Showing posts with label cctv. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cctv. Show all posts

26 October 2013

UK Police's 'Ring Of Steel' Spying On Every Car Entering And Leaving Town Ruled Disproportionate

The UK is famous for its abundant CCTV cameras, but it's also pretty keen on the equally intrusive Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras that can identify cars and hence their owners as they pass. Here, for example, is what's been going on in the town of Royston, whose local police force has just had its knuckles rapped by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for the over-enthusiastic deployment of such ANPR systems there: 

On Techdirt.

11 November 2012

EU Surveillance Team: We Need More Surveillance To Justify More Surveillance

Whether or not you believe that CCTV surveillance makes the world a safer place, there's a big problem with deploying it more widely: you still need someone to look at that footage and pick out the things of interest, and it's much harder adding new personnel than adding new cameras. 

On Techdirt.

Indian Politician Plans To Install Surveillance Cameras In His Ministers' Homes And Offices

Recently, Tim noted that, for some strange reason, politicians don't like having the same level of surveillance applied to them as they wish to inflict on the public. Here's a nice case from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, found via Evgeny Morozov, where politicians aren't being given any choice

On Techdirt.

29 September 2012

Cambodia Wants Mandatory Surveillance Cameras In Internet Cafes

Large-scale surveillance of private communications is becoming depressingly routine, even in supposedly enlightened democracies. In less freedom-loving locations, Internet cafes are viewed with particular suspicion, and subject to tight controls. But it looks like Cambodia is taking surveillance of Internet cafes in particular, and communications in general, to new heights/depths

On Techdirt.

26 February 2010

Schneier Nails it on CCTV Folly

Another brilliant essay on security from Bruce Schneier. It's all well-worth reading, but here's the nub:


If universal surveillance were the answer, lots of us would have moved to the former East Germany. If surveillance cameras were the answer, camera-happy London, with something like 500,000 of them at a cost of $700 million, would be the safest city on the planet.

We didn't, and it isn't, because surveillance and surveillance cameras don't make us safer. The money spent on cameras in London, and in cities across America, could be much better spent on actual policing.

When will the politicians face up to the facts on CCTV? (Via Boing Boing.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

29 June 2009

Watching the Watchers

I read with interest this morning the following:

“Snitchtown” is an essay by Cory Doctorow that first appeared in Forbes.com in June 2007. This SoFoBoMo project is an attempt to illustrate that essay with photographs of some of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras currently estimated to be active in Britain.

It got me thinking: how about setting up a database - a surveillance of surveillance database - that has pictures and locations of CCTVs in the UK? It could be crowd sourced, and anonymous, solving problems of scaling and legal issues. If nothing else, it would put the watchers on notice that they are being watched....

18 May 2009

CCTV is Great - For Car Parks

One of the Great Lies of the Labour's surveillance society is that being watched - specifically by the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world - makes us safer. Guess what - it doesn't:

The use of closed-circuit television in city and town centres and public housing estates does not have a significant effect on crime, according to Home Office-funded research to be distributed to all police forces in England and Wales this summer.

Actually, I'm being unfair: CCTV is useful for one particular application.

The authors, who include Cambridge University criminologist, David Farrington, say while their results lend support for the continued use of CCTV, schemes should be far more narrowly targeted at reducing vehicle crime in car parks.

So there we have it: the vast majority of CCTV cameras are a waste of money. They should be removed - or at least deployed to where they serve some purpose: to car parks.

14 April 2009

Up Next for UK: Ban on Photos of CCTVs?

This is too rich:

The man probing police conduct over the death of a newspaper seller during the G20 protests was wrong to claim there were no CCTV cameras in the area near the Bank of England, it was revealed today.

Several cameras could have captured footage of the incident two weeks ago, contradicting comments made by Nick Hardwick, the chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Mr Hardwick made the claim in response to the IPCC being accused of sweeping away evidence of police brutality.

I don't know which is more breathtaking: the fact that he said it, or the fact that he thought it wouldn't be checked and found to be inconsistent with reality, as the Daily Mail pictures prove.

