UK Wants Surveillance Cameras To Watch 20,000 Worst Families?

from the yikes dept

Slashdot points us to a story that sounds like it has to be a joke/satire, concerning a plan by the UK's Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, to spend £400 million to put 20,000 families (the worst families) under constant surveillance including 24-hour CCTV cameras in their homes, and private security guards checking on them from time to time. The cameras will supposedly be used to make sure kids go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Even in the UK, where surveillance cameras are even more popular than in the US, this seems quite extreme. Balls apparently explained:

"This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem. There should be Family Intervention Projects in every local authority area because every area has families that need support."

I'm hopeful that someone in the UK can let us know if this is somehow an exaggeration of what's going on or if this is accurate, because it honestly seems difficult to believe.

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British Cops Creating Nationwide License-Plate Surveillance System

from the orwellian dept

Britain is working hard to maintain its place as a leading surveillance society. Building on the massive "success" of its widespread use of CCTV cameras, police are now installing a system that will use the cameras to track and log car journeys. CCTV cameras across the UK are being added to the system, which automatically recognizes and stores license plate numbers, then adds them, and the location in which they were spotted, to a central database. Police, of course, say the system's great at reducing and solving crime, and one police bigwig says that arrests are up 40% in his area since cops started using the system. But just because arrests have increased, it doesn't necessarily mean crime has been reduced. He further defends the system by saying "innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it" -- which all too often is used as an attempt to justify pretty nasty governmental intrusions on privacy and liberty. This system sounds like another part of Britain's attempt to record the lives of its subjects in databases, alongside its database of info on every child in the country, and details of all the internet and phone traffic there. Will people there get up in arms over all this government surveillance, or are they saving their ire only for the likes of Google Street View?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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British Cops Try To Force CCTV On Pub Owner

from the surveillance-society dept

The use of CCTV continues to grow in the UK as police and intelligence agencies seek to cover ever-larger areas of the country with security cameras in an attempt to prevent and solve crime. In many cases, the cameras are covering public areas, but one pub owner in London says that police are trying to force him to install CCTV cameras in his business -- and turn footage over to them upon demand -- as a condition of his operating license. The man bought an existing pub, and the change of ownership required him to apply for a new license. He alleges local police said they wouldn't oppose the new license, as long as he installed a CCTV system that captured images of every person that came into his pub, and made that footage freely available to them as part of a new blanket policy covering particular parts of London. The office of the British Information Commissioner took exception to the plan, saying this sort of blanket policy for new license holders raised serious privacy concerns, and could fall foul of data protection rules. It finally looks like there's some significant pushback against the UK's growing surveillance society, both from the Information Commissioner, but also in the form of a recent report from the House of Lords, saying the country's 4 million and counting CCTV cameras were undermining personal freedom and privacy, which are vital to democracy.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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'Smart' CCTV Supposedly Recognizes Crime

from the don't-look-suspicious-in-public dept

A city in England has installed a "smart CCTV" system, which is claimed to be able to detect certain behavior or incidents (via The Register) and to alert camera operators to follow up. The system is supposed to give operators the ability to monitor large numbers of cameras at once, more than they can do just by watching TV screens. This type of technology has been around for a little while, but doesn't seem to have set the world alight just yet. It's doubtful that these devices will actually make any significant reduction in crime (perhaps predicting and preventing crime comes in version 2.0), and will serve merely as an excuse to blanket more and more areas with CCTV coverage, putting wider and wider swathes of people's lives under surveillance.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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