“Stand still, citizen! Facial recognition software has identified you and made a cross-check with the national ‘Good Citizen’ data base.”
“You have not denounced anyone for…thirty… days… please remember that community policing is a civic duty and reporting people is easy and fun! Just use your mobile phone and send a text SMS to Whitehall 1212 with the name, address and crime of a school mate, family member or co-worker!”
“And remember, if you accumulate ten ‘Good Citizen’ points for denouncing smokers, homophobes, people eating high fat food, anyone making racist jokes in private, people making unauthorised D.I.Y. repairs to ‘their’ houses, anyone using illegal light bulbs, anyone questioning the unanimous and state approved scientific truth about global warming, home schoolers or people who buy banned war toys for ‘their’ children, you will get to appear on the Big Brother reality TV show by having your home’s internal CCTV footage broadcast live for seven days!”
</child’s voice>
From the linked article: “According to recent studies, Britain has 4.2million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country – which amounts to 20 per cent of the global camera total.”
Welcome to modern Britain.
Are people stupid? I’ll credit them with some intelligence. Are they blind? Not all of them, no.
Are they afraid? Absolutely, and this is why we have the largest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world. People want to feel safe, and we are constantly told that it isn’t. Fear is a dreadful and cynical way for a government to manipulate its citizens, it dehumanises us and demeans us. We are told to be afraid of teenagers, terrorists, peadophiles, and, most importantly, each other. We are ruled by an elite that lives by the axiom ‘Divide and conquer’. Keeping us suspicious of each other keeps us from forming any kind of unified resistance. This is why we have the cameras, this is why we’re getting ID cards, and this is why our government has gotten away with stripping us of our freedoms for the last 10 years. The more people that see it the better.
Mandrill, I’m not afraid of thuggish teenagers because the state tells me to be so – I’m afraid of them because they’re violent knife-carrying scum who are seemingly immune from jail sentences until they’ve committed their fiftieth offence, powered by free money from the state and free transport (in town) from Ken and a seemingly infinite supply of drugs and alcohol. I would go so far as to say that we’re not ‘told’ to feel scared of one another, we’re _made_ to feel scared of one another by deliberate non-policing which permits a violent minority to remain in society thus furthering a security/surveillance agenda.
…Listen to me…lis-ten to me…Shoot. The traitor. Ross…
You will forget your liberties…you will forget your freedoms…you will forget the IPCRESS noise…
p.s. loved “flashy”‘s (November 7, 2006 7:08 AM )fisk of Polly’s drivel.
When I lived in Canary Wharf it wasn’t illusory fear that made me wary of the roving packs of thugs. IT was the roving packs of thugs, who tore apart train cars, mugged at will and occasionally killed people for no apparent reason.
But to think monitoring the public with cameras is a solution is sheer idiocy. Is there no liberty that the British public won’t jettison in favour of yet more government control — government control that has overseen a steady decline in the quality of life in the UK.
Lascaille, chip,
Neither one of you are afraid of the thugs at all. You are afraid of your government. In large parts of the US, “roving packs of thugs” are afraid that granny’s got a gun and knows how to shoot it. Your thugs would have the life expectency of a turtle on a busy highway in most parts of the US.
Did you notice how, many years back when thugs declared open season on tourists but only, for some inexplicable reason, in Florida (snort!) none of the press mentioned that it was because a change in the gun laws made native citizens dangerous to criminals?
You are merely afraid that thugs have weapons and means that you are prohibited from having or using. Mandrill is right. Law abiding citizens overwhelming outnumber the (still reasonably) small number of thugs. But you are afraid to cooperate. You are afraid to act in your own self defense. You are afraid of your government.
Well, I read the Telegraph article. And what struck me was that Dr Reid made no mention of these cameras tackling crime. Instead he mentioned “Anti-social behaviour” and “respect”. Well, that’s a rather loose term isn’t it? Does that mean I’ll get shouted down for smoking in front of kiddies? Having a bacon sandwich near the mosque? Maybe. will it prevent me being mugged or murdered? Will it hell.
