London – Page 2

Metropolitan Police Encouraging Stupidity and Suspicion

Rather than being a legitmate political response to an illiberal, repressive, undemocratic and unaccountable growth in surveillance, ‘interest’ in CCTV is now regarded as suspicious in itself…

Boing Boing has news of the latest London Metropolitan Police campaign which is supposedly encouraging people to report their suspicions on terrorist activity, but is in fact just another step on the illiberal, socially divisive and stupid road towards a McCarthyite Britain where British people are expected to spy on each other in the name of security.

Why not check your neighbours' waste bins?

Apart from encouraging people to rifle through their neighbours garbage, the most disturbing thing about this new campaign is the way in which it implies that any interest in CCTV cameras is a potentionally terrorist activity.

See that camera? No, you don't. It's not there.

From the late 1980s onwards, the British state in its usual bumbling, piecemeal and disorganised way, gradually created an increasingly comprehensive monitoring program of British city centres. There was never any strong evidence for the need for this technology, it was never approved by parliament, there was never a single CCTV Act that enabled it.

Now, just as it has become pretty clear that CCTV has very little effect on crime rates (its original justification, let us not forget), the state has started to close down criticism and even interest in or discussion of these surveillance measures. Effectively, we are being officially instructed to ignore the cameras and pretend we don’t see them. Rather than being a legitimate political response to an illiberal, repressive, undemocratic and unaccountable growth in surveillance, ‘interest’ in CCTV is now regarded as suspicious in itself.

At the same time, the British state is increasingly regulating the means of production of visual images by ordinary citizens. The state (and many private companies) can watch us while we have to pretend we don’ t notice, but for ordinary people to take picture or make video in public places, and in particular making images of state buildings or employees like the police (you know, the people who supposedly work for us), is being gradually and by stealth turned into a criminal act. In the past, I have been very careful not to shout about all acts of state surveillance being totalitarian (because very few of them actually are), but there is no other word for these trends. The police are attempting to make themselves the arbiters of how we see society and public places; they are telling us what can and cannot be legitimately the subject of interest and of visual representation.

They are also spending more time now ‘securing secturity’ – protecting the architecture of surveillance that has been built. You can see the private sector recognising this. At equipment fairs I have been to over the last few years, one of the big developments in camera technology has been methods of armouring and protecting the cameras themselves. There seems to be an effort, deliberate or unconscious, to forget the supposed original purpose of such surveillance in protecting us, and instead to concentrate on protecting the surveillance equipment.

This is particularly problematic for researchers like me. We’ll see what happens when I am back in London in May and June when I will be taking a lot of pictures of CCTV as part of my project, which is of course, ironically, sponsored by an official British state research council…

Counting Cameras (yet again)

Here is yet another episode in what has become a bit of a scrap between David Aaronovitch of The Times and everyone else who knows anything about surveillance (including the news reporters from his own paper). It is making me lose the will to live, but if anyone else is interested, here is Paul Lewis of The Guardian taking David out to count cameras in London.

How many cameras are there in Britain? (4)

Despite the fact that it really doesn’t ‘work’, the growth of CCTV is almost out of control in Britain, and it is probably only the recession that is holding this growth back at all…

Here is another episode in the ongoing saga that was sparked off by my discussion with David Aaronovitch about supposedly misleading figures used in our Report on the Surveillance Society, leading to his rather weak comment piece in The Times, my pre-emptive response here, and Paul Lewis’ similar piece in The Guardian.

Aaronovitch’s own newspaper, The Times, has now published a story by one of its reporters, Kaya Burgess, in which she counted the cameras on her commute into work, and found there were a total of 281 cameras on her 3.1 mile route, or one camera every 18 metres on average. 108 of these were state-placed and the rest were installed by private operators (shops,homes etc.). As the article points out, and this is something I have been arguing for years, the growth of private cameras is remarkable and of course, almost completely unregulated.

The figure of 281 is remarkably similar to Clive Norris’ little fictional tale of ‘Thomas Kearns’ of 1999 which sparked the ‘we are watched by 300 cameras a day’ stories in the press, and which was the subject of Aaronovitch’s piece. Perhaps we should feel smug, but that still isn’t the point. There never was an ‘accurate’ figure to be correct about. It was a possibility. Now it seems that the possibility has been bypassed by some distance, at least for London. Because remember, Kaya’s journey was merely the journey into work. It was not even a small portion of the day. It did not count cameras at work, or those she might encounter during her working day, nor those her image might be captured by if she went out for a post-work meal and drinks… her 281 might well end up being double that by the end of the day, and she was not doing any of the more ‘unrealistic’ things that Norris’ ‘busy Londoner’ was.

Of course, this density of cameras is by no means uniform across London or across the country, nor is there one central ‘Big Brother’ behind the cameras, no one guard in the tower. We live not in the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, made notorious by Michel Foucault’s analysis, but in what contemporary French theorist, Bruno Latour, called, an ‘oligopticon’. In some places we are watched (and even known) intensely and in others hardly at all, and we move through these different zones of varying intensities of surveillance in our days and our lives.

Does that make the huge number and high density of cameras in some places ethically more acceptable? Hardly. Despite the fact that it really doesn’t ‘work’, the growth of CCTV is almost out of control in Britain, and it is probably only the recession that is holding this growth back at all. The Times report also notes that the Local Authority cameras appeared to be placed in clear violation of the existing voluntary CCTV Code of Practice which states that CCTV should be installed in areas of high crime, not just at regular intervals everywhere. Senior police officers I have talked to agree with this. They don’t see the need for cameras on every corner; they want to target crime hot spots effectively and efficiently. And of course, the private cameras aren’t really regulated much, and those on private homes not at all. The important thing, is to have stronger, clearer regulation of CCTV as the House of Lords Constitution Committee recently demanded. This new regulation should control and perhaps even reverse the growth in the number of cameras by specifying much more clearly the circumstances and contexts under which CCTV is appropriate and how it is to be discussed and approved, so that it becomes a possibility to be debated not the normality to be expected.

(thanks to Charles Raab for bringing this piece to my attention and for being fair about The Times!)