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Wed 17 Aug 2011 04.18 EDT First published on Wed 17 Aug 2011 04.18 EDT

've lost track of the number of people who've asked me to comment on David Cameron's insane plan to cripple Britain's internet in times of civil unrest by blocking Twitter and other services. In case you're wondering where I come down on it, well, let's say that it's not just a bad plan, it's also an ineffective one.

It's only been a week, after all, since Cameron's government concluded that the Digital Economy Act's web censorship plan wouldn't be implemented because downloaders would have no trouble getting around the blocks it would throw up. If people who want to download movies can evade Britain's censorwall, then so can people who want to organise riots. Duh.

But for me, the use of BlackBerrys in organising riots (if "organise" is the correct verb here) is just a sideshow. Though as a Canadian, I'm fascinated to see that our national technology success story, the businesslike BlackBerry, has now enduringly entered pop culture's lexicon as the tool of choice for disaffected and violent youth.

The real story for me is about surveillance, and not the mere use of CCTV footage to apprehend rioters after the fact. It's about the total failure of CCTV to deter people from committing crimes in the first place.

After all, that's how we were sold on CCTV - not mere forensics after the fact, but deterrence. And although study after study has concluded that CCTVs don't deter most crime (a famous San Francisco study showed that, at best, street crime shifted a few metres down the pavement when the CCTV went up), we've been told for years that we must all submit to being photographed all the time because it would keep the people around us from beating us, robbing us, burning our buildings and burglarising our homes.

A year before the Vancouver Winter Olympics, a reporter from a one of the local papers called me to ask whether I thought an aggressive plan to use CCTVs in the Gastown neighbourhood would help pacify the notorious high-crime heroin district. I said that the deterrence theory of CCTV relied on the idea that the deterred were making smart choices about their futures and would avoid crime if the consequences might catch up with them.

Then I recounted my last trip through Gastown, where the pavements were thronged with groaning and unconscious emaciated addicts, filthy and covered in weeping sores, and asked if those people could be reasonably characterised as "making smart choices about their future." I explained how my hire car had been broken into by a thief who'd left four perfect fingerprints on the passenger window, not caring whether the crime was associated with her or his biometrics forever.

Funnily enough, I was in Vancouver during the riots, which took place quite close to my home in London. I went through Gastown, which is utterly transformed into a pleasant shopping and university district. Simon Fraser University very carefully and cleverly slotted a new campus into the middle of Gastown, and hired only local people to work in it.

It was the very model of giving people a chance and a stake in their neighbourhood. And while there are still some sad and disfigured junkies here and there, you'd never know that Gastown was recently notorious as the most drug-blighted neighbourhood in the city that is the major port of ingress for heroin into the Americas.

I won't pretend to understand the forces that led my neighbours to take to the street and smash and burn and hurt each other. I don't think I know what "pure and simple criminality" is - presumably, it's some imperceptible pollen that drifts through society and alights on people, which is awfully convenient for government because "pure and simple" criminality has no cause and therefore no one to blame and nothing that can be done to prevent it.

But I do understand one thing: the deterrence theory of surveillance had no nexus with the motivations of the rioters. The theory of street crime as a rational act is bankrupt. Evidence-led CCTV deployment shows us where CCTV does work, and that's in situations where crimes are planned, not pulled off in the heat of the moment.

Parking garages, banks and jewelry stores, yes. And CCTVs make perfect sense as part of burglar alarms that switch on when the glass breaks (or buffer continuously, but only save the few seconds before a break-in). But the idea that we can all be made to behave if only we are watched closely enough all the time is bunkum. We behave ourselves because of our social contract, the collection of written and unwritten rules that bind us together by instilling us with internal surveillance in the form of conscience and aspiration. CCTVs everywhere are an invitation to walk away from the contract and our duty to one another, to become the lawlessness the CCTV is meant to prevent.

After the London riots, one thing is certain: anyone promoting CCTVs for deterrence is most likely selling something, probably CCTVs.
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Wed 17 Aug 2011 04.18 EDT First published on Wed 17 Aug 2011 04.18 EDT 've lost track of the number of people who've asked me to comment on David Cameron's insane plan to cripple Britain's internet in times of civil unrest by blocking Twitter and other services.

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Haroon Siddique

Images captured on a household surveillance camera could breach data-protection rules if the person filmed was on a public footpath when videoed, the European court of justice (ECJ) has ruled.

By clarifying European legislation, the judgment could have significant consequences for householders in the UK who use CCTV and keep or try to use the images, according to a legal expert.

The case related to a Czech man, František Ryneš, who installed a surveillance camera after he and his family were subjected to attacks by unknown individuals. The camera filmed areas including a public footpath and the entrance to the house opposite.

After someone fired a catapult at his home, breaking a window, Ryneš gave the recordings to the police, allowing them to identify two suspects, who were subsequently prosecuted.

However, one of the suspects challenged the legality of Ryneš recording and holding the images. The Czech office for the protection of personal data, found that although Ryneš had been trying to expose the perpetrators of a crime, he had infringed data-protection rules and issued him with a fine.

Ryneš appealed against the ruling and the supreme administrative court in the Czech Republic referred the case to the ECJ, asking whether European data-protection directive rules on the processing of personal data applied.

The court decided Ryneš was not liable for a fine because he had acted to help prosecute a criminal. However, the judgment suggested that if a crime had not been committed he would have breached European data regulations. The directive has an exception in the case of data processing carried out "by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity", but the court found that the exception would not always apply if a camera is recording images of a public space such as a footpath.

The judges said: "The operation of a camera system, as a result of which a video recording of people is stored on a continuous recording device such as a hard disk drive, installed by an individual on his family home for the purposes of protecting the property, health and life of the homeowners, but which also monitors a public space, does not amount to the processing of data in the course of a purely personal or household activity, for the purposes of that provision."

This contradicts the application of the directive in the UK. Kathryn Wynn, senior associate at Pinsent Masons, said the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) had always taken the view that a camera on someone's house was outside of the law.

Householders who have surveillance cameras that capture public space would have to put up a notice informing people they are being filmed and make sure footage was not unduly retained, she said.

"The overarching concern is if you have two neighbours in dispute and one installs CCTV to capture their neighbour doing whatever they are complaining about, the other will run off to the ICO and complain about use of the film," she said. "The ICO will start to get pulled into domestic property disputes." However, she emphasised that the ruling made it clear that footage of criminal activity could still be used.

An ICO spokesman said: "We are just considering the ruling and what implications might have."
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Home surveillance CCTV images may breach data protection laws, ECJ rules

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Haroon Siddique Images captured on a household surveillance camera could breach data-protection rules if the person filmed was on a public footpath when videoed, the European court of justice (ECJ) has ruled. By clarifying European legislation, the judgment could have significant consequences for householders in the UK who use CCTV and keep or try to use the images, according to a legal expert.

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State of Surveillance: Police, Privacy and Technology

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"State of Surveillance" examines new technologies police departments are using to fight crime and the civil liberties concerns raised by these tools. Law enforcement agencies say that many of the technologies make it easier to solve and, in some cases, even prevent crime.

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I had gone to Britain to answer a question that seems far more pertinent today than it did early last month: why would a free and flourishing Western democracy wire itself up with so many closed-circuit television cameras that it resembles the set of ''The Real World'' or ''The Truman Show''? The answer, I discovered, was fear of terrorism. In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by the I.R.A. exploded in London's financial district, a historic and densely packed square mile known as the City of London. In response to widespread public anxiety about terrorism, the government decided to install a ''ring of steel'' -- a network of closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the eight official entry gates that control access to the City.

Anxiety about terrorism didn't go away, and the cameras in Britain continued to multiply. In 1994, a 2-year-old boy named Jamie Bulger was kidnapped and murdered by two 10-year-old schoolboys, and surveillance cameras captured a grainy shot of the killers leading their victim out of a shopping center. Bulger's assailants couldn't, in fact, be identified on camera -- they were caught because they talked to their friends -- but the video footage, replayed over and over again on television, shook the country to its core. Riding a wave of enthusiasm for closed-circuit television, or CCTV, created by the attacks, John Major's Conservative government decided to devote more than three-quarters of its crime-prevention budget to encourage local authorities to install CCTV. The promise of cameras as a magic bullet against crime and terrorism inspired one of Major's most successful campaign slogans: ''If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.''

