[Excerpt from OPC newsletter 2001-12-10:]

Comment below on article published here: http://www.msnbc.com/news/620569.asp

In Britain, Smile For The Camera!

Use of video surveillance leads some to decry loss of privacy

For Americans willing to relinquish certain liberties in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in the name of safety, they can look across the Atlantic for what is becoming an increasingly common method of tightening security: closed-circuit television cameras. With more than a million cameras plugged into security monitors nationwide, Britain is leading the way in today's video surveillance society.

THE SHEER ABUNDANCE of the surveillance cameras has prompted critics to argue that Britain is becoming a police state. Civil libertarians say the cameras are really a political tool that promote a false sense of security - and catch lots of innocent people doing things never intended for filming.

Closed-circuit television cameras, or CCTV, have infiltrated nearly every aspect of life in Britain.

In an effort to crack down on vandalism and curb teen smoking, some grade schools have installed cameras on buses and playgrounds, while high schools have put them in bathrooms.

Parking lots across the country have installed cameras to deter auto theft, and highways use them to monitor driving speeds and measure exhaust emissions. The sprawling London subway is equipped with an estimated 1,400 cameras.

Authorities in one northern community paid for the installation of cameras above houses in high-crime neighborhoods so homeowners could see who was approaching their doors.

And a government program uses cameras to keep tabs on repeat juvenile offenders in London, where a computer system recognizes youths' faces if they appear on specific cameras, and then alerts authorities so they pick them up.

EYES EVERYWHERE

Non-profit groups estimate that there are between 1.5 million and 2 million closed-circuit television cameras in Britain. For a nation of less than 70 million, that is thought to be the highest per capita rate in the world.

The London-based watchdog group Privacy International estimates that up to $9 billion in government money has been spent on surveillance in the past 15 years.

Publicly, the British government says it has set aside $250 million for closed-circuit television cameras, $110 of which was allocated last summer for what officials called a "blitz on crime and disorder."

"Knowing that there is an extra set of eyes watching over their communities helps to reassure people that they will be safe," said John Denham, who is in charge of overall crime reduction in Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor government. "It also acts as an important set of eyes for the police, providing valuable evidence where incidents occur."

But the prospect of even more cameras on the streets makes privacy groups shudder.

"John Denham says we should be reassured to have an 'extra set of eyes watching over' us," said John Wadham, director of leading civil rights group Liberty. "It would be more reassuring if we knew whose eyes, what they're watching and what happens to what they see and the information they record - and knew that the watchers are adequately controlled by law. At present they are not."

"QUESTIONABLE OUTCOME"

Critics also question whether the surveillance cameras actually accomplish what they are supposed to - reducing crime and making citizens safer.

"CCTV usage has expanded around the world but its outcome is questionable," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International.

Robyn Sones, manager of CCTV Information, an advisory and informational group, said that only about 30 percent of the images from the surveillance cameras are admissible in British court because most fail to meet legal requirements for facial recognition. Davies claimed a much lower figure, saying the number was "infinitesimally small."

The British government is "using [cameras] primarily as a tool for generating revenue and as a means of reinforcing social order," Davies said, and they are only catching "minor transgressions" such as petty theft.

"Eventually we have to ask ourselves: At what point are we sacrificing privacy on the altar of ineffective policy?" Davies said.

In an embarrassing incident last summer, closed-circuit television cameras picked up images of a truly dangerous situation - a man suspected of planting a car bomb outside the offices of the British Broadcasting Corp. But he was unidentifiable, reportedly due to a dirty, neglected camera lens.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

According to privacy watchdog groups, more cameras trained on potential crime hot spots means fewer police on the streets - allowing the government to avoid filling what some see as a shortage in front-line policing.

In Davies' opinion, cutting crime isn't the real goal of the surveillance cameras. They are, he said, primarily a "political tool. It looks good, it makes people feel good."

Watchdog groups also worry that surveillance film could fall into the wrong hands. Still images closed-circuit cameras have become regular features in British newspapers, and some videos relating to crime have made it to national television.

In 1996, a man was caught on camera trying to kill himself. He lived - and filed a lawsuit when the surveillance video was broadcast nationally without his permission.

IS THE U.S. NEXT?

So far, there's no indication that the widespread use of hidden cameras will take hold in the United States, which has stricter privacy laws than most Western countries. Civil libertarians were outraged when security officials at last year's Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., disclosed they used hidden cameras to scan spectators' faces in an effort to identify criminals.

In Britain, the civil liberty group Liberty says the bottom line is that people are being forced to give up a significant measure of privacy without a compensatory drop in crime.

"We have to get the balance right on the use of CCTV and other surveillance equipment in public places - between protecting people's safety and protecting their privacy," Liberty's Wadham said.

But it may already be too late to ward off threats to privacy, according to Davies. "The technology is becoming ubiquitous and institutionalized," he said. "This nation - along with others - is establishing a surveillance web of unimaginable proportions."

COMMENT: As you might expect, we are totally opposed to the public use of surveillance cameras for all of the reasons listed in this article.

They're expensive, they intrude upon civil liberties, they can be used for a variety of "alternative" purposes other than that for which they were intended, and they don't do the job they're supposed to do in the first place.

It's very ironic that George Orwell's home country is leading the way in becoming the Big Brother surveillance state he warned against. Does no one understand the implications of what he wrote, and think that somehow "this time it's different" because today's governments won't be as vicious and brutal as those of times past?

We truly hope that Britons wake up in time to the cancer of totalitarianism that will eat them (and their freedoms) alive once it becomes powerful enough to crush any and all opposition in its path. Hitler's Nazis will look like pussycats compared to the modern police state in full "glory" with today's modern technology.

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