Tag: UK

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!)

Incompetence and Surveillance

There is an opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph (UK) today by Alasdair Palmer, which argues that it is the incompetence and human fallibility of the UK government rather than any lack of desire which prevents an Orwellian surveillance state from emerging in the UK. It is hardly new but it’s an attractive argument, one which I have used before and which we used to a certain extent in our Report on the Surveillance Society, and one which draws on the deep well of cynicism about government which has long characterised British politics.

However there are a number of problems with the argument. The first is whether it is really true. A totalitarian society does not have to be competent in the sense of having correct information, in fact one of the central messages of Nineteen Eight-Four is that ‘truth’ is a product of state control in such societies. This was obvious in the case of Stalin’s purges. The accusations made against individuals did not rely on the accuracy of the accusation but on the very fact of accusation, something brought out very strongly in Orlando Figges’ recent book, The Whisperers. In the UK in recent years we have seen some elements of this. It doesn’t matter for example, whether someone really is a terrorist, the word ‘terrorist’ is just redefined in law and practice to encompass that person. New terms are invented to describe quasi-crimes (like anti-social behaviour) which come to have the force of ‘crime’ and become the focus of state surveillance activity. And I have shown how the recent arguments over photography in public places show a genuine totalitarianism in the attempt to define the limits of the collection and interpretation of visual images. It doesn’t matter how competent the state is at carrying out its desires here. The very fact that it defines what is acceptability in this way can create a new ‘normality’ and a ‘chilling effect’ on protest and resistance – which makes such activity even more essential.

The second problem is the idea that incompetence protects us. It didn’t in Soviet Russia and it doesn’t today. The government’s uselessness in handling data harms people. The loss and leakage of private personal information can lead to real effects on people’s lives: information theft, fraud and so on. The loss of trust in those who control information also has knock-on effects on those organisations that genuinely rely on personal information to provide essential services and care: education, health services, social work etc. A loss of trust caused by failed repression leads to a generalised loss of trust in government and in other people: it damages social trust. It is perhaps because British people have such a low level of social trust anyway that we expect things to fail.

The third problem relies on the first two and is the idea that state incompetence is enough to protect us. Of course it isn’t. Cynicism is no basis for thinking of, and creating, a better society. Do we want to live in a society where our only protection is the fact that state is structurally or contingently unable to create a totalitarian situation even though it continues to try? I certainly don’t. The emergence of surveillance societies, competent or otherwise, requires the imagination of alternatives – including greater democracy, accountability, transparency, and regulation and control of both state and corporate organisations in our favour – and political action to demand and create those alternatives.

A faith in failure is simply a form of nihilism.

A sane response on the number of cameras

Here is an eminently sane and sensible response to the ‘debate’ on the number of cameras in Britain from Paul Lewis in The Guardian. Not much more to say really other than I strongly suspect that he reads this blog!

Actually, equally sane if rather ruder, is Charlie Brooker, also in The Guardian. He argues as bitterly as usual, that the attitude of the Labour government to its information relationship with its citizens represents nothing but contempt. I strongly suspect he may be right.

How many cameras are there in Britain?

The truth is that no-one knows exactly how many cameras there are in Britain or indeed in any country in the world

I’ve been having an interesting little private exchange with a David Aaronovitch of The Times newspaper, who seems to think he has uncovered a terrible conspiracy… and I think I am about to be accused (tomorrow) of being ‘cavalier’ with the truth and of misleading the public. Interestingly enough this is going to be in the same newspaper that was the only one that tried to rubbish the Information Commissioner back in 2006 when we published our Report on the Surveillance Society and indeed were actively lobbying against his reappointment. I suppose someone has to argue the establishment case…

What David has been e-mailing me about is the validity of figures concerning the number of CCTV cameras in Britain that journalists have been happily spreading about for the last ten years. These figures are the ‘4.2million CCTV cameras in Britain’, and the ‘person can be captured on 300 different cameras in a day.’ He seems to think that it is an urgent matter of national importance if these old figures aren’t ‘accurate’ or apply to the average person. Well, they were and are purely indicative – they aren’t ‘accurate’ and never were, and the latter one doesn’t apply to a typical Briton and neither Clive Norris, whose figures they are, nor myself, nor any other credible surveillance studies academic that I know, has ever claimed that they are and do.

