AC Grayling: Walls to have ears
We are already a over-surveilled society: new measures to add
microphones to CCTV cameras are a quantum step in the wrong direction.
Monday, 6 November 2007
Guardian CiF
It is by now a familiar fact that there are more CCTV cameras keeping watch in Britain than in any other country in the world, even in the worst police states. In one way this is an unexceptionable fact, because it could be argued that cameras take the place of policemen on the beat, and far more effectively, thus ensuring public safety and providing a useful adjunct both to the prevention of crime and its punishment.
But it is also a fact that there are a number of ways that CCTV footage can be misused, or lead to serious error . None are hard to imagine. In the capital of the free world, the US, individuals were for decades tracked and monitored, and their communications eavesdropped upon, not because they were known terrorists or criminals, but because of their political views and trade union affiliations: this happened from the late 1940s through the McCarthy, civil rights and Vietnam eras, until it eventually sparked a constitutional debate in the 1970s. The difference between the US and the former Soviet Union in this respect, vanishingly small while the police snooped on political "undesirables", was that public outcry and political activism in the former brought a (temporary - until the advent of George W Bush) halt to sneaking and prying by the state on its citizens.
Consider, then, the fact that some police forces in the UK are now considering adding microphones to CCTV cameras in our streets so that they can not only watch what people are doing, but overhear what they are saying. This is a quantum step from surveillance of the public domain shared by the community to monitoring of the utterances and thereby thoughts and opinions of individuals.
Extraordinarily, it seems that the difference between the public presence of people in shared space and the privacy of their utterances and thoughts is not even being considered here. ...
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