly at least to blame for the problems CCTV is supposed to solve, and all of which would be more likely to increase with other solutions.

*In most ways, this answer is not really ‘mine’ – it’s the distillation of many other people’s work, some of whom are mentioned here, some of whom like Clive Norris, Mike McCahill, Will Webster, Pete Fussey and Gavin Smith, are not… anyway, they know who they are! Thank-you all…

Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar – deadline approaches!

Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
16 – 21 May 2011
Application deadline: 11 February 2011
APPLY NOW

The Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar provides an intensive, multi-disciplinary learning experience that addresses key issues of surveillance studies in ways that enhance the participants’ own research projects, as well as providing a unique national and international networking opportunity.

“International and cross-cultural diversity of the participants is one of the strengths of the seminar. Because surveillance studies are related to social justice, equality, and power, it is crucial to have the perspectives from the world of non-English speaking people.” –2007 SSSS participant

“Quality of faculty and attendees was excellent; social events well planned and spaced; location and setting excellent; well-planned and organized throughout.” –2007 SSSS participant

CORE FACULTY:
David Lyon, FRSC, Professor and Queen’s Research Chair, Department of Sociology, and Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, Canada

Valerie Steeves, Associate Professor of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Canada

David Murakami Wood, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen’s University

THE PROGRAMME:

The core of the seminar is group work, each facilitated by a member of seminar faculty. Groups will grapple with key issues in surveillance studies, including issues such as “The researcher as surveillance agent,” “Gaining entry into surveillance sites,” “Making international comparisons,” “Connecting social science with policy and legal fields” and so on. Participants are encouraged to comment, in their statement of interest, on what areas are of particular interest. The rest of the programme is devoted to theoretical, methodological and professional issues, and to open interaction with established scholars in the field. The idea is to “go behind” conference and book performances to discover how and why surveillance researchers do what they do.

There will be no assessed tasks and no credit for enrolling in the seminar, although a letter confirming your completion of the seminar will be provided.

FEES AND SUBSIDIES:

The fee for the 2011 SSSS is $700 CAD. Applicants should pursue funding opportunities before submitting their application.
The Surveillance Studies Centre (SCC) will award up to three Summer Seminar tuition subsidies to non-Queen’s graduate student registrants who can demonstrate financial need. Click here for more information.
The Surveillance Studies Network Global Scholar Award (SSN) will award up to three bursaries of £500 (500 GBP) each to SSSS participants from less developed or developing countries who are in need of financial assistance. Click here for more information.
The deadline to apply for both subsidies is 11 FEBRUARY 2011.

—
Joan Sharpe
Project Administrator
Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o Dept of Sociology
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
Canada
(613) 533-6000, ext. 78867
(613) 533-6499 FAX

Twitter @sscqueens
http://www.sscqueens.org
http://www.newtransparency.org

‘Turning Off’ the Internet

Boing Boing contributors have been doing a fascinating job of documenting the place of the Internet and social media in the ongoing turmoil spreading across Arabic countries. Until recently the focus had been on the use of social media tools by activists, but in the last few days, the empire has struck back. In particular the Egyptian state has effectively ‘turned off’ the Internet, cutting Net access and communications between Egypt and the rest of the world.

What’s particularly interesting is that the rulers of western ‘democracies’ seem to want similar powers. I’ve been writing about the growing movement amongst states to develop powers to split or close the Internet entirely for some time (see here, here and here, for example). Most recently, I reported on French efforts to develop Internet censorship power in wide-ranging circumstances, and as Sean Bonner on BB points out, a bill was introduced into Congress last year by, it’s that man again, Joe Liebermann, to give the USA government even greater powers to cut off civilian access to the Net entirely in the event of a ‘cyber-emergency’.

This is not a drill, people, this is happening…

US border project cancelled… or is it just mutating?

Neoconopticon is reporting that the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) project is to be shelved and replaced with off-the shelf surveillance equipment (UAVs etc.).

The project which was based on contracts with Boeing and Raytheon, had been in trouble for some time. I reported back in 2009 how Boeing had basically wasted most of the money on the Mexican border projects on systems that didn’t work. Neoconopticon gives the figure of $3.7Bn for the project, but in fact estimated costs for the longer-term maintenance just of the Mexican fence component had spiralled to over $10Bn.

The original source for this news, Defence Industry Daily, has a good timeline.

