Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator’s Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are “over-hyped”. Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its “nosey parkers” – as we Brits used to say – and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways.
In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified.
But I think Clive’s sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does.
As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later.
I read somewhere that a shopping trip into central Manchester will have you clocked 500 times.
Would Brown have the balls to deploy the CCA though. Would the army wear it. They are seriously pissed with NeuArbeit. And their oath is to the Queen, not Mr Brown.
He’s finished anyhow. God he looked knackered next to Obama. Think they might dump him but for who?
“it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time”
I worry about AI. Sooner or later it’s going to get really good. And then CCTV, databases containing all the URLs you visited… It will be trivial to extract information on anyone.
Might as well assume there are unlimited resources for trawling all this data because sooner or later it will be true.
I guess maybe Rob but given the Gov’s track record on IT schemes there will be cock-ups aplenty.
Civil liberties transgressions notwithstanding, they’ve turned our country into a bloody ugly place.
David Aronovitch had a quibble over at the Times yesterday, as to the accuracy of such figures as 300 or 500 captures a day.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5834725.ece
But this rather misses the point doesn’t it?
There are thousands upon thousands of CCTV cameras and they are growing in number every day.
What bugs me is they are not preventive but retrospective, and what worries me most is who, and of what calibre, are the people who monitor the cameras?
One bunch I heard of recently were fired for altering the angle of a camera so they could peeping tom in through a woman’s bedroom window as she was getting dressed.
What really burns me up though, is that they keep repeating the mantra
“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”
So why is the bunch of fascists passing a law to make it illegal to take a photo of a police officer?
Have they something to hide, I wonder?
“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”
In 1933, in response to the decree that all Jews would be required by law to stitch yellow ‘J’s into their clothes, the Jewish Council of Germany issued a statement saying “we’ve done nothing wrong, what could we possibly have to fear?”
Apologies to the ubiquitous Mr Godwin, but it couldn’t be more appropriate.
As I’ve said before, Brits are subjects, not citizens. If you want to be citizens, with rights instead of permissions, you’re going to have to do something fairly drastic about your form of government. I don’t think you will.
PersonFromPorlock, while this point may once have been quite relevant, I don’t think it really matters any more. Whether I am a subject or citizen, frankly makes zero difference to how I get treated by the state.
The French have been citoyens since 1789, and that did not help much in some of the drastic extensions of state power that occurred under Bonaparte and since; the US have citizens, not subjects, and yet that has not prevented the erosion of some of the Constitutional provisions in recent decades.
Citizen may have a rhetorical power, but without the necessary deep and broad support of liberty, and hostility to state power, the terminology means tiddley-squat.
Johanthan Pearce wrote“PersonFromPorlock, while this point may once have been quite relevant, I don’t think it really matters any more. Whether I am a subject or citizen, frankly makes zero difference to how I get treated by the state.”
I disagree. Making the distinction can help people realize that there IS a distinction, and then perhaps they will start thinking about what that distinction means, and whether they are happy about being subjects rather than citizens.
In the last Jason Bourne movie, shot in London, director Paul Greengrass, in the “director’s comments” said about the scene where the “bad guys” in Virginia could actually tap into the cctv system of the London train station (forget which one it is, sorry) that they thought it was pure fiction but when they got there and started talking to the security people, they discovered it was not so far-fetched.
I would assume anything in the movies is about 5 years behind the kind of technology actually available to our lords and masters.
Yes, with so many cameras, there will be information overload. Phew! Safe after all. I mean, no-one could create software programs that can automatically search images for specific faces at high speed across multiple databases. That’s just impossible.
But it makes a great difference in how the state gets treated by you. Don’t you see how passive your view of the state is?
I agree with Johnathan.
We are playing with words.
The outcome is the same, either way.
Except that Her Mag really doesn’t get a say.
How do I get “active” with the “State” without getting arrested PDQ ?
It may in fact be “playing with words”, but words have consequences. Whether you call yourself a “subject” or a “citizen” makes a significant difference in how you view yourself, even if it makes none at all in how the state treats you. If we could convince more people to view themselves as free, proud citizens, rather than servile, bovine subjects, it would go a long way toward restoring the state to its rightful role in society. So to me the distinction is important, and I appreciate PersonFromPorlock focusing my attention on it.
No I don’t, and I don’t think that Britons are “subjects” in terms of some historical relationship to the monarchy has anything to do with that passiveness. You must surely have followed enough media stories to realise that British people do not think of themselves as subservient to the Royals any more, although I suppose there are pockets of deference. But that has nothing to do with the spirit of liberty that has been lost.
The instinctive hatred for things such as ID cards, the strong state, high taxes, etc, existed at a time when Britain’s class system, for example, was far more onerous than it is now. There is absolutely no clear correlation between these two things.
If I really believed that changing my status in this sense would bring Britain back to being a freer country, I’d give the idea serious thought. But as I said in my citing of the examples of post-revolutionary France and the US in recent decades, calling oneself a “citizen” rather than a “subject” means little.
You guys needn’t worry that I have gone all soft and reactionary in the head as a result of having to rebut the conservative irrationalism of Gabriel.
The ‘nothing to hide’ people who support CCTV would presumably not mind government cameras in their homes to make sure they are not abusing their children or partners. With cheap technology such as webcams etc this could become a feasible.
People with nothing to hide should volunteer for such treatment to show us just how benign the government really is with its vast expansion of snooping powers. If they lead by example the rest of us will surely see the benefits.
We must only hope that the AIs have more good sense and judgement than our politicians….
As to abuse of CCTV, it isn’t all state or corporate sponsored.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lincolnshire/7923718.stm(Link)
When MPs and Congressweasels agree to have these CCTVs in EVERY room in their respective Parliament-/Congress buildings, with citizen access to all of them, THEN I’ll think that CCTVs are a good thing.
Until then, they’re pernicious.
Johnathan,
I put a question mark in the headline of the post because I thought it was a subject worth pondering. I often do that. Unfortunately, nuance doesn’t work on blogs, so maybe I should start using exclamation marks in future! Your beef is really with Charlie Beckett, whose blog I also linked to.
All the best,
Clive
Spam deleted.
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If I really believed that changing my status in this sense would bring Britain back to being a freer country, I’d give the idea serious thought. Lida (Link)But as I said in my citing of the examples of post-revolutionary France and the US in recent decades, calling oneself a “citizen” rather than a “subject” means little.
thank youyu..
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