Instead of being perceived as an Orwellian intrusion, the cameras in Britain proved to be extremely popular. They were hailed as the people's technology, a friendly eye in the sky, not Big Brother at all but a kindly and watchful uncle or aunt. Local governments couldn't get enough of them; each hamlet and fen in the British countryside wanted its own CCTV surveillance system, even when the most serious threat to public safety was coming from mad cows. In 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance networks; by 1998, 440 city centers were wired. By the late 1990's, as part of its Clintonian, center-left campaign to be tough on crime, Tony Blair's New Labor government decided to support the cameras with a vengeance. There are now so many cameras attached to so many different surveillance systems in the U.K. that people have stopped counting. According to one estimate, there are 2.5 million surveillance cameras in Britain, and in fact there may be far more.

As I filed through customs at Heathrow Airport, there were cameras concealed in domes in the ceiling. There were cameras pointing at the ticket counters, at the escalators and at the tracks as I waited for the Heathrow express to Paddington Station. When I got out at Paddington, there were cameras on the platform and cameras on the pillars in the main terminal. Cameras followed me as I walked from the main station to the underground, and there were cameras at each of the stations on the way to King's Cross. Outside King's Cross, there were cameras trained on the bus stand and the taxi stand and the sidewalk, and still more cameras in the station. There were cameras on the backs of buses to record people who crossed into the wrong traffic lane.

Throughout Britain today, there are speed cameras and red-light cameras, cameras in lobbies and elevators, in hotels and restaurants, in nursery schools and high schools. There are even cameras in hospitals. (After a raft of ''baby thefts'' in the early 1990's, the government gave hospitals money to install cameras in waiting rooms, maternity wards and operating rooms.) And everywhere there are warning signs, announcing the presence of cameras with a jumble of different icons, slogans and exhortations, from the bland ''CCTV in operation'' to the peppy ''CCTV: Watching for You!'' By one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by 300 separate cameras in a single day.

Britain's experience under the watchful eye of the CCTV cameras is a vision of what Americans can expect if we choose to go down the same road in our efforts to achieve ''homeland security.'' Although the cameras in Britain were initially justified as a way of combating terrorism, they soon came to serve a very different function. The cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel that they are being watched at all times. Instead of keeping terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to keep punks out of shopping malls. The people behind the live video screens are zooming in on unconventional behavior in public that in fact has nothing to do with terrorism. And rather than thwarting serious crime, the cameras are being used to enforce social conformity in ways that Americans may prefer to avoid.

The dream of a biometric surveillance system that can identify people's faces in public places and separate the innocent from the guilty is not new. Clive Norris, a criminologist at the University of Hull, is Britain's leading authority on the social effects of CCTV. In his definitive study, ''The Maximum Surveillance Society: the Rise of CCTV,'' Norris notes that in the 19th century, police forces in England and France began to focus on how to distinguish the casual offender from the ''habitual criminal'' who might evade detection by moving from town to town. In the 1870's, Alphonse Bertillon, a records clerk at the prefecture of police in Paris, used his knowledge of statistics and anthropomorphic measurements to create a system for comparing the thousands of photographs of arrested suspects in Parisian police stations. He took a series of measurements -- of skull size, for example, and the distance between the ear and chin -- and created a unique code for every suspect whom the police had photographed. Photographs were then grouped according to the codes, and a new suspect could be compared only with the photos that had similar measurements, instead of with the entire portfolio. Though Bertillon's system was often difficult for unskilled clerks to administer, a procedure that had taken hours or days was now reduced to a few minutes.

It wasn't until the 1980's, with the development of computerized biometric and other face-recognition systems, that Bertillon's dream became feasible on a broad scale. In the course of studying how biometric scanning could be used to authenticate the identities of people who sought admission to secure buildings, innovators like Joseph Atick realized that the same technology could be used to pick suspects or license plates out of a crowd. It's the license-plate technology that the London police have found most attractive, because it tends to be more reliable. (A test of the best face-recognition systems last year by the U.S. Department of Defense found that they failed to identify matches a third of the time.)

Soon after arriving in London, I visited the CCTV monitoring room in the City of London police station, where the British war against terrorism began. I was met by the press officer, Tim Parsons, and led up to the control station, a modest-size installation that looks like an air-traffic-control room, with uniformed officers manning two rows of monitors. Although installed to catch terrorists, the cameras in the City of London spend most of their time following car thieves and traffic offenders. ''The technology here is geared up to terrorism,'' Parsons told me. ''The fact that we're getting ordinary people -- burglars stealing cars -- as a result of it is sort of a bonus.''

Have you caught any terrorists? I asked. ''No, not using this technology, no,'' he replied.

As we watched the monitors, rows of slow-moving cars filed through the gates into the City, and cameras recorded their license-plate numbers and the faces of their drivers. After several minutes, one monitor set off a soft, pinging alarm. We had a match! But no, it was a false alarm. The license plate that set off the system was 8620bmc, but the stolen car recorded in the database was 8670amc. After a few more mismatches, the machine finally found an offender, though not a serious one. A red van had gone through a speed camera, and the local authority that issued the ticket couldn't identify the driver. An alert went out on the central police national computer, and it set off the alarm when the van entered the City. ''We're not going to do anything about it because it's not a desperately important call,'' said the sergeant.

Because the cameras on the ring of steel take clear pictures of each driver's face, I asked whether the City used the biometric facial recognition technology that American airports are now being urged to adopt. ''We're experimenting with it to see if we could pick faces out of the crowd, but the technology is not sufficiently good enough,'' Parsons said. ''The system that I saw demonstrated two or three years ago, a lot of the time it couldn't differentiate between a man and a woman.'' (In a recent documentary about CCTV, Monty Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics face-recognition system that had been set up in the London borough of Newham by wearing earrings and a beard.) Nevertheless, Parsons insisted that the technology will become more accurate. ''It's just a matter of time. Then we can use it to detect the presence of criminals on foot in the city,'' he said.

In the future, as face-recognition technology becomes more accurate, it will become even more intrusive, because of pressures to expand the biometric database. I mentioned to Joseph Atick of Visionics that the City of London was thinking about using his technology to establish a database that would include not only terrorists but also all British citizens whose faces were registered with the national driver's license bureau. If that occurs, every citizen who walks the streets of the City could be instantly identified by the police and evaluated in light of his past misdeeds, no matter how trivial. With the impatience of a rationalist, Atick dismissed the possibility. ''Technically, they won't be able to do it without coming back to me,'' he said. ''They will have to justify it to me.'' Atick struck me as a refined and thoughtful man (he is the former director of the computational neuroscience laboratory at Rockefeller University), but it seems odd to put the liberties of a democracy in the hands of one unelected scientist.

Atick says that his technology is an enlightened alternative to racial and ethnic profiling, and if the faces in the biometric database were, in fact, restricted to known terrorists, he would be on to something. Instead of stopping all passengers who appear to be Middle Eastern and victimizing thousands of innocent people, the system would focus with laserlike precision on a tiny handful of the guilty. (This assumes that the terrorists aren't cunning enough to disguise themselves.) But when I asked whether any of the existing biometric databases in England or America are limited to suspected terrorists, Atick confessed that they aren't. There is a simple reason for this: few terrorists are suspected in advance of their crimes. For this reason, cities in England and elsewhere have tried to justify their investment in face-recognition systems by filling their databases with those troublemakers whom the authorities can easily identify: local criminals. When FaceIt technology was used to scan the faces of the thousands of fans entering the Super Bowl in Tampa last January, the matches produced by the database weren't terrorists. They were low-level ticket scalpers and pickpockets.

Biometrics is a feel-good technology that is being marketed based on a false promise -- that the database will be limited to suspected terrorists. But the FaceIt technology, as it's now being used in England, isn't really intended to catch terrorists at all. It's intended to scare local hoodlums into thinking they might be setting off alarms even when the cameras are turned off. I came to understand this ''Wizard of Oz'' aspect of the technology when I visited Bob Lack's monitoring station in the London borough of Newham. A former London police officer, Lack attracted national attention -- including a visit from Tony Blair -- by pioneering the use of face-recognition technology before other people were convinced that it was entirely reliable. What Lack grasped early on was that reliability was in many ways beside the point.