I think Mid is right. I have always been ambivalent towards weapons laws. But, I saw the result of a txt-in on the local news last night and it flipped over completely. A kid in Manchester did an armed robbery and while caught (and yes he was on CCTV in the shop) he escaped a custodial sentance. Hmmm… Well, the thing that shocked me was the idiocy of people txting North West Tonight asking for enormous mandatory sentences for anyone carrying a gun. I just thought that was utterly wrong. Apart from the fact that one idiot asked for carrying to get a mandatory life-sentence (hell, ya goin’ dahn for a long time why not shoot someone?) I realised that while there is a risk to allowing an armed citizenry it is nowhere near as large a risk as the sort of idiocy that bloke was spouting.
I’ve always wanted a gun and I’d be reponsible(ish) with it (well not actively dangerous anyway). I always worried that others wouldn’t be. I now doubt that’s as much of a threat as the kinda “all guns are evil” idiocy that seems to pervade society in the UK. It’s like a perverse inversion of the NRA line. In the UK we’re blaming the tool and not the tradesman.
Of course Brits are afraid – your government took away all the legal guns and they won’t even let you defend yourself or your home with a golf club, so now you are completely dependent on the state (just the way Tony likes it) for protection – but that protection is pretty pathetic when cops are outgunned by the thugs and are more interested in writing reports than preventing crimes (and rounding up “homophobic” children, of course). These CCTV cameras are supposed to provide the illusion of safely, while in reality they just mean that every single person is treated as a criminal. I’m neither a libertarian nor a civil libertarian, but this is just stupid – so what if you have the whole crime on film? The damage is already done and it’s not like your courts will hand down a useful sentance anyway.
“You think you’ve private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
I’m watching all the time
I’m made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I’m elected electric spy
I’m protected electric eye”
(“Electric Eye”, Judas Priest, “Screaming For Vengeance”, twenty five years ago)
holdfast, I reckon that cops are about as interested in doing paperwork as the next man. I doubt people join the force in order to sit at a desk filling out forms for four hours for an arrest that takes a quarter of that time at most. The people interested in the paperwork are the ones who want to keep the police understaffed and underfunded (like lascaille said).
It used to be that there was such a thing as a society where people could intervene in so called ‘anti-social behaviour’ and put a stop to it by giving the offender a good talking to or a clip round the ear. Now we are afraid to intervene because the state has stripped that right/responsibility from us, and as such there are no checks on boisterous behaviour during childhood which leads to the ‘gangs of teenaged thugs’ feeling invincible and answerable to no-one when in fact they should be answerable to everyone. As usual the states handling of this power, taken from the individual, is woefully inadequate and causes more hassle than its worth.
The answer, and I’m sure the gov’t knows this, is to give that power back to the people not more police.
Speaking of giving power back to the people, I’d appreciate people’s responses, ideas, and criticisms to this post of mine(Link).
The government just wants to watch.
They aren’t active in crime prevention.
They’re just voyeurs.
Says Lascaille, mocking our mockery of these cameras with their sound effects. Perhaps this person could explain to us, because I think I may have missed it, quite how these devices are supposed to help.
Of course they are not supposed to prevent thuggery. They are all part of that mixture of policies designed to make us “feel” safer, rather like pointless security devices in airports.
Nick M,
Well, I read the Telegraph article. And what struck me was that Dr Reid made no mention of these cameras tackling crime.
There’s a reason for that. The Home Office’s own studies show that CCTV has no appreciable effect in preventing crime and tends to increase fear of crime.
However the Home Office (and the communities ministry) would like to intimidate us still more. Antisocial behaviour, being not actually crime but whatever the local authorities like to describe as anti-social, is a good pretext for ordering people around. Though the better studues tend to indicate crime and some more clearly identified forms of “anti-social behaviour” are falling, fear of them is not.
It is fear of crime that gives the Home Office its power, and CCTV both stimulates fear of crime and is popular, so there is a vicious circle. Crimewatch-type TV shows are popular and stimulate fear, too, but have the misfortune to be limited by availability of actual crimes.