The first figure derives from what Professor Norris openly described as a ‘guesstimate’ in his working paper with Mike McCahill on CCTV in London that was done for the EU’s UrbanEye project. Based on a casual count of cameras in one small neighbourhood in London in around 2000 (not the City of London where cameras were much more concentrated even then) it aimed to get a very loose handle on the scale of the spread of CCTV in Britain. The police at the time claimed that the real figure was in hundreds of thousands, but they were only talking about public cameras, and they had just as little idea of the extent of CCTV.

The other figure that of 300 cameras a day came from a little fictional vignette that Professor Norris and Dr Gary Armstrong wrote for their book, The Maximum Surveillance Society, which came out back in 1999. It was simply designed to illustrate how many cameras a person could possibly be caught be in any one day. I was thinking it would actually be very hard for this to be that likely even now, except perhaps in the very core of global cities like London, but then there are over 300 cameras on the university campus where I am currently, and I haven’t even started on all the private cameras, the public cameras in the city, the traffic cameras, the cameras in the buses, banks, shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, in the hotel etc. etc. I would estimate that I am caught by around 100 cameras when I am out and about here and this isn’t even a city that considers itself to be particularly ‘under surveillance.’

The truth is that no-one knows exactly how many cameras there are in Britain or indeed in any country in the world. We deliberately used words like ‘may’ or ‘can be’ in reference to these figures in our Report on the Surveillance Society because they are so rough, so inaccurate – and we were quite clear that this was not in any case a report about CCTV; if anything we tried to downplay CCTV and get to other technologies and techniques, such as dataveillance and RFID, and more importantly the way connections and links are being made, and boundaries blurred. ‘Millions’ may be about as accurate as we can guess for the UK. But does it matter if there are 1 million, 4.2 million or 10 million? Not hugely. It matters as one crude indicator of a surveillance society, but even then, the number of cameras is a very crude measure and more cameras does not necessarily mean more comprehensive coverage or better pictures, or more ‘control’. For example, would it be worse or better if I was only seen by one camera in a day, but that camera was there all the time and I was constantly being assessed on my performance (as for example is the case with many workers in call centres)? The Guardian today seems to understand this – in its report on the high-tech control room in Westminster, it clearly states that ‘no-one knows’ how many cameras there are (before quoting some even more made-up figure than ours!).

I know the media likes its easy numbers, but an old saying about not being able to see the wood for the trees comes to mind… As a researcher, I am more interested in characteristics of the wood than the specific number of trees. Now if there were no trees at all or very few, that would matter. And in my current comparative project it has some importance as one of the many indicators of what constitutes a surveillance society that I am looking into. So in a couple of year’s time I may have more of an idea of from any cameras there really are in Britain. One of the things I am trying to do during my current project is develop better ways of assessing ‘how much surveillance’ there is, and what it means. Because that is the important issue – meaning. Does it matter if there were 1/6 or 1/7 or 1/8 of the population of the former East Germany who were recruited as informers? You’ll find all those as educated guesses in the literature. What matters was that there was a culture of informing that pervaded every action. It was a society that became increasingly based on deception and distrust.

The key questions with CCTV are:

  1. first of all, why are there any cameras, and particular any cameras in public space, at all? Surely there was a line crossed when the first use of CCTV occurred. What was the reasoning?
  2. why did CCTV spread so quickly to so many places, and was so little contested?
  3. why is CCTV now considered so ‘normal’ in Britain?
  4. connected to this, why do the myths of CCTV’s effectiveness continue to be spread when all of the evidence shows a small and very limited impact on crime?
  5. what kind of a society does pervasive CCTV create? what are the social effects? what kind of social and cultural responses are there?

etc.

Unfortunately the media doesn’t seem to like depth or uncertainty. Maybe that was our real mistake – to overestimate the intelligence of the media. I have asked them for a right of reply – I am more than happy to debate the issue in public. Let’s see if that happens…

Convention on Modern Liberty

The largest ever British meeting of people against the surveillance society took place in London yesterday. The Convention on Modern Liberty site has (unedited) transcripts of some of the speeches an debates including author, Phillip Pullman’s excellent keynote. The Guardian/Observer website also has a strongly supportive report and there is an editorial in the The Observer, which argues that “whether by complacency, arrogance or cynical design, the government has erected an edifice of legal constraint to liberty that would suit the methods and aims of a despot.”

It was a shame that I couldn’t be there but I like to think I played some small part in the process that has led here, and will hopefully this campaign will continue to go on to forcing a retreat by the state from its illiberal course. This meeting is merely the beginning of the convention…

Surveillance in the UK and the USA: commonalities and differences

In one of those fortuitous instances of synchronicity, there are two stories today that illustrate some of both the commonalities and the differences between state surveillance practices and regulation in the UK and the USA.

