Invisible cameras in the pavement? What is to be done?

While channel hopping in the early hours of this morning through the unwatched digital end of the British TV spectrum (no doubt that is a technologically impossible thing to do literally but I’m sure you understand), I encountered the beginnings of or an advertisement for (I switched off and am only now remembering it) one of those Kilroy-Silk type programmes in which a sleek self-important talk-leader wanders around among various people desperate to be on television talking about something too interesting and lowbrow to be of interest to the kind of people who watch analogue TV with a number like 1 or 2, such as what it is like to sleep with your nephew or why you want your grandmother to stop getting any more tattoos. This sleek Kilroy-man was called Walsh, I think. (Yes.) And, this time the subject was going to be … and here I confess to forgetting the technical term which the unwatched TV industry has coined for this phenomenon … but it was video/digital/TV cameras for looking up girls’ skirts in public places. Apparently some unfortunate girl had become the victim of one of these freelance soft porn Spielbergs and video of her bottom and underwear was even now circulating on the internet.

I don’t know exactly how the cameras are organised. Perhaps they are placed in the shoes of the filmer. Perhaps they are operated from the basements of sleazy restaurants. A particular unfortunate girl had become more unfortunate in that she had sued her voyeur-tormentors in an American court, and the court had found that although disgusting, the behaviour of the electro-digital-voyeurs was not illegal. So now the unfortunate girl was taking her case to a higher court: unwatched television.

And that was when I switched off, which I now regret. It was the most memorable and interesting thing I saw on the telly yesterday, but I only realised this today.

As I say, I don’t know how the argument then proceeded, although I do know that they had managed to entice or fake up some sleazoids willing to argue in favour of the rights of people to make movies by pointing cheap cameras up girl’s skirts. So presumably there was an argument.

What might I have said if I had found myself in the middle of such an argument? I have no idea, but here are some guesses. First, this is not only an argument for privately owned public spaces amongst people like those who read Samizdata, it is a circumstance which will surely cause people generally to prefer privately owned public spaces to publicly owned public spaces. Whatever the constitutional right to film people may consist of exactly, upheld by the US Constitution or by the European Convention of Human Rights and only challengeable after months if not years of legal foolishness, most girls don’t want cameras pointed up their knickers, and will prefer to, e.g., shop in places where this is forbidden throughout, as I surmise that it already is in privately owned shopping centres. No doubt, in a world of ubiquitous privately owned public spaces, such as we are more and more seeing, there will also be places where such filming is allowed and even encouraged, and some girls of the naughtier and show-offier sort will visit such places on purpose.

Second, whatever the rules for such filming end up being, whether state-proclaimed or privately-proclaimed, it will be devilishly difficult to enforce them very completely. A likely result is that many girls will just get used to it. They will just say: if you look up my knickers, you’re the one with the problems, not me. That would certainly make sense to me as a reaction.

But others may adapt their costumes. Will there be revival of voluminous layered ladies’ underwear, which will give strategically places camera-persons you about as much of a view of the lower half of a lady’s body as a naked human body gives you now of the skeleton that supports it? The fashion industry is always looking for excuses to make girls frocks look entirely different to what anyone was expecting. Redoing dresses to make them proof against invisible cameras in the floor could provoke amazing new fashion statements. Will young girls be urged by their mothers always to wear clean underwear, not in case they have a road accident, but in case their underwear gets filmed and internetted?

In other words, to summarise the above points, the market, in space and in clothing, will supply solutions that the ponderous absurdities of litigation and legislation will be powerless to offer.

Third, I wonder how this will all play out in Scotland, where men also wear skirts, concerning which much controversy now rages (in Scotland and elsewhere) about what they wear underneath them. Will the fashion of men wearing skirts which is now spreading outside of Scotland be stopped in its tracks? Or will it, perchance, be encouraged? There’s a certain kind of man who loves to show off his manhood. Scottish (coincidence?) film star Ewan McGregor springs to mind. I was going to supply a pertinent link there but I would be doing most of our readers no favours, trust me.

Fourth, well, I don’t want to go on at too great length about this. People might think that there was something wrong with me.