Lack installed his first CCTV system in 1997, and he intentionally exaggerated its powers from the beginning. ''We put one camera out and 12 signs'' announcing the presence of cameras, Lack told me. ''We reduced crime by 60 percent in the area where we posted the signs. Then word on the street went out that we had dummy cameras.'' So Lack turned his attention to face-recognition technology and tried to create the impression that far more people's faces were in the database than actually are. ''We've designed a poster now about making Newham a safe place for a family,'' he said. ''And we're telling the criminal we have this information on him: we know his name, we know his address, we know what crimes he commits.'' It's not true, Lack admits, ''but then, we're entitled to disinform some people, aren't we?''

So you're telling the criminal that you know his name even though you don't, I asked? ''Right,'' Lack replied. ''Pretty much that's about advertising, isn't it?''

Lack was elusive when I asked him who, exactly, is in his database. ''I don't know,'' he replied, noting that the local police chief decides who goes into the database. He would only make an ''educated guess'' that the database contains 100 ''violent street robbers'' under the age of 18. ''You have to have been convicted of a crime -- nobody suspected goes on, unless they're a suspected murderer -- and there has to be sufficient police intelligence to say you are committing those crimes and have been so in the last 12 weeks.'' When I asked for the written standards that determined who, precisely, was put in the database, and what crimes they had to have committed, Lack promised to send them, but he never did.

From Lack's point of view, it doesn't matter who is in his database, because his system isn't designed to catch terrorists or violent criminals. In the three years that the system has been up and running, it hasn't resulted in a single arrest. ''I'm not in the business of having people arrested,'' Lack said. ''The deterrent value has far exceeded anything you imagine.'' He told me that the alarms went off an average of three times a day during the month of August, but the only people he would conclusively identify were local youths who had volunteered to be put in the database as part of an ''intensive surveillance supervision program,'' as an alternative to serving a custodial sentence. ''The public statements about the efficacy of the Newham facial-recognition system bear little relationship to its actual operational capabilities, which are rather weak and poor,'' says Clive Norris of the University of Hull. ''They want everyone to believe that they are potentially under scrutiny. Its effectiveness, perhaps, is based on a lie.''

This lie has a venerable place in the philosophy of surveillance. In his preface to ''Panopticon,'' Jeremy Bentham imagined the social benefits of a ring-shaped ''inspection-house,'' in which prisoners, students, orphans or paupers could be subject to constant surveillance. In the center of the courtyard would be an inspection tower with windows facing the inner wall of the ring. Supervisors in the central tower could observe every movement of the inhabitants of the cells, who were illuminated by natural lighting, but Venetian blinds would ensure that the supervisors could not be seen by the inhabitants. The uncertainty about whether or not they were being surveilled would deter the inhabitants from antisocial behavior. Michel Foucault described the purpose of the Panopticon -- to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.'' Foucault predicted that this condition of visible, unverifiable power, in which individuals have internalized the idea that they may always be under surveillance, would be the defining characteristic of the modern age.

Britain, at the moment, is not quite the Panopticon, because its various camera networks aren't linked and there aren't enough operators to watch all the cameras. But over the next few years, that seems likely to change, as Britain moves toward the kind of integrated Web-based surveillance system that Visionics has now proposed for American airports and subway systems. At the moment, for example, the surveillance systems for the London underground and the British police feed into separate control rooms, but Sergio Velastin, a computer-vision scientist, says he believes the two systems will eventually be linked, using digital technology.

Velastin is working on behavioral-recognition technology for the London underground that can look for unusual movements in crowds, setting off an alarm, for example, when people appear to be fighting or trying to jump on the tracks. (Because human CCTV operators are easily bored and distracted, automatic alarms are viewed as the wave of the future.) ''Imagine you see a piece of unattended baggage which might contain a bomb,'' Velastin told me. ''You can back-drag on the image and locate the person who left it there. You can say where did that person come from and where is that person now? You can conceive in the future that you might be able to do that for every person in every place in the system.'' Of course, Velastin admitted, ''if you don't have social agreement about how you're going to operate that, it could get out of control.''

Once thousands of cameras from hundreds of separate CCTV systems are able to feed their digital images to a central monitoring station, and the images can be analyzed with face- and behavioral-recognition software to identify unusual patterns, then the possibilities of the Panopticon will suddenly become very real. And few people doubt that connectivity is around the corner; it is, in fact, the next step. ''CCTV will become the fifth utility: after gas, electricity, sewage and telecommunications,'' says Jason Ditton, a criminologist at the University of Sheffield who is critical of the technology's expansion. ''We will come to accept its ubiquitousness.''

At the moment, there is only one fully integrated CCTV in Britain: it transmits digital images over a broadband wireless network, like the one Joseph Atick has proposed for American airports, rather than relying on traditional video cameras that are chained to dedicated cables. And so, for a still clearer vision of the interconnected future of surveillance, I set off for Hull, Britain's leading timber port, about three hours northeast of London. Hull has traditionally been associated not with dystopian fantasies but with fantasies of a more basic sort: for hundreds of years, it has been the prostitution capital of northeastern Britain.

Six years ago, a heroin epidemic created an influx of addicted young women who took to streetwalking to sustain their drug habit. Nearly two years ago, the residents' association of a low-income housing project called Goodwin Center hired a likable and enterprising young civil engineer named John Marshall to address the problem of under-age prostitutes having sex on people's windowsills.

Marshall, who is now 33, met me at the Hull railway station carrying a CCTV warning sign. Armed with more than a million dollars in public financing from the European Union, Marshall decided to build what he calls the world's first Ethernet-based, wireless CCTV system. Initially, Marshall put up 27 cameras around the housing project. The cameras didn't bother the prostitutes, who in fact felt safer working under CCTV. Instead, they scared the johns -- especially after the police recorded their license numbers, banged on their doors and threatened to publish their names in the newspapers. Business plummeted, and the prostitutes moved indoors or across town to the traditional red-light district, where the city decided to tolerate their presence in limited numbers.

But Marshall soon realized that he had bigger fish to fry than displacing prostitutes from one part of Hull to another. His innovative network of linked cameras attracted national attention, which led, a few months ago, to $20 million in grant money from various levels of government to expand the surveillance network throughout the city of Hull. ''In a year and a half,'' Marshall says, ''there'll be a digital connection to every household in the city. As far as cameras go, I can imagine that, in 10 years' time, the whole city will be covered. That's the speed that CCTV is growing.'' In the world that Marshall imagines, every household in Hull will be linked to a central network that can access cameras trained inside and outside every building in the city. ''Imagine a situation where you've got an elderly relative who lives on the other side of the city,'' Marshall says. ''You ring her up, there's no answer on the telephone, you think she collapsed -- so you go to the Internet and you look at the camera in the lounge and you see that she's making a cup of tea and she's taken her hearing aid out or something.''

The person who controls access to this network of intimate images will be a very powerful person indeed. And so I was eager to meet the monitors of the Panopticon for myself. On a side street of Hull, near the Star and Garter Pub and the city morgue, the Goodwin Center's monitoring station is housed inside a ramshackle private security firm called Sentry Alarms Ltd. The sign over the door reads THE GUARD HOUSE. The monitoring station is locked behind a thick, black vault-style door, but it looks like a college computer center, with an Alicia Silverstone pinup near the door. Instead of an impressive video wall, there are only two small desktop computers, which receive all the signals from the Goodwin Center network. And the digital, Web-based images -- unlike traditional video -- are surprisingly fuzzy and jerky, like streaming video transmitted over a slow modem.

