UK - we're number one in citizen surveillance.

With the recent announcement of ANPR + average speed cameras, we'll continue to be number one.

That picture is awesome. I wish I could say the same for the event I attended in Helsinki. I got the feeling that the organizers kind of missed the point. It was basically an information session about surveillance, privacy, and pervasive technology presented by the Finnish EFF in a little basement conference room. It was anything but attention-getting and visible to the public. It pretty much felt like preaching to the choir to me. The way I see it, the point of Freedom Not Fear was to bring this to the attention of people in the general public who may not even be aware that they should be concerned about their privacy.

It would have been more pointed if it were a picture of Jacqui Smith.

Wake up, Britain!

The time to fight back against this culture of fear and invasion of privacy is now. Very soon it will be too late to overcome Brown's "Ministry of Truth".

I believe that the only logical response to this opressive regime is direct action and violent protest, as anyone who has read Cory's wonderful YA book, 'Little Brother' will know.

Peaceful demonstration and intellectual debate can only achieve so much. This is a call to arms to all bloggers, vloggers, Second-Lifers and netizens. Put down your keyboard and pick up a halfbrick.

Techno-guerilla "M1k3y" should be an inspiration to us all, especially in the way he uses technology to fight back against his oppressors. Here are some real-world ideas in the same vein as those presented in the book:

* Screenprint hundreds of t-shirts with Osama Bin Laden's face on the front and distribute them at an airport.

* Throw a plastic bag full of nuts and bolts through Ed Balls' window at 3AM.

* Oyster cards are used to covertly track people's movements around the capital. Why not build devices that indiscriminately wipe data from these cards and install them at turnstiles.

* Hack into London Zoo's computer system and release the tigers. Maybe one will go to Harriet Harman's office ... and bite her ... oops?!?!!!?

I once believed in revolution, now I understand the best course is to do nothing, absolutely nothing, until it is time to vote. Educate yourself and communicate with others, but if you don't like cameras, don't work at the camera factory.

It is far easier to not make something than control its use after the fact. We build, install, and service the tools of our enslavement.

I'm sure most cctv equipment is made in China.

"He that can have patience can have what he will."

Of Rome, we are all that remains.

Great picture! Very cool thing you can do with few people.
Here in Berlin we had a huge demonstration with about 50,000 (!) participants. It is in the evening news and the big newspapers. Three years ago 200 people demonstrated against data retention now 50,000 march for "Freedom not Fear - Stop the surveillance mania!".
Best part: Due to the fact that the demonstration passed main tourist spots we had lots of people asking what this was all about.

Curious, do these cameras survey all public areas or just areas with high crime rates?

I wouldn't like to be constantly monitored in areas that a crime is unlikely to happen - say, at a park or areas meant for entertainment or a mall - places with lots of people. I wouldn't mind surveillance of parking lots and streets or other public areas that are mostly vacant after dark. Constant surveillance in all public areas would feel pretty oppressive.

If cameras are going to prevent crime, and there is no evidence they do, there must be a camera in every place, public and private.

FoetusNail, that's pretty extreme. Surveillance in high crime areas should prevent crime and if it doesn't, as you say - it should at least make identifying and finding taped criminals easier. Thus, getting them off the street for a while. Still, they should only be used in the situations I described above.

"* Throw a plastic bag full of nuts and bolts through Ed Balls' window at 3AM."

Hey! WTF does the main man behind the glorious The Times, Television Personalities, Teenage whatever, et al. have to do with this?

Having had someone toss a brick through my bedroom window while I was asleep convinces me this is a bad idea. Civil disobedience will serve you much better.

Sorry Tom, but the cameras don't work. There were some surveys done in San Francisco and London which both concluded the cameras were all but useless. Search Boingboing, they were both posted here in the last year or so (at right around the same time, might have been the same post, even).

Anyway, one of the conclusions is that CCTV is usually of too low a quality of video to make any identifications possible. All those times you see it work on CSI and in the movies? Pure Hollywood bullshit of the finest grade.

So, no. They don't work. Not even in high crime areas.

