Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote an article for CNN entitled “Spy cameras won’t make us safer” that’s worth reading.

His basic premise is:

Pervasive security cameras don’t substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.

Yesterday I wrote about privacy consultations regarding the online tracking of consumers.  Privacy advocates want to ensure that consumer choice and privacy are respected.   Similarly, pressure is put on ISP’s and search engines to limit the amount of information they retain about their customers, and the length of time they retain it.  All laudable objectives.

On the other hand, law enforcement wants to require ISP’s to retain certain information about sites their customers visit for long periods of time to facilitate criminal investigations. See this CNet article for example.

Seems inconsistent to me.

England has turned into one of the least privacy friendly governments.   It is a poster child for being overly invasive – with the usual unsupported claims that is is necessary to fight crime – and the position that governments and police forces can be trusted to be discrete and do the right thing.  But of course, when the official culture is one of invasiveness – the ‘right thing’ is a moving target.

Case in point: Boing Boing reports that a UK inquiry claims the police routinely arrest people they haveo intent of charging solely to get their DNA into their database.

Boing Boing posted a remix challenge to mock the new anti-terror posters I mentioned a few days ago.

Some of them are quite good – definitely worth a look.

Thats the title of my Slaw post for today.   It reads:

Cory Doctorow writes on Boing Boing about the latest anti-terrorist campaign in England.

His entire post is a worthwhile read – but to get a flavour of it:

The London police have bested their own impressive record for insane and stupid anti-terrorism posters with a new range of signs advising Londoners to go through each others’ trash-bins looking for “suspicious” chemical bottles, and to report on one another for “studying CCTV cameras.”

Essentially, this redefines “suspicious” as anything outside of the direct experience of the most frightened, ignorant and foolish people in any neighborhood.

So in addition to being suspected of being a terrorist if you take a photograph of a police officer, or of a public facility, or of a surveillance camera, you are a suspect if you even look at a surveillance camera!

For the London Free Press – March 9, 2009

Read this on Canoe

George Orwell’s depiction of state surveillance in 1984 is beginning to look less like science fiction and more like reality in the United Kingdom, where successive governments have created one of the most extensive and advanced surveillance systems in the world.

The British House of Lords just released a report that expresses concern over the U.K.’s extensive closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance network and its growing national DNA database, which contains information even about innocent people.

Its estimated that the U.K. has about 4 million public CCTV cameras. And Britain’s national DNA database contains information on 7% of the population, compared to only 0.5% in the United States.

Many government organizations claim the widespread surveillance and data collection enjoys public support by providing a greater sense of security.

But many others share a concern expressed by John Burrow, former chief constable of Essex, who believes that when the public fully recognizes the capabilities and intrusions of CCTV, it “may well be that there will be a falling off of public confidence in the authorities having control of such system.”

The eye-opening House of Lords report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, questions the effectiveness of the surveillance and data gathering and stresses the importance of individual privacy.

It examines how surveillance and the collection of personal data are altering the relationship between people and the state and between individuals. It further canvasses whether the right to privacy is too easily overridden by the government’s assertion that these anti-crime measures are necessary.

This is similar to the statement contained in the 2007-08 Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s annual report on the Privacy Act: “The Orwellian dystopia was predicated on a totalitarian society. In our democracy, benevolent intentions appear to be pushing us toward a surveillance society.”

While the report does not go so far as to say that the U.K. has become an Orwellian state, it does say that “the expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War.”

The House of the Lords covers the claimed advantages of having this information, including the deterrence of crime, assistance to law enforcement, increased public safety, and the efficient provision of public services. Many, however, question how effective surveillance actually is in achieving those goals.

But the report also says that many of Britain’s “surveillance practices are unknown to most people and their potential consequences are not fully appreciated.”

Disadvantages, some of which are more difficult to quantify than the advantages, include the threat to privacy and social relationships, increased mistrust of the State, the risk to personal security and of identity fraud, as well as the selective way in which the technologies might be used to discriminate against certain categories of individuals. It isn’t always about what people are trying to hide, but rather what they are trying to protect.

To safeguard individual privacy from misuse of CCTV surveillance and the National DNA database, the report urges transparency and control over how and by whom the technologies are used.

The debate between state supervision and personal privacy rights will continue.

While it does, be careful — Big Brother just might be watching you, especially if you’re in the U.K.

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.

Slashdot points to a Times article saying that “The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. ”

This of course doesn’t sit well with privacy advocates.  It reminds me of the statement in the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s annual report on the Privacy Act that:  “The Orwellian dystopia was predicated on a totalitarian society. In our democracy, benevolent intentions appear to be pushing us toward a surveillance society.”

Techdirt and Slashdot comment that some people have placed images of license plates belonging to people they are not fond of on their own cars, then speeding by photo radar, resulting in the other person getting a ticket. 

Techdirt’s spin on this:

In general, we have trouble with things like speed cameras and red light cameras — both of which don’t tend to do much of anything to make the roads safer (rather, there’s evidence that they lead to more accidents). The reality is that they are really about boosting revenue for local governments, not about safety — which explains why plenty of places have been found illegally changing parameters to make them bring in more revenue.

A reminder of my recent post on Slaw and here that tomorrow is being promoted in Europe as a day of protest against surveillance.

Its no wonder that this is happening, especially in light of things like David Fraser posts about today, where cameras are being used in UK parks to catch litterers and pooper scooper violators.

I’ve commented before that this type of surveillance is mere security theatre, doesn’t really accomplish anything, and is offensive to the concepts of privacy and a free society.  Just take a look at this, or read the various posts under the privacy tag on my blog if you are in doubt.