CCTV – Page 2 – ubisurv

UK consultation on CCTV: a weak brew?

The UK government has released a consultation document on a ‘Code of practice relating to surveillance cameras’ (CCTV). The closing date for comments in May 25th.

I will go through the document in more detail but there are several initial things to note here:

1. I am interested first of all in the fact that the camera systems are refered to as ‘surveillance cameras’ rather than ‘security cameras’ or ‘safety cameras’ as in many situations I have encountered around the world.

2. This is merely a step toward a state code of practice. The government had promised to ‘regulate’ CCTV, and what many people might have legitimately expected from such a promise was legislation, in other word a statutory footing for surveillance cameras and legal controls. A code of practice is very much at the weak and volunteeristic end of ‘regulation’ if it is regulation at all. The proposed Code itself is really quite weak and presaged on “gradually raising standards to a common level.” with nothing that is mandatory.

3. The document proposes another ‘Commissioner’ to govern surveillance cameras, a ‘Surveillance Camera Commissioner’. This government, despite its avowed attempt to reverse the proliferation of Quangos, seems to want to create another one. One would think that this would naturally fall under the remit of the Information Commissioner, but it appears that the Tory attacks on the ICO (which have been going on in newspapers like The Times for some years and have now spread to other libertarian groups) have been having some effect. Does Britain need another Commissioner in the area of information, surveillance and privacy? I don’t think so. I think we need to clarify the roles of existing Commissioners, and reduce their number – provide adequate budgets and better guidance and division of labour. I suggested a few weeks ago that splitting the ICO into a Surveillance and Privacy Commissioner (which would incorporate the data protection function and absorb all the existing micro-commissions like Surveillance, Interception of Telecommunications and now this new proposed Surveillance Camera Commissioner) and a separate Freedom of Information Commissioner, would be the best solution.

4. The consultation document acknowledges that camera surveillance has increased too rapidly in Britain and has eroded privacy and been overly intrusive. That’s a start. However it also hedges this quite strongly by saying that the government does not intend to limit law enforcement’s abilities. I am not sure the two things are compatible – but I will have to examine the proposals in more detail.

5. The document acknowledges that “CCTV does not always provide the benefits expected of it” but explains this as largely down to technical and operation reasons rather than anything more fundamentally problematic. This is not necessarily justified by evidence or particularly insightful.

6. The document acknowledges that Automatic Number Plate (Licence Plate) Recogntion (ANPR / ALPR) is largely unregulated too and that it connects to all kinds of databases, yet proposes little more than auditable data trails.

7. The document mentions both flying drone cameras / Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and helmet-mounted cameras, but assumes mistakenly that these are ‘niche and novel’. If this can still be said to be true, it will not be for much longer, and the document is overly dismissive of the immediacy of this issue.

8. The document is way too cautious and has the fingerprints of a ‘Sir Humphrey’ bureaucratic avoidance of anything that might ‘frighten the horses’, motivated as it claims to be by “the wish to avoid imposing unreasonable or impracticable bureaucratic or financial burdens on organisations” and recommending “an incremental approach.” It is too late for incrementalism, about 20 years too late in fact.

At first glance, the consultation document appears to be a rather weak brew rather than the strong medicine that is required.

The Expansion of Video Surveillance in India

A recent market analysis (which contained many predictions, more of which tomorrow) identified India as one of the world’s fastest expanding video surveillance or Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) markets, and the coverage of policing plans in the Indian media over the past couple of years would seem to confirm this. In particular, in the wake of the terrorist attack on Mumbai, authorities in all major cities have been pushing ahead with the intensification of security and surveillance measures. This is part of a more general expansion of surveillance in all areas of Indian governance, some of which, like the new biometric census and high-tech border surveillance and UAVs, I’ve mentioned here before.

Cities such as Chennai have announced plan for 10,000 cameras across a range of settings (interestingly in this case, ‘marriage halls’ were one of the first locations to get CCTV – perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why this would be – along with state banks and major malls) and the police chief is quoted as saying he wants “the whole city covered by CCTV.” Delhi is combining a massive expansion of CCTV with increasing numbers of police officers on the streets, so this is not a case of an inhuman technological gaze replacing the neighbourhood police officer. And here, as in the state of Gujarat, in cities like Ahmedabad, the road network is a particular priority with Automatic License (or Number) Plate Recognition (ALPR/ANPR) systems and cameras being installed on all major roads. This ‘Intelligent Traffic Management System’ (ITMS) is designed to be multipurpose and address security, traffic and emergency requirements.

The diffusion of CCTV to more remote and peripheral areas has also been remarkably quick. Just recently, the northern Haryana region has also announced a huge CCTV installation of around 5000 cameras in eight cities, which will be targeted at “shopping malls, main market, major traffic points and escape routes in these cities” – an interesting turn of phrase, which almost seems to portray the city as a prison. Just as in the major urban centres of the country, here too the new systems will employ analytics including movement recognition.