Here in the centre of Cheltenham, a moderate-sized town located midway between Bristol and Birmingham, there are around eight or nine cameras the length of the High Street (say, about a mile) with a few more along the Promenade (a high-class shopping area). There's one outside a nightclub off the High Street, but that club's been closed for a while, so I don't know if that camera's even active any more.

That's official cameras, mounted on lamp-post-like structures, presumably linked to the local cop-shop. There are numerous private cameras actually in various shops, and a few overlooking car-parks. These aren't linked to any network, except in the case of the larger shops, perhaps, but just stream to local video-tape or hard-disk. Away from the shops and car-parks there tends to be no CCTV coverage at all. (Except for GCHQ, which is doubtless bristling with the things.)

Personally, I don't feel particularly surveilled. No more so than if those cameras were replaced with beat cops and store detectives. Particularly as I know someone who was beaten up one afternoon in sight of two of the high street cameras, and the police said that they couldn't make any firm identification of the culprits. If they couldn't spot and identify a bunch of chavs beating up a muslim 50 yards from his mosque, I don't feel particularly threatened by the CCTV coverage myself.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/7656870.stm

an illiterate chimp goes away for seven months max... not a good argument for everyone losing their privacy.

I absolutely agree - I would never argue for ~more~ surveillance here! (the UK I mean, not boingboing). I was/am too insomnia-addled to string a coherent point together... (can you string a point?)

so...

there are more surveillance cameras around than you can actually ~see~...

all sorts of public bodies have been authorised to surveille us now... http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jun/23/localgovernment.localgovernment

and they're to be given more access
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/13/privacy.civilliberties

and perhaps it's better ~not~ to get your name and d.o.b. tattooed on your neck...

I could do with some of these fine gmail goggles, http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/07/gmail-goggles-stops.html , I reckon they'd work just fine for sleep-deprivation-induced temporary dementia.

Look at Wal-Mart to find out how well surveillance works. Wal-Marts are one of the most camera laden places one will ever go, yet they still have a shrinkage rate just under 1%, which represents an approx. loss of $3 billion. This estimate is for US stores only. The national average is around 1.75%.

A few years ago, Wal-Mart changed their policy on prosecuting shoplifters, they no longer prosecute on less than $25. According to Wal-Mart, their shrinkage rate is rising. How much of the difference between the industry average and Wal-Mart's 1% can be attributed to surveillance is anyone's guess. How many more cameras or supervisors would they need to add to cut their losses by just 10%? They are probably already up against The Law of Diminishing Returns.

Nationally almost half of the shrinkage reported by retailers is due to employee theft, about a third is shoplifting customers. Wal-Mart's employees and customers are under continuous surveillance and are still making off with the goods. This tells me, we would need cameras every 10 to 20 feet if we wanted to see reductions in the types of crimes CCTV's document, along with a huge increase in foot patrols. However, most crimes happen away from cameras.

Every home would need cameras front back and side. Every place a car could be parked would need coverage. We should probably put a camera in every room of every home to prevent domestic violence, every room and hallway in every school, store, hotel, hospital and nursing home, and every street and alley way.

I wonder why Cory didn't say anything about the
50 000 people yesterday in berlin asking for less surveillance and more privacy/freedom. I was there and it was very inspiring, and actually (unfortunately) peacefull. The media does a pretty good job in minimizing and ignoring this great demonstration. I have pictures and video footage, though there are some on german sites like: gulli.com

'm Ynk lvng n th K..... sy sll th CCTV cmrs nd s th mny t nstll shck cllrs n th yths hr - thn gv rmts t ll th dlts. Ths cntry s z f frl chldrn.

#13, most public cameras don't work, but that's partly because they're expected to cover such huge areas. At my Uni, there are two cameras in the library of the normal style (go back to VCR and have a 4 in 1 monitor), but they're pointed at useless places (they weren't moved during a layout change) and the quality isn't that high. The more recent installs in the computer labs however, are of a Very high quality, full motion colour video, high resolution. They're only designed to cover a 20m x 20m computer lab though, not a busy street full of people.

