CCTV in the UK
In the New Statesman via Spy Blog:
A good article on the state of video surveillance in the UK. One of the nice parts of the article is about how camera operators work. Here are some snippets:
Brown and his team control 160 cameras, covering locations across the borough: the West End, Belgravia, the Golden Jubilee Bridges, Trafalgar Square, Knightsbridge and the full length of Oxford Street. The cameras are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – “Yep, even Christmas Day,” says Brown.
The control centre is, bizarrely, registered as a charitable trust, and is funded by Westminster City Council, the Metropolitan Police and private businesses. Since becoming operational in 2002, the control room has recorded 24,000 “incidents”, ranging from (in Brown’s categories) “low-level” graffiti, fly-tipping and public urinating to “high-level” robbery, drug dealing and prostitution. It has also had 5,000 visitors from more than 30 countries whose governments or police forces are looking to adopt similar systems. Britain used to export textiles, iron, steel and pop music; now it exports Orwellian methods for monitoring the masses.
. . .
“We look for signals, body language, anything out of the ordinary,” says Brown. He pulls out a vast file marked Internal Tasking System, a manual for camera operators. It contains five or six photographs of each of the streets monitored by the 160 cameras. In every photo, there is a square red box. These are “areas of suspicion”. So, in a snapshot of the entrance to the Chinawhite nightclub on Air Street (or “Air Street Camera Four”, as Brown refers to it), there is a red box to indicate where vagrants sometimes sleep and another showing where ticket touts operate. There are hundreds of these photos, all laminated and neatly filed in folders.
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