There is really very little information about the quantity of CCTV around as well as what it does. That often-quoted statistic about the number of cameras in Britain is usually traced back to one survey of Putney High Street in 2002. But I am in no doubt that we have far more than anywhere else, with extra concentrations in London.
A couple of things I’d like to say:
Firstly that I find it most worrying and that I’m totally against government run CCTV cameras (except ones monitoring politicians and civil servants).
Secondly, that as some American posters have noted: one thing that would very quickly stop this thuggish behaviour which has become common place in many areas (and it has, this is not a government exageration, indeed I believe they’re down playing it in many ways) would be to repeal our ridiculous firearms laws and to improve our self-defence law.
But thirdly, I’d like to ask a question: why are we against CCTV cameras? What I mean is…if there was a policeman on every street, would we be so against that? Would we be against it at all, assuming they wern’t paid for through involuntary taxation? Somehow I know that CCTV cameras are wrong…but I’m not entirely sure how I justify that opinion… A helping hand?
“Where the law is, crime can be found.”
(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — “The Gulag Archipelago”, Vol. I, p. 67)
Get it? It won’t be about “crime” anymore, as the concept has been known to reasonable people for nearly innumerable centuries. In fact, it isn’t anymore, as evidenced by the toleration of authentic crime now in the U.K. It will be about arbitrary assignment as “crime” to activities that the state will disapprove for political reasons or no damned reason at all, simply because they can pick and choose from ordinary activity that they could never hope to observe before.
You can already see this dynamic in action, without the cameras. (Witness the case the other day of the ten year-old kid who had cops at his door for simply using the word “gay” in a politically unacceptable way.)
It’s about arbitrary power.
This is something that ought to be terrifying and bloody outrageous to every thinking person.
And, I must say, it’s remarkable to me that the point has to be explained.
That fact, right there by itself, illustrates the ground that must be recovered in matters like this.
The drip, drip of idiocy out of the UK has become a steady trickle. One wonders if the public will wake up before it becomes a flood that washes away what’s left of a free society.
Of course they are not supposed to prevent thuggery.
That’s sentimental ranting.
Maybe they don’t prevent thuggery, but maybe they deter thugs. CCTV cameras could help police identify criminal thugs, find them, arrest them, and supply proof of the crime, needed in court.
I’ve read about a few cases where CCTV cameras did just that.
The claim that they are useless doesn’t sound plausible. Not every comera catches a thug every day, but surely some of the cameras help catch a thug ocasionally.
No doubt true Jacob. And going to a full blown fascist regime will no doubt make the trains run on time too. A reasonable trade-off, yes? After all, the government has proven trustworthy again and again.
I wonder if there is a map anywhere of the concentration of CCTV cameras in the UK, if so perhaps someone might be able to actually work out that the solution might just be real policing and crime prevention in those locations – not more cameras and Social Services Sturmtruppen Counselling Teams for the deprived children of evil parents who need to be re-educated. Of course the real injustice is to see one of those cameras and realise that in order to pay for it Gordon Brown probably deprived one person of their pension.
Just to drive from home (Richmond, Surrey) to work (Hammersmith, W6) involves me passing 19 state surveillance cameras that I could see, excluding the harmless blue TrafficMaster system (those blue cameras with an aerial on top or the blue cameras you see on a bridge on motorways) and corporate security cameras. I just told a friend in the USA this and, not surprisingly, his response was “B.S” followed by a challenge for me to film a typical journey to work, mark out the cameras and upload it to YouTube for all to see.
Nice one, Perry. So when are you and the rest of the risk-adverse losers flying the coop?
Terry you are beginning to annoy me.
But I will deal with you later.
Have any of you been inside a Camera Obscura?
Bristol has one on Clifton Down, next to Brunel’s Suspension Bridge.
It is a facinating and ancient technology.
A lens in the roof of a darkened room, focuses on a large round metal table.
At first you can see nothing as your eyes ajust to the light. But gradually you can see the whole of the surrounding area laid out on the table.