Even then, they can't prove your identity if you keep your face away from them. So you really need cameras pointing on both directions, you need expensive ones and you need someone to see whatever you need better data on and be able to pan/zoom to best cover the action. Considering how much public space you'd need to cover, and how many people you'd need to actually control those cameras instead of leave them static or pan automatically, I have to agree that for most public spaces, the cost of CCTV is prohibitive.

If you've got a computer lab full of large things (PCs, monitors, etc) cameras can help you, but if you're looking for which person slipped a knife into someone else on a crowded street, you'd better cross your fingers.

A bit of false logic and some counter-arguments:

1) "I have nothing to hide":
Please google "Don't talk to the police" WITH the quotes. The first
two links you'll get are Google Video files. (Um, unless you're in China, I suppose)
Watch 'em in order. I'll wait. . . . . . . . . .

OK? Next:

2)"If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide".
Well, fer starters, see above. Fer seconders, read John Dean's take on that line of
reasoning: (Yeah, THAT John Dean.)
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20071019.html
Memorize this line: "If I've done nothing wrong, then you have no need to see anything."

3) It's critically important to keep some part of your life private.:
Daniel Solove's paper on this topic, mentioned by John Dean, is excellent:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
(If you can't d/l it, let me know, I've got a copy of the PDF here,
somewhere - I could always 'fair use' some parts of it here.)
As well, google "Privacy as contextual Integrity" by Helen Nussenbaum. Read it once or twice.

Here, I'll save you the effort:
http://crypto.stanford.edu/portia/papers/RevnissenbaumDTP31.pdf

Am I the only one that feels sorry for the cameras?

This is the curse of the engineering background. There is a moral dimension here - how much observation and record is necessary - but for me the much more interesting question is why the cameras don't work. I heard the story of some woman from the US who had her handbag taken from her backback somewhere along Oxford Street, which is just around the corner from where I work. There is no lack of cameras in this part of the country, and yet it was not possible of cost-effective to follow her from one camera to the other, though the crime was probably on camera. You could imagine some version of Google Earth that would allow you to view London in space and time, and follow this woman and find the purse-snatcher. The efforts in tracking the 07-07-05 bombers shows that this can be done where there is enough will. It is frustrating knowing you could fix something like this - dammit, we can fix this! It must be really frustrating being a policeman...

The current policy in the UK seems to be to go for more data gathering and more huge databases, and not on the intelligence to search the data, and to wipe what is not needed. I would not mind being recorded by hundreds of cameras if they were guided by computers. If something happened to me, I might even want records of my mobile phone signals to say where I was. I don't share #23's belief that we only have something to fear if we have done something wrong - I am just saying that it can be useful.

Anyway, face to face, none of us is anonymous. Anonymity comes when we are in a crowd. More cameras and more data ought to mean more anonymity. We should fear the single camera driven driven by a bored or malicious human being, and not a host of automatic cameras.

As I read this, I see on the side of my BoingBoing page an advert...

Find Sex Offenders Free
Locate Sex Offenders in Your Area. Updated & Free Info

See? We can fix the machines, sure, but we need to fix this sort of thing first.

What the UK really need is a political party or broad political movement that takes civil liberties seriously.

Why don't people run for councils with slogans as "take down the CCTV cameras"? And it's not just ID cards and CCTV cameras, it's a wholesale slide into the police state.

CCTV cameras everywhere, surveillance of all car journeys with roadside cameras, 42 days of detention without trial, ID cards which will also introduce a central registration of where you live and everywhere you ever lived in the past, surveillance of everything you do on the Internet.

People are being stopped and searched on the Tube without suspicion of anything, and ordinary people are harassed for taking photographs in the cities.

It all adds up to something very nasty, and it will be abused. The UK is sleepwalking right into the police state and people need to start protesting right now. I'm glad to see Open Rights Group do something, but more is needed.

Respect, where are you? Lib Dems? Like I said, slogans could be

* Take down the CCTV cameras
* NO Internet surveillance
* NO to 42 days of detention
* NO ID cards
* Freedom not fear

Turning society into a police state isn't fighting terrorists, it's letting the terrorists win. England will never be free before the CCTV cameras are broken and down.

I keep forgetting to add:

Prime minister != leader.