During my time in the control room, from 9 p.m. to midnight, I experienced firsthand a phenomenon that critics of CCTV surveillance have often described: when you put a group of bored, unsupervised men in front of live video screens and allow them to zoom in on whatever happens to catch their eyes, they tend to spend a fair amount of time leering at women. ''What catches the eye is groups of young men and attractive, young women,'' I was told by Clive Norris, the Hull criminologist. ''It's what we call a sense of the obvious.'' There are plenty of stories of video voyeurism: a control room in the Midlands, for example, took close-up shots of women with large breasts and taped them up on the walls. In Hull, this temptation is magnified by the fact that part of the operators' job is to keep an eye on prostitutes. As it got late, though, there weren't enough prostitutes to keep us entertained, so we kept ourselves awake by scanning the streets in search of the purely consensual activities of boyfriends and girlfriends making out in cars. ''She had her legs wrapped around his waist a minute ago,'' one of the operators said appreciatively as we watched two teenagers go at it. ''You'll be able to do an article on how reserved the British are, won't you?'' he joked. Norris also found that operators, in addition to focusing on attractive young women, tend to focus on young men, especially those with dark skin. And those young men know they are being watched: CCTV is far less popular among black men than among British men as a whole. In Hull and elsewhere, rather than eliminating prejudicial surveillance and racial profiling, CCTV surveillance has tended to amplify it.

After returning from the digital city of Hull, I had a clearer understanding of how, precisely, the spread of CCTV cameras is transforming British society and why I think it's important for America to resist going down the same path. ''I actually don't think the cameras have had much effect on crime rates,'' says Jason Ditton, the criminologist, whose evaluation of the effect of the cameras in Glasgow found no clear reduction in violent crime. ''We've had a fall in crime in the last 10 years, and CCTV proponents say it's because of the cameras. I'd say it's because we had a boom economy in the last seven years and a fall in unemployment.'' Ditton notes that the cameras can sometimes be useful in investigating terrorist attacks -- like the Brixton nail-bomber case in 1999 -- but there is no evidence that they prevent terrorism or other serious crime.

Last year, Britain's violent crime rates actually increased by 4.3 percent, even though the cameras continued to proliferate. But CCTV cameras have a mysterious knack for justifying themselves regardless of what happens to crime. When crime goes up the cameras get the credit for detecting it, and when crime goes down, they get the credit for preventing it.

If the creation of a surveillance society in Britain hasn't prevented terrorist attacks, it has had subtle but far-reaching social costs. The handful of privacy advocates in Britain have tried to enumerate those costs by arguing that the cameras invade privacy. People behave in self-conscious ways under the cameras, ostentatiously trying to demonstrate their innocence or bristling at the implication of guilt. Inside a monitoring room near Runnymede, the birthplace of the Magna Carta, I saw a group of teenagers who noticed that a camera was pivoting around to follow them; they made an obscene gesture toward it and looked back over their shoulders as they tried to escape its gaze.

The cameras are also a powerful inducement toward social conformity for citizens who can't be sure whether they are being watched. ''I am gay and I might want to kiss my boyfriend in Victoria Square at 2 in the morning,'' a supporter of the cameras in Hull told me. ''I would not kiss my boyfriend now. I am aware that it has altered the way I might behave. Something like that might be regarded as an offense against public decency. This isn't San Francisco.'' Nevertheless, the man insisted that the benefits of the cameras outweighed the costs, because ''thousands of people feel safer.''

There is, in the end, a powerfully American reason to resist the establishment of a national surveillance network: the cameras are not consistent with the values of an open society. They are technologies of classification and exclusion. They are ways of putting people in their place, of deciding who gets in and who stays out, of limiting people's movement and restricting their opportunities. I came to appreciate the exclusionary potential of the surveillance technology in a relatively low-tech way when I visited a shopping center in Uxbridge, a suburb of London. The manager of the center explained that people who are observed to be misbehaving in the mall can be banned from the premises. The banning process isn't very complicated. ''Because this isn't public property, we have the right to refuse entry, and if there's a wrongdoer, we give them a note or a letter, or simply tell them you're banned.'' In America, this would provoke anyone who was banned to call Alan Dershowitz and sue for discrimination. But the British are far less litigious and more willing to defer to authority.

Banning people from shopping malls is only the beginning. A couple of days before I was in London, Borders Books announced the installation of a biometric face-recognition surveillance system in its flagship store on Charing Cross Road. Borders' scheme meant that that anyone who had shoplifted in the past was permanently branded as a shoplifter in the future. In response to howls of protest from America, Borders dismantled the system, but it may well be resurrected in a post-Sept. 11 world.

Perhaps the reason that Britain has embraced the new technologies of surveillance, while America, at least before Sept. 11, had strenuously resisted them, is that British society is far more accepting of social classifications than we are. The British desire to put people in their place is the central focus of British literature, from Dickens to John Osborne and Alan Bennett. The work of George Orwell that casts the most light on Britain's swooning embrace of CCTV is not ''1984.'' It is Orwell's earlier book ''The English People.''

''Exaggerated class distinctions have been diminishing,'' Orwell wrote, but ''the great majority of the people can still be 'placed' in an instant by their manners, clothes and general appearance'' and above all, their accents. Class distinctions are less hardened today than they were when I was a student at Oxford at the height of the Thatcher-era ''Brideshead Revisited'' chic. But it's no surprise that a society long accustomed to the idea that people should know their place didn't hesitate to embrace a technology designed to ensure that people stay in their assigned places.

Will America be able to resist the pressure to follow the British example and wire itself up with surveillance cameras? Before Sept. 11, I was confident that we would. Like Germany and France, which are squeamish about CCTV because of their experience with 20th-century totalitarianism, Americans are less willing than the British to trust the government and defer to authority. After Sept. 11, however, everything has changed. A New York Times/CBS news poll at the end of September found that 8 in 10 Americans believe they will have to give up some of their personal freedoms to make the country safe from terrorist attacks.

Of course there are some liberties that should be sacrificed in times of national emergency if they give us greater security. But Britain's experience in the fight against terrorism suggests that people may give up liberties without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. And if we meekly accede in the construction of vast feel-good architectures of surveillance that have far-reaching social costs and few discernible social benefits, we may find, in calmer times, that they are impossible to dismantle.

It's important to be precise about the choice we are facing. No one is threatening at the moment to turn America into Orwell's Big Brother. And Britain hasn't yet been turned into Big Brother, either. Many of the CCTV monitors and camera operators and policemen and entrepreneurs who took the time to meet with me were models of the British sense of fair play and respect for the rules. In many ways, the closed-circuit television cameras have only exaggerated the qualities of the British national character that Orwell identified in his less famous book: the acceptance of social hierarchy combined with the gentleness that leads people to wait in orderly lines at taxi stands; a deference to authority combined with an appealing tolerance of hypocrisy. These English qualities have their charms, but they are not American qualities.

The promise of America is a promise that we can escape from the Old World, a world where people know their place. When we say we are fighting for an open society, we don't mean a transparent society -- one where neighbors can peer into each other's windows using the joysticks on their laptops. We mean a society open to the possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people can travel from place to place without showing their papers and being encumbered by their past; a society that respects privacy and constantly reshuffles social hierarchy.

The ideal of America has from the beginning been an insistence that your opportunities shouldn't be limited by your background or your database; that no doors should be permanently closed to anyone who has the wrong smart card. If the 21st century proves to be a time when this ideal is abandoned -- a time of surveillance cameras and creepy biometric face scanning in Times Square -- then Osama bin Laden will have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now imagine.

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Jeffrey Rosen article says biometric cameras installed in Great Britain after terrorist attacks by Irish Republican Army in 1993 and 1994 are not perceived as Big Brother intrusion but rather as friendly eyes in the sky; there are estimated 2.5 million surveillance cameras in country; Britain's experience with them is

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The increasing use of surveillance technology - including body-worn video, drones and number plate recognition systems - risks changing the "psyche of the community" by reducing individuals to trackable numbers in a database, the government's CCTV watchdog has warned.

In his full first interview as surveillance commissioner, Tony Porter - a former senior counter-terrorism officer - said the public was complacent about encroaching surveillance and urged public bodies, including the police, to be more transparent about how they are increasingly using smart cameras to monitor people.

Porter stressed that he was not anti-surveillance and insisted he was helping to improve standards by encouraging the adoption of a voluntary code. But he added: "The lack of public awareness about the nature of surveillance troubles me."