I am left wondering however about whether this cancellation might have anything to do with the discussions that were recently revealed on the North American Perimeter project, which I blogged back in December last year. A complete North American perimeter might reduce the pressure to add further security to the US-Canadian border at least, and Canadian government funds and people could be leveraged by the US, as they were during the Cold War with the DEW Line and BMEWS. A summit on the issue between US President, Barack Obama, and Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, had been scheduled for January and was recently pushed back into February, which has given time for the decision on the cancellation of the SBI.

This could all be coincidence, but it is certainly interesting timing…

Facebook learns nothing

Having been strongly criticised over its ‘Places’ feature for its lack of understanding of the concept of ‘consent’ in data protection, and why ‘opt-in’ is better for users than ‘opt-out’ when it comes to new ‘services’ (i.e: ways they can share your data with other organisations), Facebook is doing it again.

Between today and tomorrow, the new Facebook feature called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-Facebook sites and it is automatically set to “Enabled”.

To turn it off: Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.

(Or of course, you can just ‘Turn Off All Platform Apps” too!)

The really important thing is that if your Facebook Friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. So, copy this and repost to yours…

(Thanks to Lorna Muir for this alert)

The Total Surveillance Society?

Advanced visual surveillance has become prevalent in most developed nations but, being restricted by inconvenient things like democracy and accountability (even if they are not as strong as some would like) and police and local authority funding, such surveillance remains patchy even where it is widespread.

The Chinese state, however, suffers from none of these inconvenient restrictions. Free from democracy, accountability, and with a buoyant economy still largely connected to the Communist Party, it is able to put in place surveillance systems beyond the wildest dreams of the most paranoid western administrators. The target of the new wave of surveillance is internal political unrest, particularly in separatist Tibetan Buddhist and Muslim areas of the massive nation.

Associated Press is reporting official internal announcements about how Urumqi, capital of the Uighur Muslim area of Xinjiang, which saw extensive anti-government protests last year, will be blanketed by surveillance systems. According to the report:

40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective shells have already been installed in the region, with 17,000 in Urumqi itself
3,400 buses, 4,400 streets, 270 schools and 100 shopping malls are already covered
the aim is for surveillance to be “seamless”, with no blind spots in sensitive areas of the city (and this includes in particular, religious sites)
5,000 new police officers have been recruited

This is part of a wider ‘Safe City’ strategy – in this context, even more of a euphemistic description that the same words would be in the west – that will see 10 million cameras being installed across the country. Ths numbers keep growing all the time: the last time that I reported on this, the estimate was less than 3 million ! IMS Consultants last year estimated that the Chinese video surveillance market was $1.4 billion in 2009, and that this will grow to over $3.5 billion by 2014. China is now the single largest market for video surveillance in the world.

Condensed CCTV

Video analytics is the thing right now. With so much video information and the limits of human operators, what to do with all that footage? There are numerous answers mostly involving forms of algorithmic movement recognition. From the masses of press releases that come my way every day, I notice one Israeli company (Israel being one of the world leaders in security technology), BriefCam, is marketing a new automated system that not only recognises objects of interest but then condenses hours of video which feature the object of interest into a matter of minutes featuring all the salient points from the whole time, at once. Or according to their own website:

“BriefCam VS Online receives real-time feed from the DVR/NVR and processes data to produce a database that can be called on to create a video summary presentation, on demand.”

I’ve seen the technology at work, but one thing starts to concern me imediately is what is lost by way of this combined footage. Check the video here for example.

The blurb claims that it is ‘easy’ for operators to see something unexpected, yet this is not a ‘real’ image, or in fact it is a hyperreal image, multiple images partly overlaid on what is assumed to be a standardized background. Of course, given the original footage remains available contextual evidence can be sought. However, I do wonder what kind of decisions will result from fast-moving combined footage pre-selected to present to a human viewer… and of course, what exactly it is that the system is programed to recognise and how. It seems that operators of video surveillance systems will increasingly be watching is not reality, but combined, edited highlights, a part-simulated recreation. Jean Baudrillard would be having a quiet chuckle if he could see this…

Corporate Privacy?

