In the “you’ve got to be kidding” category is a post on Wired Gadget Lab that refers to an article in the Daily Express that says the UK government is going to put 20,000 UK “problem families” under 24 hour CCTV supervision in their own homes.

And if you subscribe to the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, there’s nothing to worry about” line that we hear all too often, take a look at arguments against that in these articles by Bruce Schneier and Prof Daniel Solove and from the Washington Post.

Add this to inconsistencies I don’t understand.  Google street view often gets lambasted for privacy issues.  That happens when an individual or a car license plate is visible.  Since these street views are one time images – one only gets captured if one happens to be in view of the camera at the specific time and place it happens to be.   Privacy commissioners, including in the UK, generally want faces and license plates to be blurred. 

But the UK police get away with implementing a system where cameras log all car travel and keep records of where all cars are when they pass by each of the huge network of cameras for 2 years.  As Wired Gadget lab puts it:

UK police are on the verge of a a huge surveillance coup which will make 1984’s telescreens look as dumb and benevolent as a corner-store CCTV rig. Britain’s network of spy-cameras includes a fleet of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cams which read around 10 million license plates a day. These will soon be piped into one central computer which will compile and share this intelligence across the nation.

Remember: This isn’t being used to scan and log already suspect automobiles. It is recording the movements of every road user, whether a suspect, a criminal or an innocent traveller.

Perhaps I can understand a system that looks for license plates that the police are looking for, records that and alerts officers – but recording that info on every vehicle that passes by, and keeping it for 2 years is just wrong.  

Two basic privacy principles are that no one should collect more personal info than is necessary to do what needs to be done – and  any personal information one does have  should be kept no longer than it is needed.   I just don’t get why these principles are not applied more heavily to government collection of information.

The British House of Lords just released a report that expressed concern over the UK’s extensive CCTV surveillance network (4 million cameras) and its growing DNA database containing information even on innocent people.

Read a Guardian article about the report.

Boing Boing has a post about a protest in Seattle tomorrow.  People upset at the growing number of CCTV cameras will walk around with huge CCTV cameras on their heads to bring atention to it.   The organizer is quoted as saying:  “The project not only raises the questions of who is watching who and who is watching the watchers, but also … why we are being watched at all”

I guess you could call this security theatre about security theatre.

Read the Boing Boing post

The Federal Privacy Commissioner has initiated some research into public surveillance.   From the Privacy commissioner’s blog:

We’ve decided to commission research into how developments in public surveillance techniques and technology are affecting Canadians, individually and as a society. First off, Queen’s University will be examining the proliferation of surveillance cameras across the country, and report on the trends in the use of public surveillance – although it seems as if we are seeing more and more attempts to expand surveillance networks. As well, the University of Alberta will be taking a detailed look at whether privacy issues are being properly considered in the run-up to the 2010 Olympics.

I look forward to the results of that research.  I subscribe to the view that for the most part public CCTV is security theatre that does not have any significant effect on actual security.

Read the Comissioner’s post for more detail and insight into the issue.