Porter, who was appointed to the independent role in March, is responsible for overseeing around 100,000 publicly operated CCTV cameras out of total of up to 6m surveillance cameras nationwide. He said: "When people say 'the public love CCTV', do they really know what it does and its capability? Do they know with advancing technology, and algorithms, it starts to predict behaviour?"

He said he was very nervous about the "burgeoning use of body-worn videos [BWV]", not just by the police but by university security staff, housing and environmental health officers - and even supermarket workers.

"If people are going round with surveillance equipment attached to them, there should be a genuinely good and compelling reason for that. It changes the nature of society and raises moral and ethical issues ... about what sort of society we want to live in ... I've heard that supermarkets are issuing staff with body-worn videos. For what purpose? There is nothing immediately obvious to me."

Security staff on patrol at a number of universities, including Newcastle, Essex, Bath and Bangor, have started wearing body cameras and microphones in an attempt to reduce fights and crime on campuses. Similarly, fears of antisocial behaviour at an Asda supermarket in Dundee led to security staff being issued with BWVs.

Porter said he had had "robust" arguments with universities about the use of such cameras and questioned whether they were "conducive to creating a learning environment". He said: "There's a security argument, but there's also a personal freedom argument. Have universities been transparent with students and parents? It is very important to corral all those using it [BWV] and bring home to them their obligations."

Porter, a former counter-terrorism commander with Greater Manchester police, is also working with police forces piloting the use of BWVs as a way of increasing police accountability, particularly firearms officers. Porter said he had insisted that police publish privacy impact assessments on how they are using BWVs, and added that none of the forces involved had "got it absolutely right" as they were "navigating massive complexities".

He said he was concerned that the experiment could harm community policing by making the public reluctant to talk if they were confronted with "a million pixels up their nostrils".

Porter added: "I challenge chief constables on what happens if the cameras are stolen - how are they going to ensure that highly sensitive material is protected."

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CCTV cameras in Britain. Photograph: Alamy

He said he had also challenged senior officers on the transparency of the use of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. "It is seen as a valuable tool, but the police should be identifying how many cameras there are," Porter said.

"It is wrong not to be transparent because it impacts not just on the motorists, but on the whole psyche of the community. It is very dangerous to walk into a datafied society, where everybody is a number and everybody can be linked via ANPR to facial recognition, to another thing."

He has similar concerns about drones: "Every time a drone is operating with a surveillance camera attached to it, then the risk of a privacy impact in a public space rises exponentially."

Porter also pleaded with those who got drones for Christmas to use them responsibly. "You might say 'it's just a toy' but used repeatedly, hovering over a neighbour's house, [it] is going to cause an issue. You should use it with a great deal of sensitivity."

Porter argued that new technology must have the consent of the public. "To knock it back is Luddite, but you need a close examination of what's going on."

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A remote-controlled drone with camera equipment. Photograph: Geoff Moore/Rex

The role of the surveillance commissioner, which was created under the coalition agreement "to roll back the over-intrusive powers of state", has been questioned by civil rights campaigners. Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said Porter had been handed an impossible job because he had no enforcement powers.

"He seems genuinely interested in the issues. But there are hardly any powers that he can exercise. Meanwhile, new innovative use of CCTV is running with itself and nothing in the regulation can keep up with that," she said.

Porter accused Liberty of being defeatist, saying: "I get irked by this idea that it's a toothless role ... if it isn't working, it's within my gift to request greater powers." But he added: "It is difficult to legislate because the technology is moving so fast."

Porter also rejected as "bonkers" any suggestion he could not champion privacy because of his background, which included a stint as counter-terrorism coordinator for the London Olympics. He said he was more likely to raise standards because he understood the "labyrinthine politics of covert and overt surveillance".

Porter said he took a pay cut to take the job, which comes with a £90,000 salary - pro-rated to three days a week even though he works full-time in the role. "Everyone is impacted by surveillance. I want to set a new standards framework and bring the rest up to the best. The UK has some of the most surveillance cameras per head in the developed world. That reputation spurs me on to make sure I make a difference. If I don't make an impact I won't want to hang around."
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UK public must wake up to risks of CCTV, says surveillance commissioner

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The increasing use of surveillance technology - including body-worn video, drones and number plate recognition systems - risks changing the "psyche of the community" by reducing individuals to trackable numbers in a database, the government's CCTV watchdog has warned.

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The Boston Marathon bombings suspects were quickly identified after investigators picked them out on CCTV footage. Does that mean Americans need to depend more on CCTV?

Before they were Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, they were Black Hat and White Hat - two young faces in baseball caps, identified in grainy video footage as the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.

From footage totalling hundreds of hours, investigators singled out the two men from a sea of marathon spectators, then followed their movements before and after they allegedly planted the two bombs.

Those bombs would kill three people and wound more than 200, and Black Hat and White Hat were identified soon after their images were released. A day later, one was dead and the other in hospital.

The crucial role that video footage played in this case has many Americans re-evaluating the role of CCTV and other surveillance tools in public spaces.

While the US never embraced state-sponsored CCTV the way the UK has, it has nevertheless used surveillance as a national security and law-enforcement measure for years.

"As the Boston bombing demonstrated, we are pretty well surveyed," says Ioannis Pavlidis, a professor of computational physiology at the University of Houston.

Big Brother, crime fighter

Several high-profile cases were solved with assistance from CCTV or other surveillance video

London Nail bomber: David Copeland was quickly identified and arrested after authorities released an image of him captured by CCTV

Murder of James Bulger: CCTV caught the two-year-old being lured outside by two boys who later tortured and killed him

Nicola Edgington: The psychiatric patient was filmed buying a knife just before using it to kill a woman

The UK Riots: Police used CCTV footage to help bring charges against rioters

That surveillance comes from a mix of private and public video cameras. Pavlidis, who worked in the private sector before turning to academia, says his projects were funded both ways.

"Part of our funding [into surveillance technology] was coming from a government agency who was interested in developing more of this kind of technology," he said.

"There was government interest, but at the same time there was private interest. And they coincided."

For the most part, surveillance in the US has been led by private citizens.

In the 1980s, video technology became cheap enough for individual businesses and citizens to install their own home security systems. By the '90s, that technology improved, leading to more digital footage with better quality.

Private video footage has been used in public security, in cases such as the Rodney King beating, where a citizen caught police assaulting King on tape.

Then came the attacks on the World Trade Center.

"The thing that was really prompted by 9/11, on top of the general trend, is the introduction of the police-run cameras," says Jay Stanley, a police analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union.

New York City boasts an impressive system designed not just to identify criminals after the fact but catch them in the act.

"All of these cameras feed back into a command centre that has very significant analysis capabilities on the back end, including real-time video analytics on the feed," says Dan Verton, editor of Homeland Security Today.

"A bag left unattended would be automatically picked up by the system."

Police can then be deployed to troubled areas caught on film, allowing the force to do more with fewer officers.

"The mission is to have just a few officers being able to cover arguably the entire city wherever there's a camera, and redirect resources - police on the street - to areas where they are needed as opposed to having to blanket the street with officers," says Verton.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been outspoken in his support of surveillance cameras after the Boston bombing.

"The people who complain about it, I would say, are a relatively small number of folks, because the genie is out of the bottle," Kelly said on MSNBC television. "People realize that everywhere you go now, your picture is taken."

Indeed, most experts predict more surveillance in the years to come.

An argument against cameras

Despite high-profile cases solved with the assistance of CCTV, not everyone is convinced that the UK's system is effective in fighting crime.

"If CCTV had a direct relationship on crime rates, London would be the safest city in the world," says Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch.

Instead, he says, London's crime rate declined on par with those of other major metropolitan areas, and cameras seem not to have had a positive effect.

"Four out of five of the London boroughs with the highest number of CCTV cameras have the lowest numbers of crime detection rates," he says.

Pickles says money spent on cameras would bet better spent improving street lighting and home protection systems.

"That's the way of the world and where the technology is going," says Pavlidis, who cites the introduction of Google Glass.

"That will be one more surveillance mode in everyone's face. Social media, phones with cameras everywhere... there's no escape."

For privacy advocates like Stanley, however, there is a big difference between footage taken by private citizens and collected by the police in an emergency - and footage taken by police as part of a larger blanket campaign.