In the UK, The Guardian has revealed that the Surveillance Commissioner (a separate office to the Information Commissioner) has been very critical behind the scenes, as the Lords Committee was in public, of the uses to which the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) (RIPA) has been put, not this time by local government, but by national ministries like the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and agencies, including Ofcom (the broaadcast and communications regulator) and the Charities Commission. DEFRA came in for a particular telling-off over its spying on fishermen. The chief commissioner, Sir Christopher Rose found generalised lax practice, a lack of proper justification for and proportionality in the used of RIPA, and little training or accountability. In short, RIPA is being used because the powers exist not because there is any pressing justification to use surveillance in this manner – the used of surveillance has expanded because it is available.

It is very interesting that The Guardian had to discover all this through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and that the Surveillance Commissioner had not put all of this in the public domain as a matter of course. It highlights for me, once again, the clear difference in attitude and regulatory practice between him and the open, accountable, and active Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). It confirms my view that we would be much better off if the Surveillance Commissioner’s work was absorbed into the ICO.

In the USA, it is to lawyers that people immediately turn if some bad practice is suspected on behalf of the government. The Los Angeles Times reports that on Friday, the US government lost the case it had been bringing to try to stop an Islamic charity based in Oregon from suing them over what they claim were illegal wiretapping operations targeted at them. The case stems from the Bush administration’s attempts to bypass what were already very weak regulations governing the surveillance of American citizens which were introduced in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) (FISA) and recently amended in the Protect America Act (2007). Requests are supposed to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) which meets in secret and does not have to publish its rulings and so far as we know, has never turned down a request – so it is somewhat mystifying except as a matter of speed and convenience that the Bush administration did bypass the court.

Now the Obama administration is (shamefully) defending the actions of his predecessor. This is not entirely surprising. Intelligence is one area of continuity between governments: it is what Peter Gill called the ‘secret state’, a core that remains constant regardless of changes of administration. Nixon and Bush were both stupid enough to get caught, but the NSA, CIA and FBI are continually looking for different ways to get around domestic regulations on surveillance. Political devices like the UKUSA agreement served this purpose for many years – whereby Canadian and British intelligence services would collect SIGINT on Americans and supply it to the NSA and vice-versa. But GCHQ and others just don’t have the capabilities to carry out the amount of monitoring that now goes on. It’s been the reality for many years now that the NSA in particular does spy on Americans. Again, they have the capabilities so those capabilities are used.

Of course, unlike in the UK, we are talking about the threat of terrorism not anglers catching one-too-many fish; that really does say something about the petty bureaucracy that characterises the UK! However RIPA was also justified originally with reference to terrorism and serious and organised crime. Anyway, the ruling in the Oregon case clearly states that state secrets privilege was not enough to justify warrantless surveillance of suspects, whatever they had allegedly done. It seems that at least is one point of hope that the USA and the UK have in common. Let’s see where these situations now lead in each country…

Surveillance to be ‘hardwired’ into British culture?

Labour simply needs to admit that it has been wrong on this and to develop some more credible plans which recognises that real security protects liberties rather than undermining them in the name of security.

Richard Thomas is no longer a lone voice in the top echelons of the British state against the growing culture of surveillance, but he remains the most persistent and hard-hitting critic, not least because of he makes the best possible use of his position as UK Information Commissioner when most government watchdogs are largely toothless.

Now in an interview in The Times newspaper, he has renewed his attack on the government’s data-sharing and surveillance proposals,arguing that we risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life. He has clearly fully absorbed the report we wrote for him back in 2006, in which we warned of the possibility of a ‘technological lock-in’ and is building on it in a serious and creative way.

Thomas is clear in the interview that government plans are ‘excessive’ and so much so that they ‘risked undermining democracy’. With Thomas now joined in his stance by eminent critics like the House of Lords Constitution Committee, former MI5 chief, Stella Rimington and most recently, former far-from-liberal Home Secretary, David Blunkett, as well as just about all media and academic opinion, it seems difficult to see how the government can continue to claim that its plans are in any way credible. Labour is now obviously isolated, unpopular and wrong on surveillance. This needs more than token gestures like the resignation of the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith (she has other reasons why she should resign anyway), it needs some real soul-searching and a complete reconsideration of the direction in which the government is heading. Labour simply needs to admit that it has been wrong on this and to develop some more credible plans which recognise that real security protects liberties rather than undermining them in the name of security.