This expansion has not gone unchallenged – see this debate over some of the Chennai systems – but the debates seem rather lifeless and complaints seem to be limited to hoping that there will not be ‘abuse’ of the camera systems by police, and commenting on the lack of any regulatory body for video surveillance. Nor has it all been smooth in technological terms. The Delhi expansion of CCTV builds, as in many cases, from the security upgrades for a ‘mega-event’, in this case the Commonwealth Games in 2010. However, as with much of the infrastructure for these games, there were reports of systemic failure, if not a total lack of functionality from day one. The cameras for the event were apparently poorly calibrated and made watchers dizzy an in some cases, installed where no view could be obtained. It is also not the case that what many nation’s security authorities would consider to be priorities for video surveillance have actually already been covered, even where there has been a demonstrable threat: for example, it is only now that CCTV is being installed at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, which apparently had no CCTV at all prior to this.

Overall, there appears to be strong media backing for a combined state and private sector discourse that emphasises CCTV not so much as a protection against terrorism (though that is clearly present) but as an unquestionably ‘necessary’ or even simply ‘natural’ component of progress, economic development and modernisation. Consider, for example, this description of the new “shining steel” Metro system in the high-tech and global information economy service-centre region of Bangalore, where “automatic fare collecting gates, metal detectors, CCTV cameras and voice announcement systems” were all of a piece along with the announcement of the new ‘signature tune’ for the public transit network. And see also this rather peculiarly de-politicised description of the history (and future) of policing technology in India, written by a former senior officer from Kerala state, in which the British colonial imposition of fingerprinting in India is portrayed as a collaborative advance and in which, of course, CCTV is pictured as part of a similar and apparently totally necessary new series of technological advances designed to drag Indian policing out of a ‘medieval’ period. At the same time, however the historic (and largely colonial) legacy of a slow-moving, fragmented and conflict-ridden bureaucracy is still resulting in a very uneven diffusion of video surveillance across this enormous country.

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…

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…

Campaigners uncover UK local government spending on CCTV

Using Freedom of Information requests, Big Brother Watch in the UK has managed to get hold of figures from many British local governments on how much they spend on CCTV surveillance systems.

According to the Press Association, the annual spend by 336 local councils on the installation and operation of CCTV cameras over a three year-period from 2007/08 and 2009/10 totalled £314,835,170.39 (around $400M US). That’s a large amount of money in an ‘age of austerity’… however it is still not complete as there are another 80 local governments who did not respond to the requests. Interestingly there were still some local governments, albeit only 15, who still did not operate public-area CCTV. That’s not to say that the local police forces in those areas did not, however. There are some cities in Britain, the exception rather than the rule, like Newcastle for instance, where police own and operate public CCTV cameras. I am not sure if these are the types of councils making the claims, and I will have to look at all the figures in greater detail.

The top ten spenders on CCTV over the three years were listed as:

the city of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, and controversial for its special scheme targeted at ‘Muslim’ areas, but also with a massively regenerated and semi-privatised city-centre. £10,476,874.00
Sandwell metropolitan borough, a large urban area to the north-west of Birmingham £5,355,744.00
the city of Leeds, in Yorkshire, whose downtown district is the epitome of the characterless, over-regenerated urban centre. £3,839,675.00,
the city of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, a wannabe global city, and former G8 meeting host, £3,600,560.00
the borough of Hounslow, on the edge of urban and suburban west London, £3,573,186.45
the borough of Lambeth, a diverse south London district, £3,431,301.00
the city of Manchester, one of the cities we studied in our book on urban resilience, which put a huge amount in to CCTV in the downtown core the wake of a provisional IRA bombing, which has now also been gentrified out of recognition – it also has a signficant suburban gang problem, £3,347,310.00
the borough of Enfield, a leafy north-east London suburb, £3,141,295.00
the borough of Barnet, also in north London, £3,119,020.00
the borough of Barking and Dagenham, in east London, on the borders with Essex, and another area of high racial tensions stoked by a strong local British National Party, £3,090,000.00.

Half of the top ten are London boroughs, outside of the centre of London, showing that CCTV is still diffusing outwards from the heavily surveilled core around the financial centre of the City of London and the government district of Westminster. Not surprisingly, the diffusion is also continuing primarily to the major urban centres beyond London, and the case of Sandwell perhaps shows that the greater Birmingham area is going through a similar process seen in London. In any case, public area video surveillance is not going away in the UK any time soon, and the new government will have to, at some time, demonstrate what it actually meant by introducing greater regulation of CCTV.