When large-scale surveillance systems like the ones in New York are in place, he says, "You can track individuals through time and space in a way that you can't when cameras are privately owned."

"You can collect [private] video quickly and easily if you need it, but it doesn't allow for the many abuses we fear if you turn all of our public spaces into centrally monitored ones," he says.

Americans have proven resistant to such measures in the past. The use of drones as a surveillance measure has been roundly criticised, says Verton, with several planned programmes put on hold due to privacy fears.

A recent poll showed that only 40% of Americans supported more cameras in the name of public safety - and only 12% wanted fewer cameras.

And yet, more cameras are coming. Police officers in Denver, Phoenix, Chicago and other cities are relying more on surveillance video to help fight crime.

For Ioannis Pavlidis, the technology is inevitable. But it is also neutral.

"It's the interpretation that makes the difference," he says. "If democratic institutions work well and it is used judiciously, it can make us safer."

And if not? Privacy advocates are like Stanley are watching the watchers, hoping to stem back the tide.

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CCTV surveillance in the US: On the rise?

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The Boston Marathon bombings suspects were quickly identified after investigators picked them out on CCTV footage. Does that mean Americans need to depend more on CCTV? Before they were Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, they were Black Hat and White Hat - two young faces in baseball caps, identified in grainy video footage as the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.

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Air Surveillance drones the future of CCTV?

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Air Surveillance drones the future of CCTV?

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Last week, the FBI admitted to using drones over US soil. During a Senate meeting, Robert Mueller - the head of the FBI - was asked whether unmanned aircraft were being used in America. He replied, bluntly, "Yes, for surveillance." So that's that. He did, however, quickly put everyone in the country at absolute ease by insisting that they are used in a "very, very minimal way, very seldom".

But after the NSA revelations (they claimed their internet surveillance was narrow, targeted and specific, which obviously turned out to be complete bullshit), apologies if Mueller's words don't provide much comfort. Until proven otherwise, it's safe to assume that "very, very minimal" translates to almost the exact opposite - that, in reality, CCTV is increasingly taking to the skies, making sure that America remains free from two miles above the ground.

Encouragingly, Mueller isn't even sure what happens to the images collected by these drones, or whether there's communication between the various departments that use them: "I'm not certain, I don't think so."

Drones have already been in use on the US/Mexican border for over a year now by other wings of the American government. However, rather than achieve their goal of making the US less susceptible to illegal immigration, the usage has instead shone an uncomfortable light on the ineffectiveness of the American government's control of the border. It also raises the question of what else the drones are recording during their fly-by surveillance.

Drone technology has developed at an incredible rate over the past few years. Starting as clunky, noisy jet planes, the research of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) is already well underway, with proposed applications for reconnaissance, as well as slightly friendlier, less invasive stuff, such as research and environmental monitoring missions.

FBI director Robert Mueller. (Image via)

However, for all their advancements and genuinely useful, non-nosy uses, the issue of drones mostly being hugely invasive CCTV systems with the power of flight is a pressing one. And the main issue within all that is that these drones are being used without any legislation in place that balances security concerns with invasions of privacy. When asked what laws have been implemented to protect the civil liberties of American citizens from drones, Mueller replied that the FBI is in the "initial stages" of drafting legislation.

Worryingly, an MI5 source talking about the laws governing internet surveillance said that, "The legislation doesn't exist for this. They are using old legislation and adapting it." In the same vein, if new laws aren't written up regulating the use of drones - and, instead, old ones for CCTV are just slightly adapted - then it seems inevitable that a similar abuse of power will be exercised to that of the NSA's mass collection of online data.

And it's not just government drones that need to be regulated; there is now a booming commercial market for unmanned aircraft, most of which is coming from China.

I spoke to Sam Smith from Privacy International about what laws need to be in place to protect the public from drones, and what he anticipates for the future of drone surveillance.

Sam Smith, Privacy International. (Photo courtesy of Sam Smith)

VICE: Should the FBI be using domestic drones before laws protecting privacy have been put in place?
Sam Smith: We would hope not. Existing laws on the books - in regard to closed-circuit TV in the US - are relatively weak in terms of privacy protections. Domestic drones would likely fall into this category, except that - unlike CCTV - flying cameras that can track an individual, vehicle or group using automatic or manual means can be much more invasive.

What kind of regulations on domestic drones do you think need to be in place? And would they be the same for military and commercial drones?
All monitoring of drones should take account of intent and form. There's a fundamental difference between a predator drone carrying missiles, fire-fighters flying a camera into a burning building and a quadro-copter given to a 12-year-old for Christmas. Drones able to kill should be controlled as weapons. Drones designed as a Christmas present for children can't work in that way.

Beyond cameras and missiles, drones are currently marketed as containing IMSI catchers to intercept mobile phone calls and data. They can be a wi-fi base station, they can contain infra-red cameras, highly directional microphone arrays to single out noises and conversations or a blade to cut through materials. All this being said, there must be regulations on drones, and they have to be tailored to their intent and form. One-size-fits-all drone laws will not account for all their potential uses, each of which carry different risks.

Does the use of drones in a domestic context have any bearing on civilians' privacy?
Absolutely. The scope for remotely operated surveillance devices capable of tracking an individual, via sight or electronic means (following the phone in your pocket), is significant. Depending on how they are deployed, we're not just talking about a drone that goes in to scout a crime. It's entirely possible that drones will become the new CCTV, except the surveillance will not be fixed to the wall, but be able to follow you around. How can you have a reasonable expectation of privacy if this is the case?

What do you think of Mueller's words, "[drones are used] in a very, very minimal way; very seldom"?
Taking those words at face value, there seem to be two words missing from the end: "for now". Without proper oversight and effective monitoring, all technology is abused. As yet, drones have not received widespread use. It's only going to go in one direction from here.

Mueller says that drones are being used "for surveillance". What do you think this means?
As I said, surveillance could mean many different things. One thing, however, is for certain: we would hope it involves a court order. But if the FBI isn't willing to say, that doesn't inspire confidence.

What do you see for the future of domestic drone use?
Where law enforcement sees a benefit to a tool, they will generally find the money to use it. Drones are cheap compared to the technologies they replace. The lack of regulation of surveillance drones means that, at best, they will be ineffective and, at worst, they will be able to watch the population with little oversight for whatever purposes the government sees fit for the moment.

Thanks, Sam.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

Look Forward to the Year of the Drone

Sorry Guys, Americans Love Obama's Killer Drones

Watch - Drone On

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Are Surveillance Drones the Future of CCTV?

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Last week, the FBI admitted to using drones over US soil. During a Senate meeting, Robert Mueller - the head of the FBI - was asked whether unmanned aircraft were being used in America. He replied, bluntly, "Yes, for surveillance." So that's that.

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Moscow's local government has formally announced the deployment of facial recognition technology on a "city-wide" network of CCTV cameras. The system has been undergoing tests for close to a year, but the city's Department of Information Technology today revealed new details of the project, including its licensing agreement with Russian startup NTechLab for the facial recognition software itself.

Speaking to The Verge, the chief information officer of the Department of Information Technology, Artem Ermolaev, said the project is still "somewhere between" testing and finished, but has already led to six arrests. "We connected to a federal list of [wanted criminals] for the past two months, and arrested six persons, who hadn't been caught for several years," said Ermolaev.

Only a few thousand cameras are active at a time

The system taps into Moscow's network of 160,000 CCTV cameras, which cover the entrances to 95 percent of the city's apartment buildings. However, due to the cost of deploying the technology, only a few thousand cameras are active at a time. The cameras scanning for faces can be changed on the fly, says Ermolaev, to target "regions most concentrated with crime," or to surveil areas where suspects are known to frequent. The city is currently working with NTechLabs for ways to minimize costs and expand its coverage.

What's particularly unclear at this point is to what degree the system is automated. Ermolaev says that there are "several ways" to use the technology. Sometimes, he says, the system scans for faces that match mugshots stored in a police database, and other times his team will screenshot footage from CCTV cameras and feed that into the facial recognition software manually. There are no exact figures for how many faces are scanned on a daily basis, but Ermolaev suggests it is somewhere in the region of several thousand.