There. Another one off my todo list.

who are the Britons today? What are their beliefs? What languages do they use? Hopes, fears? What do they imagine for the future? Who holds the power? Who is the underclass? I suspect most are running on vastly outdated models based on generation old answers to these questions. If a demagogue with talent emerges who figures these out before people of moderation - you're in the shite, boys.

Maybe the British are actually just voyeurs. If they're afraid of surveillance, why don't they just make the things they're afraid of others seeing them doing legal?

Purly, #29:

We could start by putting up a CCTV in your bedroom to tape the legal things yo do with your wife? No need to worry, it's legal after all and people assume you do it anyway, so you couldn't possibly mind. Or could you?

Well, maybe the Brits could too, then :-)

No wonder why they don't have any privacy in the uk, they don't really seem to care too much... wait until it turns against you (if it hasn't already), you will see our concern for our privacy (hence democracy) has nothing to do with being paranoid.

@23, Lindsay,

You may be self-confident now, because the things that you are doing now are not of concern to the authorities. In the future, a Tory government might decide to look more closely into the activities of those who have supported Labor candidates (or vice versa). If you wore a button, affixed a bumper strip to your car, or put a sign in your window, that would be visible from the ubiquitous cameras and you could become a "person of interest". What makes you think that you would be treated fairly by the authorities in such a situation? How much would it cost you to defend yourself?

If you don't stand up for your rights, you can never tell when someone will take them away, as the Germans learned in the 1930's. You can't sit idly by when the authorities use surveillance to arrest your neighbor. The next time, they might come for you.

Here in the US, the police are also creating a surveillance society, following the lead of the UK, but more heavily based on data mining. Wiretapping is permissible with only limited control. Companies like ChoicePoint have collected data on almost everyone in the country and make many millions of dollars selling that information to governments and corporations. Of course, we give up vast amounts of information willingly when we use mobile phones and other positioning devices, credit cards for all of our purchases, "shopper" cards for discounts, and more.

They know who we are, what we are doing, and where we are. If Cheney or Giuliani had become President, we would have seen them move to consolidate the information gathered by Homeland Security, the FBI, and other "watchers". In such a society, no one is safe.

Failix @31: You're not paying attention. This is not yet the Britain of Orwell's 1984. There is plenty of privacy in the UK. There are no cameras pointing into my flat, and if I wanted to traverse Cheltenham without being surveiled, I could do it by avoiding the High Street and the Prom, and a few car-parks.

What there is is a huge potential for loss of freedom. Whatever action is to be taken to reduce that potential, it isn't helped by exagerating the true state of things. We're not lost yet.

Perhaps another story we should watch out for is Asimov's "The Evitable Conflict".

A highly computerised government (which thinks it's the best possible thing for humanity) uses advanced data mining to detect firebrands before they become active and subtly deflects them into lives where they will not be a problem.

Of course, if you're going to use data mining, you don't need the cameras either. Except maybe as misdirection.

I have a question for anyone who cares to answer: how do you explain privacy and why it's important to a 5-year-old?

I took my daughter with me to Freedom Not Fear, but found myself at a loss to explain privacy in a way that she could understand. I would welcome any tips about talking to your kids about privacy.

#35:

Cory has several times used an example which is very easy to understand for everyone, children as well as adults.

First, the more child-oriented part:

It's not a secret that all of us have genitals, willies and bums and female genitalia.

It's also not a secret what we use them for, like when we go to the toilet.

However, we don't like other people to see these parts of ourselves - these are private parts. People have no right to get to see these parts without our permission, by lurking in the girls' gym at school or similar antics.

Also, it's not a secret that people have friends, and friends say things to each other. However, the fact that this is not a secret does not mean we like other people to heart what we say to our friends. The things we say to our friends are *our* things, our private life. The government has no right to get to know what we tell our friends, e.g. by tapping our phone.

And this is the end of the "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide" argument. It's not that there's anything wrong with our private parts, but we *still* don't want to walk around on the street with no clothes.

It's also not that there's anything wrong with the things we say to our friends, but these are *our* things.

