Dispatches-Are We Walking Into A Police State?
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain. Britain, already the world's leader in video surveillance of its people, will soon be able to automatically track the movements of millions of cars on most of its major roads. Does this not seem outrageous. A recent television programme, dispatches on channel 4 delved deep into the world of the growing paranoia of the government and the installation of thousands of CCTV cameras across Britain. Whatever your feelings about privacy, no one cannot afford to be camera shy in modern-day Britain. Per capital there are more surveillance cameras in the UK than any other country in the world - more than a million according to one recent estimate. The average city dweller can expect to be captured on film every five minutes. Almost 500,000 low budget CCTV kits have been bought in the last three years. At this rate, by 2015 there will be no such thing as a secret place in our city centres, according to Simon Davies, of the pressure group Privacy International. Yet opposition of this type seems to have been increasingly pushed to the margins. When CCTV began to gather pace at the beginning of the 1990s, hostility was common place. The principle objection was that it would ceaselessly erode civil liberties and after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 the number of cameras across the U.K. as double and even tripled in some areas of London
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain. Britain, already the world's leader in video surveillance of its people, will soon be able to automatically track the movements of millions of cars on most of its major roads. Does this not seem outrageous. A recent television programme, dispatches on channel 4 delved deep into the world of the growing paranoia of the government and the installation of thousands of CCTV cameras across Britain. Whatever your feelings about privacy, no one cannot afford to be camera shy in modern-day Britain. Per capital there are more surveillance cameras in the UK than any other country in the world - more than a million according to one recent estimate. The average city dweller can expect to be captured on film every five minutes. Almost 500,000 low budget CCTV kits have been bought in the last three years. At this rate, by 2015 there will be no such thing as a secret place in our city centres, according to Simon Davies, of the pressure group Privacy International. Yet opposition of this type seems to have been increasingly pushed to the margins. When CCTV began to gather pace at the beginning of the 1990s, hostility was common place. The principle objection was that it would ceaselessly erode civil liberties and after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 the number of cameras across the U.K. as double and even tripled in some areas of London