The extent to which this process can be automated is an important limitation on how widely the technology will be deployed. NTechLab, the supplier of the facial recognition tech behind the system, already makes its FindFace software free for anyone to use a limited number of times a day. FindFace matches faces to profile pictures from Russia's Facebook equivalent, VK, which was the subject of controversy last year after it was reportedly used to identify porn stars.

The image quality on CCTV isn't good enough for reliable facial recognition

Scaling this sort of facial recognition system up to the city-wide level is also constrained by the quality of footage from CCTV cameras. The pictures they capture are usually grainy and the subjects far away, so although the Department of Information Technology claims it has access to a potential network of 160,000 cameras, it's not clear how many of these produce usable images.

Speaking to The Verge, Ermolaev would not give specific figures for the accuracy of NTechLab's software when it comes to analyzing CCTV imagery. However, he told Russia Beyond last December: "In such conditions obtaining recognition of even 60-70 percent of the images is extremely difficult. A 30 percent result is already cosmic."

These limitations aside, it's clear that facial recognition is slowly being adopted around the world. Police in the UK have run a number of trials, including at Notting Hill Carnival in London and outside football games. In China, facial recognition technology is put to all sorts of uses, from spotting criminals to dispensing toilet paper. Deploying the technology reliably across an entire city for the purposes of spotting criminals is still some way off, but it's much closer than we think.

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Moscow says its new facial recognition CCTV has already led to six arrests

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Moscow's local government has formally announced the deployment of facial recognition technology on a "city-wide" network of CCTV cameras. The system has been undergoing tests for close to a year, but the city's Department of Information Technology today revealed new details of the project, including its licensing agreement with Russian startup NTechLab for the facial recognition software itself.

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Are Security Cameras an Invasion of Privacy

In a public surveillance cameras good or bad debate, the first question is whether the surveillance cameras in public places are an invasion of privacy.
42% say yes and 58% say no, according to the debeate.org in the security cameras and privacy discussion.

When you are walking down the street, driving in your car, or hanging out with boyfriends and girlfriends, you will be monitored with cameras placed in public. This creates a complete picture of the private life of an individual. We all have a private life and we don't want others or the government to know.

Yet, public surveillance does help with the investigation and protect us. There are no laws that prohibit surveillance cameras in public places. And more than half of the reviewed citizens think that cameras would not be an invasion of privacy if they were put in places that are not private, like in the parking lots or in business.

In fact, laws on surveillance cameras in public places are sparse and only a few of the states in the United States pass statues that regulate the public usage of the video surveillance.

For example, in New York, police can only use video surveillance as a part of the investigation into the alleged criminals after obtaining a warrant from local authorities.

However, putting hidden security cameras in public places, like bathrooms, changing rooms and other places where an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, are prohibited in most cases (click here to learn why).
Further Reading: Check this post to learn whether it is legal to set up security cameras in workplaces.

*Read the infographic below to find the pros and cons of surveillance cameras in public places if you are in a rush.

Pros of Surveillance Cameras in Public Places

Why are the benefits of surveillance cameras in public places? Here list several advantages of why we need public surveillance.

Pro 1. Public Video Surveillance Improves Public Safety

When we install a home security camera, we gain increased house safety. Just like that, the main benefit of surveillance cameras in public spaces is also the increase in public safety. Public surveillance cameras help you stay safe while clubbing, shopping, and traveling.

The public security cameras can be used as a way to keep an eye out for crimes. PTZ security cameras put in public spaces, like a crossroad, a retail store, parking lots, museums, concert halls, do an excellent job in providing 360° seamless surveillance solutions.

Additionally, crimes can be deterred before they even begin in some cases. If a suspicious individual or individuals or items are seen in an area, the appropriate authorities can be contacted to move into the area before any damage is done or any crime is committed. Moreover, any people in the area can be cleared as a precaution.

Since public safety is guaranteed, people's fear of crime can also be reduced, while their sense of security is created.

According to a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2015, nearly 80% of public schools put up surveillance systems in public places to secure campuses.

To ensure students' safety, administrators of Broward County School have announced that they will introduce AI-powered facial recognition security systems to the campuses after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 that led to the death of 17 students and staff.

Pro 2. Public Surveillance Cameras Reduce Crime Rate

Video surveillance statistics show that camera surveillance does reduce crime - after security cameras were put in public, crime incidents in Humboldt Park dropped 20%.

If an individual knows that there are live surveillance cameras in a certain area, they may be less willing to commit a crime near the location for the fear of being caught.

Some authorities place public cameras in Walmart and other shops, hoping that the cameras will help prevent crimes from being committed.

Pro 3. Public Video Surveillance Helps Catch Criminals

If a crime is committed in an area where a public surveillance camera has been set up, the chances of catching the criminal are much higher.

Facial recognition software has improved greatly over the years. So, if criminals are captured by security cameras in public places, the local authority is able to recognize and catch them easier with facial recognition technology. Posters can be created and the images can be aired on network television to help spread the word about the criminal.

Without the surveillance cameras in public places, it can be extremely difficult to gain a quality description of the person who committed the crime, even if there were eyewitnesses.

Catching criminals is one of the best benefits of surveillance cameras in public places. The bombing at Boston Marathon is a good example. It only took the FBI three days to release blurry shots of the two suspects, taken by a surveillance camera installed in a department store.

Pro 4. Video Cameras in Public Locations Provide Evidence and Gather Clues

Another benefit of surveillance is that any footage that captures a crime being committed can be used in a court of law as evidence against the accused.

In some cases, if there were no CCTV security camera systems in public places, there would be little or no evidence to convict the person of the crime and the individual may go free. With night vision security cameras on watch, robbers can be recognized even if they commit a crime in dark areas.

Additionally, in some cases, the public video surveillance footage can also help prove someone's innocence if they have been accused of a crime that they did not commit.

Research on the value of CCTV systems shows that CCTV footage is classified as useful in 62.2% of robbery investigations and nearly 61% of assault investigations.

Pro 5. Public Video Surveillance Brings Convenience for Everyday Life

Some cities have placed cameras on stop lights as a way to help prevent people from speeding or from going through a red light.

And also, relevant authorities can monitor road conditions with the live surveillance cameras. So they can make real-time traffic reports, helping people choose the right time and road when going out.

Cons of Security Cameras in Public Places

While there are advantages of CCTV, there are disadvantages.

What's wrong with public video surveillance? Here are some bad points of public CCTV cameras.

Con 1. Surveillance Systems Are Easily Abused

A con of surveillance cameras in public places is that these security cameras may be abused. One example of how a public camera may be misused is that information gathered by law enforcement can be used as a form of blackmail.

Another form of abuse is voyeurism. Spying on women with public surveillance cameras is quite common, which becomes quite an issue that needs to be dealt with.

Overall, the simple lack of control or limits on public camera use is one of the biggest problems. Until now, there is no a good check-and-balance system, in order to prevent abuses from occurring.

Con 2. Effectiveness of a Public Security Camera Is Doubted

Another controversy of the use of surveillance cameras in public places is that its effectiveness has not been proven. While there has been a push for more public CCTV cameras to be placed in public places because of the threat of terrorist attacks, it is quite clear that a suicidal bomber is not going to be deterred by the fact that there is a camera in place.

Con 3. Public Camera Surveillance Is Expensive

One of the arguments against the widespread use of public surveillance cameras is that it costs big money. Since it is not effective enough to deter crimes and theft, why would we spend too much money in it, which not only fails to make us safer but also violates our personal rights?

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, officials in Michigan have been proposing to put up public video surveillance for years, but ended up concluding that the limited results could not justify high maintenance and personnel costs.

Conclusion of Installing Public Surveillance Cameras

In today's world, public cameras can be extremely helpful.

After the Orlando nightclub shooting, how to stay safe in public places, say, a night club, has been a hot topic. Needless to say, placing cameras in strategic areas throughout a city can help ensure public safety, protect property, and prevent crimes.

On the other hand, there are always crimes that are not deterred by surveillance cameras. And the abuse of public video cameras would violate privacy and personal rights. Therefore, how to balance public safety and personal privacy needs to be considered further.