Which brings up the interesting possibility that having banned photos of the police - so as to avoid members of the public taking evidence of police brutality - the next logical step would be to forbid people to take photos of CCTVs or to talk about their location - because it would "help terrorists" - so that the police can then claim that they don't exist in an area where police brutality has taken place.

And if you think that's utterly impossible, you haven't been paying attention.... (Via @stevepurkiss.)

Update: What a surprise, the IPCC has suddenly found those errant CCTV cameras. Amazing how a picture can change one's perception.

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

05 September 2008

Open Source Surveillance

True open source surveillance does exist. It's called sousveillance, and uses the idea of distributing the task among many people, often in response to centralised surveillance. It's an interesting idea, especially in the context of a society like the UK's, where we are constantly spied on by CCTV cameras.

Alas, that's not quite what we talking about here....

On Open Enterprise blog.

18 June 2008

Our Chains Will Make Us Free

How Orwellian is this:


UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has defended the apparatus of the UK's emerging surveillance society as the means to bring liberty to the people.

Britain's infamous identity cards, CCTV, biometrics and DNA scanners will make people more free by making them more secure, he said yesterday in defence of his security strategy.

Brown has seriously lost it.

15 June 2008

The Bang-on Blogosphere

Further proof that things are shifting in media-land:

as Iain Dale, the Tory blogger who ran Davis's ill-fated leadership campaign, points out, while newspapers scorned the resignation the blogosphere largely embraced it: political chatrooms are overflowing with right-wingers offering to start a fighting fund, and left-wingers agonising over whether to support him. Even the Daily Telegraph's Saturday letters page was two to one in favour of the former MP for Haltemprice and Howden.

Could David Davis somehow have stumbled across something the establishment has missed, an untapped anger with what the public sees as a snooping, heavy-handed state that spies on it through speed cameras and CCTV and microchips on its rubbish bins, that tramples its freedoms and makes sloppy mistakes with its private data?

Update: Related thoughts here.

09 April 2008

Riding the Dragon

If you want to understand the role of the Internet in the development of the current situation in China, this is the best article I've read on the subject:

In the weeks since the protests, riots, and government crackdown in Tibet hit the headlines, Chinese coverage of the events has gone through several incarnations. It began life as a terse state press-release, then refashioned itself into a front-page struggle between embattled civilians and scheming "splittists", before arriving at its current manifestation: the public shaming of the purportedly anti-Chinese western media.

On the face of it, these changes have been mandated from the top down. But behind the curtains of China's official media, networks of active internet users have played a key role in shaping the course of the reporting of Tibet.

It includes this fascinating nugget:

"In the beginning, the government had been hoping to keep things quiet", my friend Bei Feng, an editor of a major Chinese web portal whose blog was chosen in 2007 as one of China's ten most influential, told me. "But the actions of netizens forced them to widen their coverage." He himself was an example of this sort of net activism. When news of Tibet broke, he employed a strategy he says he commonly uses for sensitive issues, posting a story about it on his blog and then taking it off after only a few hours to avoid being shut down by censors. The window of time is narrow, but gives readers ample opportunity to copy and paste his story into chatrooms and bulletin-board systems.

And concludes with this interesting thought:

As he offers rice wine to those seated near him, Bei Feng pointed out a failing in the government's favoured method of co-opting anti-foreign sentiment. "What the authorities don't realise is that the people who are using these standards of objectivity to criticise CNN will eventually apply them to Xinhua and CCTV."

"Yes", a listener chimed in. "The common people are very smart. Sooner or later they'll expect more."


Update: Looks like it's started...

03 May 2007

Defending the Street Tree

Another great commons under threat:

In towns and cities across the country, millions of other street trees are less lucky. Supersized lorries batter their crowns, utility companies dig up their roots, high-density developments squeeze them out, mobile-phone companies and CCTV operators demand they are trimmed back, water-main repairs shut off life-giving leaks, insurers claim they are causing building subsidence . . . and we, the public, sue councils when we trip on pavements made wonky by tree roots.