This being a major tourist place you will see people, eating ice creams, playing frisbee and perhaps fondling each other behind bushes that they thought hid them from the rest of the world. Ha! but you know different!!
And there’s no way to escape a frisson of pleasure in knowing something that another person does not know.
Namely that you can see them but they have no idea about being scrutinised by you.
I got that feeling in the camera obscura and I didn’t like it.
I wonder what sort of folk will take to this kind of work?
It’s not the cameras that are the real problem—they are only a symptom of a much more fundamental pathology.
The government is trying to use the cameras to placate the ordinary citizen, who can tell that the streets are becoming increasingly unsafe, and wants reassurance that some effort is being made to address the problem.
Rather than admit that things have gone very wrong, both in society, and in the state’s response to criminal activity, those who actually believe that perception is reality are hoping that this band-aid, along with various other public relations gimmicks and trendy programs, will slow the growing realization on the part of the average working stiff that he or she is pretty much been abandoned by those whose supposed duty is their protection.
The objection to the public cameras by various members of this intellectual community is partly based on a deep suspicion that the state rarely, if ever, does actually protect ordinary citizens, as a theoretical position, added to both anecdotal and statistical evidence that, in fact, agents of the government have actually abandoned any true committment to the suppression of crime, and the prosecution of criminals, and are now engaged in various acts of political theater whose true purpose is murky at best, and sinister at worst.
If it was the common experience of those participating here, and ordinary citizens in general, that the state was committed to the protection of its members’ fundamental rights, and that it was basically competent and successful at preventing crimes and prosecuting criminals, little of the animosity being expressed here would exist in any but those for whom any state action is evil by definition.
The cameras are window dressing, meaningless frills whose presence does nothing but remind people that, even if anybody did bother to investigate a crime competently, and prosecute the criminal with some degree of enthusiasm, the court, prison and parole systems are so disfunctional as to render any small positive developments meaningless in the larger picture of frightened citizens, arrogant law-breakers, and ineffective laws, police, and courts.
What is needed is not a gimmick, for that is all the cameras are, regardless of their sinister potential, but a serious reconsideration of what it means to be charged with the suppression of violent crime in a democratic society, and a fearless openness to potential new policies and procedures which might result in a more successful campaign against crime and criminals while still respecting the rights and liberties of ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
There are successful models which can be studied and adapted to British society. The first step in the process is admitting that all the phony multi-culti posturing that has only exascerbated the problem must stop, and a serious approach to actually suppressing crime and criminals must be adopted.
What’s needed is straight talk coupled with firm, ethical action. Gimmicks are not the answer, and muddle-headed good intentions will never solve the problem.
Good luck.
Well done, Albion, you’re getting the hang of this humour thing. I almost chuckled, honest.
And the rest of Britain- do you feel safe with all those cameras everywhere? Britain should be the safest country in the world by now, if cameras were the key to crime-control.
Is it?
Has crime, over-all, gone down, stayed the same, or gone up?
Now if the cameras were slaved to some automatic weaponry… non-lethal options available… would you feel safer still?
Harry Hutton’s take on talking cameras.
Re Mandrill’s ”Fear is a dreadful and cynical way for a government to manipulate its citizens”
Oh Mandrill, you did make me laugh.
A government, especially a FascistLite ™ Nu-Lab one, cynically manipulating citizens in a dreadful way. Did you expect anything else?
Cameras are all part of the emasculation, infanitisation and drive to towards a dependent citizenry. This is just another “baby step”.
CCTV does work on occasion – the yob in Romford who just stabbed a bloke waiting for a cab. Wonder how much lying would have gone on so that lowlife wormed his way out with only partial eyewitnesses to refer to?
That said, most cameras would not be needed if we were not hamstrung by the state. Even the Romford incident is an example – so quick to excuse bad behaviour without such ‘evidence’. It is a typical pattern – the State creates the problem then uses it as an excuse to “fix” it to further their own agenda. Coming soon: Private Schools.
