Just in case you though the other (main) lot believed in civil liberties

[major_clanger]

I found a newsletter from the 'Limehouse Conservative Action Team' in my mailbox yesterday. Very professional looking, and with the Conservative Party logo on the masthead, so I assume that it is official or at least endorsed by the party.

Headline? CALLS FOR MORE CCTV, followed by a story that indeed calls for more deployment of CCTV cameras, mainly on two of the local (primarily working class) housing estates. What boggled my mind was the final comment in the story: "Labour has let us down over CCTV after 11 years in power".

Good grief. The UK is already the leading example of how far a democracy can go in turning itself into a surveillance society, and the Conservatives think that New Labour has been slacking on the job?

Once again, prepare to watch the two main parties race for the bottom of this particular barrel.

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Maybe you can forward them copies of some speeches by David Davies...

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

I do hope someone's monitoring those watching the footage, to ensure it's not being misused.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

If our per capita stats rise any higher, we'll each be carrying our own personal CCTV.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

are you unlucky enough to have a conservative MP? if so, complain via faxmymp.org and see if they spank the local party?

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

CCTV was one of the things that made life pleasant for me and my female colleagues while working in Milton Keynes because it cut the risk of attack, mugging or car crime down to zero . It meant that we could work late, go shopping , go to clubs ,pubs and London without fear ,i.e. let us have a life.

The effect of CCTV on public safety has been compared to the introduction of public street lighting . I suspect that opponents of CCTV will sound as comical to the next generation as the Victorian opponents of street lighting sound today.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago I'd have unconditionally agreed with you. And I don't think CCTV is a bad thing of itself - as you say, it, combined with good lighting, can do much to address the problem of areas where people (especially women) are vulnerable.

However, some very worrying developments have started to raise new concerns. The sheer number of CCTV cameras means that realistically they cannot be monitored by human operators, so instead we now see new technologies such as face recognition, gait analysis (looking at walking patterns) and even systems which look for 'suspicious behaviour'. Couple this with the fact that our position is continually tracked by smartcard purchases, travel passes and mobile phone position logs, it looks like we're heading towards what has been described as a global version of Bentham's Panopticon prison, an environment in which our location is never unknown. If you trust the authorities, that's fine... but even if I do, will the next lot, or the lot after that, be trustworthy? And even if they're not malicious, they can be careless, as has been seen with the repeated and substantial losses of personal data.

Organisations like NO2ID and Open Rights Group are concerned not about CCTV of itself but about the creeping (actually, galloping) trend towards integrating it into a database-driven surveillance society. My particular concern with this flyer is that far from considering such concerns, as David Cameron has claimed the Conservatives will, it indicates an attitude of More Is Always Better when it comes to security paraphernalia. Because in these straitened times, such extra equipment is likely to be paid for by cuts in other areas - such as actual police. (Our local station is a candidate for closure, with the idea being that we'll be remotely policed from Bethnal Green.)

I really do sympathise with your point. There are places around where I live where I feel safer because there are streetlights and signs saying that the area is CCTV-monitored. But I am concerned that the major political parties see 'more surveillance' as the answer to all crime and security concerns.

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

I agree about the competence of large organisations - it is very hard to be sensible 365 days a year.

I thought CCTV was supposed to be the most cost effective form of crime reduction and local bobbies on the beat the least cost effective ?

Arguably the real problem with CCTV is a reverse nimbyism -with (say) prosperous, shiny Milton Keynes centre being covered but not the sink estate on the outskirts (which i won't name for obvious reasons) that accounts for 90 % of hate crimes in the area.

I've gone beyond bogglement at some of the weird data analysis things people do commercially .

I quite like the princess's idea of getting everyone in her No2id group to swap their customer loyalty cards over at intervals to confuse the retailers.