Maybe bad people say bad things to each other on the phone and plan to do bad things to good people, and if the police have a good reason to believe that then yes, in that case a judge may give them a warrant to listen in on these suspected bad people's conversations.

Bad people may even hide bad things like weapons along with their private parts, and in that case it would also be okay for police to ask to see their private parts - if they have a good reason to believe that, I mean.

They should *not* be allowed to do this without a reason (reasonable suspicion), because these are people's private parts - these are *my* private parts.

I think this would make good sense even for a five-year-old.

I'm rather concerned about those people advocating violent protest. This is just my opinion, of course, but I'd urge you to consider it:

Please, people, think for a minute. In the second-most-paranoid democracy in the world? The government and the media would be screaming "terrorist" before you could take two breaths.

If the government can use anti-terror legislation to try and solve the financial crisis (check it out) then what do they think they would use on you? And what would that do to the cause of privacy campaigning?

#37 Shadowfirebird, you're quite right.

Violent protest = bad idea.

Legal, peaceful political protest = good idea

Non-violent civil disobedience = even better idea

But violence will only scare off people whose support is needed and help legitimate even more horrors.

Sorry to go on about this, but it has just occurred to me that even *suggesting* violent protest may be illegal in the UK -- it's called "inciting violence" or somesuch.

I personally have no objection to the above comments as comments, but UK law might. We should all be aware of that.

(I guess those of you outside the UK are fine, though.)

I contributed my photo to the mix. The result is spectacular.

I forgot to say that I really loved the idea about giving away Saddam Hussein teeshirts.

Which is not worth a comment, except that I have a suggestion for a slogan to go on the shirt: "Is it illegal to wear this shirt?"

That way you might get people to actually wear them, which is surely the idea. Also works with pictures of bombs, guns, liquid bottles >100ml, transformers ...

All those flickr'd CCTV pics, think about adding them to this group

http://www.flickr.com/groups/632390@N24/

and mapping them :)

cheers,

mark.

I had thought - perhaps incorrectly - that the taking (making) of a photograph of a surveillance device was in fact a punishable offense.

If not it ought to be. All power to the state - and you little people GET BACK TO WORK!!!!

Jackie31337, excellent question, and Agger, excellent answer, which has been copy and pasted into a file for my sons, thanks.

ShadowFirebird, that's the point right there. Anyone that thinks violence, or an armed population, is going to end this attempt to control society, is foolish. The powers to be are ready and waiting for those foolish enough to believe peace will be won by violence. Peaceful protests are such a threat, the authorities plant violent operatives, and no doubt plant calls for violence in peaceful blogs.

Jackie's five year old x10^9 is the secret weapon. They've been teaching us for centuries, it's time we take responsibility for that as well. Teach your children to stop working for authoritarians, it will take a long time, but the result will endure. Take a lesson from religions and despots, or should I say, religious despots.

If I owned a blog, I would state on the homepage "a peaceful directory of wonderful things", and unpublish those comments as fast as they spring up. Too much of that crap and advertisers will walk.

Nothing is Easy

Agger @30 You completely failed to comprehend that I was joking.

Right now, I think the more cameras there are, the more diluted the ability of "organizations" to adequately monitor the images. No one give a fuck about the actual video - the cameras are symbols.

I have been assaulted in a train station, twice, directly under the gaze of the CCTV cameras, and when the police became involved and I asked if they could look through the tape to get pictures of the perpetrator - they couldn't be bothered.

Whether deliberately or not, the main effect of CCTV everywhere is to make everyone feel frightened, and in need of "protection". That suits everyone in authority from the prime minister down to the guy who runs security in your local shopping centre.

Also, CCTV cameras everywhere serve to soften us up for the next stage. Who knows what that will be? But I bet it involves ID cards, linked databases, GPS in your mobile, higher resolution images and smart systems with facial recognition.

THEN it gets scary. And we're letting it start now.

Agger @36: Thanks for sharing your ideas. I will definitely try to have this discussion with her again, hopefully with more success. It would be a lot easier if she had any sense of modesty (I am convinced I'm raising a future nudist). :)

The more I think about this the more I see "The War on Terror" as a 'Reichstag fire.'