Samizdata

From the Telegraph yesterday:

Closed-circuit television cameras are to be installed in every classroom at a school for the first time in Britain in a development that has raised alarm among parents and teachers.

CCTV will operate throughout the new school, King’s Academy in Middlesbrough, when it opens in September. The cameras are intended to make it easier to monitor and control bad behaviour by pupils.

The school says they will also watch over expensive computer equipment and will assist staff by providing evidence to clear teachers if they are falsely accused of abuse or assault.

This last is to counter the fear among the teachers that the cameras will also be used to spy on them.

King’s is the latest of the Government’s trumpeted city academies, funded jointly by state and private money. It will specialise in business and enterprise. Although CCTV is used for security reasons around many schools, King’s is the first to use it throughout classrooms.

Manchester city council is now seeking funds to install cameras in five schools as part of a discipline crackdown. A CCTV network of 40 to 50 cameras, which would cover the average school, would cost about £16,000.

Not for the first time, my reaction to being told the cost of some surveillance kit is: that’s cheap. Soon, if they want it to be everywhere, and they do, it will be.

Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to White Rose, Samizdata.net and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling.

Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly…

…and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand…

But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate…

…rounder, blending in with the background…

…looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye.

The second age of security cameras is at hand…still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.

This from the BBC:

Eavesdroppers, including stalkers and jealous spouses, are listening in on hundreds of thousands of private conversations in Britain every week because of a legal loophole, BBC News Online has discovered.

Telephone tapping without a valid warrant is illegal under both the 1998 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

The law relating to intrusive surveillance devices – bugs – is less clear.

But it is legal to trade in taps, bugs and covert cameras, which explains the myriad websites, mail order businesses and spy shops.

And so on.

I’m a libertarian and I don’t quite know what I think about all that. I mean, I’m in favour of trades of all kinds, including lots of trades that other people aren’t in favour of. I think, for example, that it ought to be legal to buy a small and sneaky camera, if you want to buy one and if someone wants to sell you one. It’s a bit like guns. It’s what you do, and in this particular case it’s also where you do it, that matters, not the mere owning or buying of the thing itself.

But my attitude to posting on White Rose is: if it’s of interest and relevance, stick it up. I’m trying to give the customers here, that is to say the people the editors here want to be the customers here, what they want. No doubt they’ll straighten me out if I’m doing it wrong.

Often, we expect curbs on civil liberties to be the desired goal of our own left-wing authoritarians or the unfortunate consequence of some EU directive. It is rare that the demands of the United States may result in one more step towards the “surveillance state”.

EU passports will soon have to incorporate a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip, including biometric data, that would be machine-readable for entering the US. This is a consequence of the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002 that demands all visa-free entrants incorporate biometric information on their passports from October 2004. (Hint: you may want to change your passport if you wish to visit the United States after this date).

In the tension between liberty and security, the demands of this Act appear a prudent measure to curb the use of false passports for perpetrating acts of terrorism. However, the biometric identifiers used will be standardised according to workgroups meeting for the International Civil Aviation Organisation and International Organization for Standardisation.

Their work will be co-opted by the European Union. A European biometric identification strategy was announced in June at the summit in Greece. The European Biometric Forum was established, with major players and strong links to their counterparts in the United States, to ensure that there would a single standard for applications of this technology, pursued by all member states of the EU.

The EBF will be launched on the 21st July in Dublin and the technology is being promoted as an additional protection for the privacy of individuals, although the growth is driven by state institutions and telecom/security companies.

When you type “Surveillance” into google, some of the more interesting stuff is the adverts on the right. The top one in the list today was this. The one with the creepiest name was this.

A commenter (“Grace”) on a previous surveillance related post of mine here said that governments will always be more powerful users of this stuff than the general run of surveillance-inclined people:

We’re deluding ourselves if we think there’s ever going to be any degree of equality in information collection between the government and the (no-longer) private citizen. 1) The government has the money, the power, the inclination and – increasingly – the ability to carpet the nation with surveillance. 2) Forms of counter-surveillance proving to be effective will be declared illegal – in the interest of public security, of course – and forced underground. (That’ll be interesting.)

We’re fighting a rear-guard action.

And then she recommends a book.

But she’s missing my point. I’m not saying that all these regular punters are going to try to spy only on the government and thereby to hold it at bay, although no doubt that will be part of the story, in the form of spying on lesser government officials and the like. My point is that people concerned about surveillance don’t just have the government to worry about. They’ll also have the amateurs spying and spooking all over them. These amateurs may not have mainframe computers and super-intelligent software, but they are awfully numerous, compared to the government.

And the kit that the amateurs need is now getting very cheap, and very easy to use, and to hide. As these adverts prove.