As far as I am concerned, the benefits of surveillance outweigh the disadvantages greatly.

According to FBI statistics on surveillance cameras, there were an estimated 1,165,383 violent crimes 8,277,829 property crimes reported in 2014, and the crime rate has been rising in recent years.

I can't imagine how bad the situation would be if there were no public security cameras. There is no much about the concern of privacy violation when you behave yourself in public places. Security in public places should always be put on top of priority.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. What do you think about surveillance cameras in public places? Feel free to share your ideas by leaving a comment below!

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Top 8 Pros and Cons of Surveillance Cameras in Public Places - Reolink Blog

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In a public surveillance cameras good or bad debate, the first question is whether the surveillance cameras in public places are an invasion of privacy. 42% say yes and 58% say no, according to the debeate.org in the security cameras and privacy discussion.

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CCTV is now something we take for granted. Many premises, streets and even homes are fitted with such technology and it is something we have come to accept and expect.

Businesses and consumers alike can benefit from using it to boost security and to increase their peace of mind.

Of course, the CCTV systems available today are very different from earlier versions. Here is a quick synopsis of the evolution of the technology.
Live monitoring
The earliest documented use of CCTV technology was in Germany in 1942. The system was designed by the engineer Walter Bruch and it was set up for the monitoring of V-2 rockets. It wasn't until 1949 that the technology was launched on a commercial basis. In that year, an American government contractor named Vericon began promoting the system.

These primitive solutions comprised cameras and monitors and they could only be used for live monitoring. They did not have components that allowed users to record footage.
Primitive video recordings
Later, primitive reel-to-reel recording systems were introduced to help preserve the data gathered. However, the magnetic tapes had to be swapped manually, which was a difficult, unreliable and costly process. Operators had to thread the tape from the reel through the recorder and onto an empty take-up real. Unsurprisingly, such systems were rare.
The emergence of VCRs
A major development in the history of CCTV occurred when video cassette recordings (VCRs) became widely available in the 1970s. This technology was quickly incorporated into surveillance systems, offering a new way for the cameras to be used.

It was no longer necessary for people to monitor the screens live. Instead, the systems could be set up and left to run by themselves. Users could then review the information recorded as and when they wanted to. This made CCTV much more popular among businesses.

However, it's important to note that these solutions were far from perfect. The tapes had to be changed on a regular basis or re-written. If users wanted to store information for any length of time, they had to keep a library of tapes.
Multiplexing
Another significant development in the history of CCTV occurred during the 1990s, when multiplexing solutions became available. This technology allows video signals from a number of CCTV cameras to be combined and displayed on one monitor. For example, it means that if a company has four security cameras, each of these video signals is synchronised by the multiplexer and recorded on the same tape.

This step forward made CCTV solutions more efficient and it helped to increase their popularity.
Going digital
Progress in digital technology since the turn of the millennium has led to further improvements. VCRs have been replaced with digital video recorders (DVRs), making CCTV systems simpler and more user-friendly. Multiplexers are now built into these solutions, meaning the kits are easier to install and operate. Digital systems have also removed the need for video tapes, meaning organisations no longer have to stockpile tapes in order to store information.
NVRs
Coming right up-to-date, it's possible to purchase network video recorders (NVRs). These systems work by encoding and processing video in cameras and then streaming the footage to NVRs for storage or remote viewing. The solutions are particularly useful for firms with many site locations because they allow users to view various departments at any one time across the network or internet more easily and in higher quality than remote viewing with a DVR allows.

Given the impressive features that CCTV products now boast and the ease with which they can be used, it is no wonder that the technology is in such high demand.
Check out PCR's latest product guide to home security hardware here Author bio: Anna Longdin writes regularly about security systems. Image source: Shutterstock

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The history of CCTV - from 1942 to present

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CCTV is now something we take for granted. Many premises, streets and even homes are fitted with such technology and it is something we have come to accept and expect. Businesses and consumers alike can benefit from using it to boost security and to increase their peace of mind.

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Of course we don’t know what the future will bring us. But we have a good idea of what is going to happen in the near future. Nowadays we are already using drones equipped with cameras at certain big events. Events where many people come together like the Super Bowl finals or the Boston marathon, are good targets for terrorists. By using camera equipped drones, we can manage the crowd and oversee everything that’s going on. The FBI is already using drones during some events, but camera equipped drones are only going to be used more and more because of their easy control. In the future, drones will watch over cities and countries and keep an eye on everything. The problem with this method is that it may violate some privacy rules. Because everyone and everything can and will be recorded, you don’t know if and when you are being recorded. Also, you don’t know where this footage will be used for. In order to make this method work, there should be made some rules about who can see the footage and how long it can be stored.

Another thing we are going to see in the future is the massive use of facial recognition software by government agencies. This software runs your face through a database with criminal faces. In this way, criminals can be easily caught by the police. Because of this software, fugitives can be found much faster then without this software. This software is now being used only if there’s an assumption someone is in the neighborhood of a camera. I think in the future this software will be used on every public CCTV surveillance system regardless of a possible suspect in the neighborhood or not. This also brings some privacy problems. So before we are ready for the future, there should be a debate on the current privacy rules and a possible change of these rules.

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The first use of CCTV was in 1942 by the German army, they used it for monitoring the V-2 rocket. Only up until 1949 an organisation called Vericon launched the technology on a commercial base. The big downside from these systems were that they could only be live monitored, nothing could be recorded.
The first systems that could record footage were very unreliable and expensive, the footage was stored on magnetic tapes. These tapes had to be threaded by hand. All of this makes these systems very rare.
In the 1970’s a big breakthrough for CCTV-surveillance occurred, the VCR (video cassette recordings) were introduced. No longer had the camera’s to be monitored live but you could re-watch the recorded footage on a later moment that day or week. Although this was a huge development, the big downside still was that the cassette’s had to be replaced by hand and if you wanted to keep the data for longer times you needed a lot of space to store the tapes.
Another big development in the use of CCTV is the introduction of the multiplexing system, this system made it possible to watch and record several cameras at once. The plus-side of this was that you could store footage of 5 or 6 cameras on one tape. This made the use of CCTV a lot more efficient.
After the millennium switch CCTV-systems switched from VCR to DVR(digital video recordings), this made it possible to store recorded footage on an hard drive build in computers. Also the multiplexing system was now built in which made it easier to install and operate.
The latest update for CCTV is switching over to NVR ( network video recordings) this system makes it possible to stream footage from your cameras to an encoded server. From this server everywhere when you have an internet connection you can stream the footage live to a portable device. Also the footage will be stored in the cloud so it is always accessible on a later part in time. (Longdin, 2014)

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Nowadays we live in a constant fear to be around when a terrorist attack happens. To make ourselves feel more safe, we are more and more installing security cameras around our houses and public places. That is also the point where we all question ourselves if this is really going to prevent any kind of crime.

It is a big debate where everyone has their own opinion about.

To give you the opportunity to create your own opinion about CCTV surveillances I am going to discus a few pros' and cons of using security cameras.

A big pro of CCTV surveillance in public places is that people do feel safer when they see cameras around a public place. It can also prevent a crime like shoplifting when security guards see someone acting suspicious in the store on camera.

It is also proved, that surveillance cameras in public areas reduce the crime rates. When an individual knows about the cameras, they may be less willing to commit a crime in that place.
CCTV surveillance also helps the police to catch criminals. The better the camera is, the more is the chance that criminals get recognized after seeing them on the security videos. It really helped finding criminals in cases over the past years. At last it also improves convenience for everyday life because they place cameras close to traffic lights to prevent people from speeding of crossing a red light.

Ofcourse there are also a lot of cons for CCTV surveillance. I will name a few of them.
At first CCTV can be seen as a violation of the privacy rules. People really don’t like the thought of being recorded everywhere they go.
It is also a system that can be hacked and abused. Then all the records can be used as a form of blackmail for example.
The next con is the question how effective CCTV is. It has never been proven that the use of CCTV in public places really makes it a safer place.
The last con of CCTV is the price. It is really expensive to install cameras around your house, or around public places. A lot of people can’t afford it. I hope with this information you can create your own opinion about CCTV surveillance