I’ve been arguing a lot recently that individual privacy, state secrecy and corporate confidentiality should be regarded as clearly separate things. Keeping this separation is important precisely because it stops organisations which we should expect to be open to inspection and accountable to us, from using ‘privacy’ as an excuse for avoiding such inspection. Philosophically, the distinction should be clear, but legally it may not be so obvious. One problem however lies in the nature of the whole notion of ‘incorporation’, which in its very language already assigns certain individual human attributes to organisations. And corporations are very much aware of this.

Marc Rotenberg points me to a very interesting legal test case in which the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in the USA is currently involved. This case originally started when in 2008 the Federal Communications Commission ruled that corporations could not use ‘privacy’ as a reason to reject Freedom of Information requests. In 2009, a court overruled this decision. And now the FCC, ironically aided by EPIC, an organisation which frequently finds itself challenging rather than supporting the state on such issues, is seeking to have this ruling overturned in the Supreme Court.

This strikes me as a vital case, not just for the USA, for other jurisdictions where corporations will be observing the outcome and seeking to bring similar challenges if they can. If privacy, and indeed any other fundamental human right, is to mean anything it can neither be granted to companies who find it simply a convenient cover for a desire for confidentiality, nor to states who seek to maintain secrecy. Clearly there is information possessed by corporations and by states that might have elements that could be damaging to personal privacy. Private individuals acting in a corporate or state capacity may perhaps in some clearly delineated circumstances have the right not to be personally identified, even more so for individuals from outside the organisation concerned, but the ‘what’ of the information should still not, by association with an individual expressing a desire for privacy or anonymity, acquire the protection of privacy.

Doping, Surveillance and Radical Transparency in Sport

Surveillance studies people tend not to look at sport very much. Sure, sports mega-events and the kinds of security crackdowns and surveillance surges that occur around them are an object of research, but sport itself, less so.

This is interesting because the bodies of athletes are amongst the most closely monitored and at the same time, contested sites that one could imagine, none more so than professional cycling. Professional cycling may be the most difficult sport on the planet and not surprisingly it has acquired a bad reputation for the prevalence of cheating, particularly in the area of doping. The reputation is in some ways unfair as cycling also has some of the most onerous regulations governing everything from the movements of the riders – the so-called ‘whereabouts rule’, where riders must be available for testing at all times, so must tell doping testers where they are going to be and be there – to bodily function, with top level cyclists now required to have a ‘biological passport’ which establishes baseline values for levels of various aspects of blood and so on, so that anything which alters these values in an unusual way can be taken as prima facie evidence of doping.

However, there has been a reaction from many cyclists against the increasingly intrusive surveillance regime. Privacy has been cited (see for example the challenge by Kazahk rider, Andrey Kashechkin to be his positive test for an illegal blood transfusion), as well as the riders’ right to a good night’s sleep (testers now often arrive in the early hours of the morning). Critics have been less sympathetic with accusations of a code of ‘omerta’ towards anyone who tells the truth about doping in cycling, and riders generally failing to understand the seriousness of cheating.

In opposition to the complaints, a growing number of top teams and riders have been taking the initiative and arguing not against the surveillance regime but embracing it even more fully than the UCI, the sport’s governing body or WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency. One example is British rider, Bradley Wiggins. He’s an ex-Olympic track cycling champion who has previously finished 4th in the Tour de France, generally acknowledged as the pinnacle of the sport. That result was a surprise to everyone as Wiggins had never really shown such prowess on the road, and there were mutterings about doping. What Wiggins did was radical and even more startling: a rider who has always insisted that he has ridden clean, he published his biological passport readings for the whole period of the Tour and more.

Now he is taking this ‘radical transparency’ stance further and arguing that all biological passport data for all riders should be made available on the Internet. He argues that this would give both individual riders and the sport, credibility, and stop the rumour mill and the often unfounded allegations around particular performances, as well as shaming those who really are trying to get away with doping. Of course it does damage privacy, but in this case, the virtues of privacy and very much less clear than they might be in other domains. Of course there is also a big difference between such transparency being a voluntary gesture and a requirement.

Two Weeks to Go for Bill C-32

Many people will still not be aware of the imminence of a new bill on copyright for Canada. Everything you need to know (and more) is on Michael Geist’s excellent site. The key thing is that, like most such bills around the world, this bill is still skewed towards industry perspectives and does not place much importance on the rights on the ordinary citizen or resident of Canada, in particular in the areas of ‘digital locks’ that prevent fair use of digital materials, and the lack of provision for copying across form factors for personal use. You have until the end of January to make your views heard.