Basically they want to know where we are at all times. Miliband and his carbon credit card aims to know what we buy, when and from whom. They already have the means to access our telecommunications. Laws exist for wife-beaters to have CCTV in their homes. Next step will be released habitual criminals. Then only a half a baby step to known criminals “who vote for the wrong party”.
I also agree with Mandrill, Guy, Mid, NickM.
Jacob, you really are a dope. “Prevention” and “deterrence” are the same thing in this case. If I do not deter X, then I do not prevent it. QED.
I have yet to come across any statistically rugged evidence that cameras deter criminals. They may be handy after the fact, but that is fat consolation to victims of Britain’s high crime rates. The solution to crime lies elsewhere.
A question to those with a better understanding of technology than I have –i.e. just about anyone. I remember that old-fashioned intercom systems use their speakers as microphones. Could the speakers on those CCTV cameras be used in this way? How easy would it be to listen in on conversations without having to admit that there are microphones on the cameras?
As usually veryretired said it very well and true.
Maybe the cameras are useless. They sure are if the cops don’t actually use them to vigorously prosecute criminals. They are “window dressing” – maybe, if they are not properly employed.
But people here are paranoid. They depict the cameras as proof of a “a full blown fascist regime “. This is shrill nonesense. To use a cliche: cameras don’t kill people…
Phil,
We have every right to expect better from our politicians, we are their employers after all.
Jacob,
The cameras are merely the icing on the cake, the tip of a very large and dangerous iceberg of legislation, regulation and attempted economic and social control. Fighting my way through The Road to Serfdom, I am beginning to see how well intentioned politicians can metamorphose into dictators through trying to control and regulate a complex society which, if given the chance, could quite easily be a self regulating one.
The main problem is that ZaNuLab is not a proactive government, a majority of their policies are reactive. They seem to think that what the media says is the will of the people is actually the will of the people, when in fact the media tells people what its response should be. Scary stories sell papers, so that there seems to be an epidemic of violence, crime, thuggery, and paedophilia when in fact the incidence of these is not as high as we think it is. We are like children who read, watch and listen to horror stories to the exclusion of all else. No wonder we have nightmares and want our parents to check under the bed and in the closet for monsters born of our own imagination.
Rantingkraut,
Thats a very good point, you’ve got me wondering now aswell.
rantingkraut. There is no need for that technology. They are working on automated lip-reading for CCTV. They have actually trialed a system that can estimate the chance that a crowd is going to “get nasty” by measuring it’s dynamics.
This kind of technology is developed purely for commercial reasons where there is a business case for doing so. For example software exists which attempts to distinguish between a burglar climbing the wall of a building and an employee entering through the door. But this software would have been developed to target a particular market, probably for use in a commercial property. I think the problem is more to do with the unashamed use of technology by the government for control of anti-social behaviour. This is what is new and there is little to stop it because you can always find a purely logical justification for it. Many people ‘feel’ that something is wrong with this but they cannot articulate why.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article1615598.ece
I hope the link works.
“Many people ‘feel’ that something is wrong with this but they cannot articulate why.”
That’s what I said too.
When you call the cameras “a sinister tool of oppression” that’s exaggerated sentimentalist ranting.
Mandrill Re:“We have every right to expect better from our politicians, we are their employers after all.”
I agree wholeheartedly, in principal.
Sadly, that does not seem to influence the Government’s actual behaviour though, nor apparently does the possibility of being voted out of office…
Also, if we are employing them, how come they do more stuff we don’t want that we do? It’s a monopoly! We need an OFFGUV Com.
Absurd. It makes repression by the state easier, it really is that simple.
[dailymailmode]
I’m going to formally object to children’s voices being used for the camera alerts since I feel this would deliberately encourage paedophiles to drop litter in order to be told off by a young child.
[/dailymailmode]
CCTV cameras could help identify thugs, arrest them, and … and…. and ….. things….., and then it’s solved, right?
I mean, like, after they have ink on their fingertips, they’re not going to og and do anything…. right?…..right?…
Actually, they need the cameras because evrybody has learned that it is not just futile, but dangerous, to try and bear witness against thses creatures, and every few weeks somebody else is actually murdered, killed dead by them to reinforce the lesson.