Battle lines being drawn in UK surveillance debate

there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK…

securitystrategybannerThe UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the influential think-tank that was behind the New Labour project, has released a report on intelligence and national security that argues that privacy and human rights will have to take second place in the War on Terror. The report, National Security Strategy, Implications for the UK Intelligence Community, is written by former civil service security and intelligence coordinator, David Omand, is part of the IPPR’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, whose rather unimpressive launch event I attended last year.

The Guardian newspaper’s story on this is trying to build this up into an ‘end of privacy’ / ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ story and Omand certainly comes down firmly on the side of security over liberty. He recognises that his arguments are contrary to ours and go “against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society.” But he is not actually making a total ‘by any means necessary’ argument. Even the Guardian’s own report quotes his rather qualified statement that “in some respects [new intelligence methods] may have to be at the expense of some aspects of privacy rights.”

The report is simply not as strong or even as interesting as The Guardian‘s story suggests. Most of it is simply a description of how intelligence works (and not even a very comprehensive or insightful one at that). Much, as we predicted in our recent book (see My Publications), it tries to set the creation of ‘resilience’ as a key rationale for reducing civil liberties, as if resilience in itself was a good thing that needed no justification when in fact it is being used as a bland container for all sorts of questionable policies – from the use of torture and imprisonment without trial to the everyday use of intrusive high-tech surveillance. The references to the political controversies over surveillance are rather cursory and don’t really say much other than that people are worried and really they shouldn’t be. These are just the usual ‘trust us, we know what we are doing’ and ‘these are exceptional circumstances’ arguments that we have heard many times before, and they are as weak and old-fashioned coming from Omand as from anyone else.

It is worth noting that there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK. I reported yesterday on David Blunkett’s conversion to the cause of limiting surveillance society, and a few days ago, Stella Rimington, the former Head of the Security Service, MI5, condemned the current government’s approach to liberty and security in even stronger terms, arguing that the approach that Omand typifies would lead to ‘a police state’.

Surveillance has finally become an issue on which it is becoming less possible to be unengaged, apathetic or even neutral. That in itself is a good thing, however it does not guarantee a good outcome even if more major public figures suddenly discover their enthusiasm for liberty once they leave office. However, I hope this reflects a split which is growing within the current government too – normally when retired politicians and civil servants speak out, they are conscious of the way in which they speak on behalf of friends and colleagues who feel they cannot be so candid.

David Blunkett Attacks Surveillance!

I know. Pause. Take a deep breath…

You read it right. The former UK Home Secretary, with a reputation as one of the most authoritarian of recent years (though it is hard to chose in that regard), will condemn the growth of surveillance in a speech at the University of Essex today. He will also, according to Tom Young at VUnet, call for the ID card scheme (which he introduced!) to be scrapped, and for the information-sharing powers that were hidden in the new Coroners and Justice Bill, to be reduced. He also argues that the latter will happen as he knows the Justice Minister, Jack Straw, recognises the problem.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Certainly it is fantastic when a prominent figure like this changes their mind and is prepared to admit that they were wrong, I just wish that sometimes they listened to the arguments against what they were doing when they were in office. In addition, of course Blunkett spent several years after leaving office writing very strong pro-surveillance, pro-ID card pieces for the populist, right-wing tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and is (or was) according to the Register of House of Commons Members Interests, paid £25-30,000 ($35-40,000 US) as the Chair of the International Advisory Committee of Entrust Inc., a company that works on digital certification and Internet surveillance, and which was involved in consortia for the ID card contract. Perhaps they have had enough of him.

But let’s hope he really has had a genuine change of heart.

Britain ‘risks a police state’

Following the damning reports of the House of Lords Constitution Committee and yesterday, the International Commission of Jurists, now Stella Rimington, ex-Head of the security service, MI5, has warned that Britain risks becoming a police state. In an internview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia reported by the Daily Telegraph, Ms Rimington attacked government plans for the National Identity Register and the soon-expected plans for a database of all communications (delayed from last year). If even ex-heads of the security service are now asking the government to change direction, in addition to civil liberties experts, independent judges, and just about everyone else, their stock of excuses must be rapidly diminishing. The current cabinet must know that their actions smack of the desperation of a failing government desperately searching for votes in being ‘tough on crime and terrorism’… but they seem to be locked into a trajectory of ever-increasing surveillance and security that they cannot justify but cannot escape. You do wonder who is actually advising them that this is all a good idea…