New multipurpose traffic cameras in the EU

A new multipurpose traffic camera which can identify license plates, recognise the distance between vehicles, see whether or not a driver is wearing a seatbelt as well as detecting speeding is being created as part of an EU program, ASSET. The program is a research project which means there is no guarantee that any member state will actually take up the scheme, but it would seem to fit with the policies of a number of them, notably the UK, which has already a nationwide network of Automatic License (or Number) Plate Recognition (ALPR or ANPR) cameras.

The story has been reported in The Guardian which notes that, despite concerns about the automation of road justice, many of the UK organisations which currently oppose speed cameras seem to be tentatively in favour of this camera which is even more restrictive of the ‘drivers’ rights’ that such organisations claim to represent… which is somewhat curious.

New Orleans Ditches Surveillance Cameras

For a while now, I have been wondering how long it would be before the combination of cost and manifest ineffectiveness made urban authorities consider removing CCTV schemes. I had thought, given its long history of public space video surveillance, was that it might be Britain where this was most like to happen. What I didn’t expect was that one of the first big examples would be from the USA, which since 2001 has been going through the kind of expansion of CCTV seen in Britain in the 1990s.

But, surprise, surprise, here is New Orleans’ Mayor, Mitch Landrieu, arguing that a mere 6 indictments in 7 years (which is the success rate of New Orleans’ video surveillance system) is not enough to justify the costs and intrusion of CCTV:

“Most of us can agree that based on the way that they were installed, based on the way that they operated and the way that they were not maintained, that they were not a good investment.”

Woah! What was that? Public space CCTV doesn’t work? Who knew?

Well actually, it isn’t just New Orleans and its particular unmaintained and faulty system. Most urban authorities already know this. Police forced already know this. I would argue that much the same could be said for those in London, which has an far, far more intensive network in public spaces, yet the police themselves admit that only 3% of street robberies are solved with the help of CCTV. The difference is that now some of them are admitting what they have known for some time. The problem is that the public still largely believe that they ‘work’ (whatever that means anyway). And ironically this means in New Orleans that the cameras are staying up, even if they are turned off (as in fact many all over the world are anyway, and many more are not actually being watched by anyone)…

Meanwhile, in the rest of the USA, Homeland Security and stimulus plan-funded Justice Department CCTV systems continue to proliferate.

(Thanks to Aaron Martin for finding this story!)

Real-time Video Erasure?

There are some reports circulating around the web that researchers from the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany, have invented an algorithm for unobtrusively erasing objects from live digital surveillance camera footage. Now the possibility of post-hoc manipulation of video has long been known, but the idea that live images could be altered is something new. A device that could trigger such an erasure drove the plot of the superb surveillance technothriller, Whole Wide World, written by Scottish author, Paul McAuley back in 2001, but almost ten years later, reality appears to have caught up with a piece of near-future SF that already felt perilously close.

According to Ray Kurzweil’s blog, the software is being demonstrated as I write at the Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in Seoul, although the researchers appear to refer to their invention as ‘diminished reality’. There are links to video on the invention from both there and the university press release (above). The software appears to work by recognised shapes and removing them from the video as the feed comes in and before it reaches any display.

Moscow_1919 — Soviet Leaders in Red Square, 1999

1919_-_Altered — ... and with Trotsky removed.

However, neither Kurzweil nor any of the other commenters on this story (e.g. BoingBoing) seem to get the potential seriousness of this development, both for resistance to surveillance and for the credibility of video surveillance: it could be a fantastic tool for privacy, or an equally fantastic tool for social and political control. It’s one thing to be able to manipulate the past (to do what Stalin did to his oppenents and airbrush them out of history -see David King’s excellent book, The Commissar Vanishes), it’s yet another thing to be unsure whether what one is watching on TV or on YouTube is ‘real’ or ‘fake’ or some combination, but it is another thing entirely to be unsure whether the supposedly live images from a surveillance camera are actually real or not…

The city where the cameras never sleep… New York, New York

The Gothamist blog has a brief report on the massive upgrading and expansion of the video surveillance system in the New York public transit system. Like Chicago, which I’ve mentioned several times here, the cameras in New York are really just collection devices to feed an evolving suite of video analytic software, that can track suspects or vehicles in real-time or search through old footage to find multiple occurences of particular distinctive objects or people.

The other notable thing is that the new camera system is just completely overlaying the old – in other words there is no attempt to connect the older cameras which are not compatible and have far poorer image quality. As cameras and software gets cheaper, this option looks like being the one many urban authorities will pursue, so cities like London, which pioneered widespread video surveillance, but which, with their disconnected mosaic of incompatible systems, have started to look increasingly ineffective and out-of-date, could deal with this not by expensive and unreliable fixes but simply by sticking in an entirely new integrated algorithmic system on top of or alongside the old ones. Technological fallibility and incompatibility can no longer be relied on as protections for the privacy rights of citizens in public spaces.