Of course, the property urge remains strong and can catch people unawares, and they give chase.
Like the father who chased two car thieves in Wakefield; his children are now orphaned, of course.
And if the police catch the scum, they will have to prove beyond any semblence of irrational doubt that the murderers committed murder, and then they will go to a rest home for a few years.
rantingkraut wrote:
That is technically possible but so difficult, especially in the street CCTV environment, that it would only be worth the effort in exceptional circumstances. Even then, performance would not be much good outside of a short range.
Also, the only benefit, over a disguised directional microphone array, would be better disguise. Given any CCTV type equipment (speaking or not), installation of a disguised direction microphone array, of vastly superior performance, would be fairly easy. That itself would not be sufficient protection against forensic investigation of the whole equipment and its electronic circuits, in support say of a public enquiry. It’s not a runner.
Nick M wrote:
I don’t think that would be lip reading of what was said; more likely gestures and facial expressions. After all, it’s a 1 bit decision: crowd about to riot, or not.
The entropy of running speech is somewhere around 15 bits/second (dropping to 8bps for digit strings and 4bps for yes/no): see Computational Models of Speech Pattern Processing, page X where the editor echos points I made in discussion back in 1999. It’s very unlikely that anywhere near 15bps is available from lip reading, given that only the lips, lower jaw and occasionally forward tongue position are visible, and not most of the tongue position and velum, and not quite a bit on manner of articulation. For pattern matching of activity of everyday importance to humans, I generally work on the basis that what humans cannot do well enough on a good day, machines never will do well enough at all.
Best regards
“Many people ‘feel’ that something is wrong with this but they cannot articulate why.”
It is because the operation of these cameras engages in two types of conduct that we as a civilisation consider to be both indicative of criminal intent and psycholgically perverted.
They are peeping toms, watching people from a hidden place where they can observe while undetected and undetectable.
And further, they mask the peepers identity behind the mask of a camera lens. Not only do you not know when you are being watched, you do not know who it is that might be watching you. Much as a facial mask disquises the face or writing notes disquises a voice concealing the bankrobber or kidnapper from witness identification.
It is instinctive to consider this behavior threatening. Throughout the run of civilisation people who have engaged in these two conducts and directed them against ordinary people who are attempting to live their routine lives, have been people of bad intent. It is probably in our genetic material to consider someone spying from a place of concealment to be a threat to us. We inately ‘know’ that peeping spies are dangerous. That is why arguments that ‘They’re not doing anything to you that other people walking down the street aren’t also doing to you.’ falls so flat.
Just out of curiosity, how many of you, in a crowded street with all other things being equal, when faced with the choice of walking through the eye of a camera or walking outside of the eye of a camera would choose to be watched because you feel safer? How many of you would feel safer when not being watched?
Thanks Nigel.
I would still like to know- has the crime-rate gone down, or stayed the same, or gone up? And a related question is- Has the capture and conviction of criminals improved because of the cameras?
Perry,
Absurd. It makes repression by the state easier, it really is that simple.
Two points:
1. Did states in the past have any difficulty with oppressing people because of lack of cameras ? Not at all. The cameras don’t matter in this respect.
2. You would have to prove, or show, that cameras are used for illegitimate oppression. The mere fact that they could be so used is not enough. The cameras could be used also for positive ends (combating crime). You have to show what use has actually been made.
Mid,
We inately ‘know’ that peeping spies are dangerous.
Maybe… maybe we hate people peeping into our private space. In public space we expect to be seen. It does not matter whether we are seen by cops patrolling the streets, or cops sitting behind the camera monitors.
has the crime-rate gone down, or stayed the same, or gone up?
There are a million factors affecting crime rate. You would never know how much cameras contributed to lowering the crime rate or reducing the rate of crime increase.
Cameras do help, every now and then, to catch and help convict criminals. Cameras don’t arrest criminals. You need policemen for that. If the police is ineffective, cameras by themselves don’t help much.
