Smile, You're On CCTV

One Nation Under CCTV - Banksy
Originally uploaded by unusualimage

You know that feeling you get when you're being watched? Well, I get it a lot here. But that probably has to do with the fact that, in England, you're practically always on TV. And by TV I mean CCTV--closed circuit televisions.

It all started when the Bulger case, a story of the murder of a little boy by two 10-year-olds caught on CCTV. The footage helped lead to a quick arrest After that, the British Home Office made grants available to any local council that wanted to install cameras. Four years later, the numbers have swelled and London is the biggest customer. After the IRA detonated a bomb that killed one person and did an estimated £1 billion worth of damage, after which the police put a "ring of steel" around Bishopsgate to prevent any more attacks, including hundreds of CCTV cameras.

Now, years later, CCTV is everywhere. The numbers are actually staggering. One fifth of the world's CCTV cameras are in the British Isles, which represent less than one five hundredth of the world's habitable land mass. No one knows exactly how many there are, because so many different agencies, private and public, have installed them. Here's one estimation:

"Clive Norris, Professor of Sociology at Sheffield University, calculated four years ago that there were "at least" 4,285,000 – one for every 14 citizens. Norris claimed in his 1999 book that a person could be caught on CCTV cameras 300 times in a day. This figure is on the high side; Prof Norris has described it as "a piece of rhetoric" intended to "make a point" – but a few hours' spent travelling around central London could take you past 300 cameras."

You see them walking down the street or waiting for the bus. Near shopping areas, tube stations and even around school. And I'm not sure how much safer I feel or am. There's a lot of debate about that too. While they may may sound like a great idea, but at what cost? Just consider this.

"A website run by the charity Privacy International publishes a world map, updated annually, in which countries are colour coded according to the level of surveillance to which their citizens are subjected – white for the countries where there is the greatest respect for individual privacy, black for the countries such as Russia, China and various Middle Eastern states, where surveillance is "endemic". Most years, there is only one European country coloured black – the UK. This is because the UK could be almost be called the home of the CCTV camera." [Source]

And now comes another development. There's a rumour that the Met (London police) want to install CCTV in pubs around London. Just imagine what will happen then.