Either you get to argue cameras do not work and therefore it is fairly pointless to worry about them (as you argue above) or they do work (as you argue elsewhere) in which case your argument is not about cameras at all but about a state’s capacity and propensity to do wicked things.
As you claim cameras do work in most of your comments (and by work I mean enable a given action to be carried out more effectively than without said factor), your argument must therefore be that as states do more good than evil when they control civilian populations, therefore CCTV is a good thing because they work.
As I reject the premise of what must be your contention, your argument is meaningless to me as my premise is that as the great majority of what states do is illegitimate in and of itself, therefore anything that improves its ability to control people will be more bad than good in the same proportion (i.e. the great majority of cases). For example, if CCTV helps reduce car tax evasion , that is a bad thing as car tax itself is a bad thing.
I do not want a more efficient state, I want a smaller state so your argument means very little to me.
“New Dark Age, made all the more protracted by perverted science..”
Who came out with something similar, and when?
And what did he say in the 1945 General Election about the Labour Party?
I do not want a more efficient state, I want a smaller state so your argument means very little to me.
Well, I do want a more efficient state – in those areas where we need the state – like fighting crime, protecting individual rights.
I want a smaller state too, but not by eliminating all activities across the board – I want to eliminate those activities I disapprove of – like excessive taxation, regulation, etc.
Too bad, you don’t get to pick and choose. CCTV is a tool which will help the state does a few good things and a great many bad things.
Billy Beck,
I’m quite aware of how cameras can be (and are) abused, but the fact that something can be abused dosn’t seem like a good idea to be against it. To me anyway. Guns for instance, can be abused, as can kitchen knives and automobiles but, assuming you’re not an anarchist of some description, I expect you would still want the government to be able to have guns (for the army, for instance) and kitchen knives (for the canteen) and automobiles (to move around). Perhaps I’m putting words in your mouth, I hope not.
So my question is: why are we against the cameras themselves rather than the abuse? Suppose there was some kind of magical computer system which ONLY allowed CCTV operators to see people committing genuine crimes like murder and theft, and everything else was blanked or blurred out and there was no way to bypass this system? Would we still be against them?
Personally, I think I probably would be. I’m not saying that all the people complaining about CCTV are wrong, I’m sure they’re right, I’d just like somebody to articulate why they’re right.
I’m for small government, but because big government is bad, not because I worry that big government might turn into something bad. See?
Sadly many (most?) people feel lonely and lost and confused.
So hearing instructions (as long as they are delivered in a friendly sounding way, and mixed with games – such as your example of how reporting people can be made “fun”) will appeal to them.
Rather than feeling anger or contempt, many (again most?) people will feel warm and fuzzy if this is done well (i.e. if the state gets its P.R. right).
As the old insistitutions of civil society (both religous and secular such as clubs and societies and the family itself) have declined (at least in part due to government policy) so a gap has been created where the state can step in – in the name of “fraternity” (as Dr Danny Kruger might put it).
“No, No, No – this is about fighting crime”.
But as Guy Herbert, and others, have pointed out – there is very little evidence that such police state (an old term “police state”, as F.A. Hayek was fond of pointing out, goes back centuries in German thought and was always linked to the concept of the “welfare state”) tactics does reduce real crimes.
If one wanted to reduce crime, how about the following:
Get rid of the statutes banning both the ownership and carrying of firearms by honest folk. Presently only the servants of the state, and criminals (who ignore the statutes) can normally own or carry firearms – and their is plenty of evidence that (for example) allowing “concealed carry” reduces violent attack (attackers do not want to run the risk of attacking armed people).
But, of course, these “gun control” statutes are not going to be repealed in Britain. Because the powers-that-be (and many ordinary people) are not really interested in reducing crime – they are interested in making the population feel part of the state. Joined in fraternity against antisocial elements.
We live in a sort of global “Big Brother”, everyone can know everything about us and we’re for sure recorded in a lot of CCTV…but that’s the price for a better security in such a huge and sometimes dangerous city like London.
locksmith sw6