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CCTV is a good thing.

Started by fol de rol, March 19, 2008, 11:00:37 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Uncle TechTip

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2008, 12:49:40 PM
Well I didn't say there were 14 million pointing at public places. But if you have some exact figures as to how many are in public places, how many in private but pointed in public placed and how many are none of my business then please share. The fact remains there are a lot of the fuckers and they are endemic of a society that is ruled by fear, paranoia and suspicion.

No; YOU provide the proof because it's you making the suggestion that there are 14m cameras. You tacitly implied that each of the 14m cameras are pointed at people just going about their daily business in public. I have no proof other than common sense to support my view - 14m cameras in roughly 30,000 conurbations & settlements in this country would mean over 450 cameras in every city, town and village in the UK.

Pylon Man

Well, it's a fair point made in the article, but why does he insist on bring right vs left into it? The argument is basically "what about the human rights of the victims?" which seems to come from the right-wing when talking about not only CCTV, but also stuff like the government spying on you in more insidious ways. Of course you could argue that since a smaller state is right-wing, the opposite argument is also right-wing and that just demonstrates how stupid categorising stuff into right-wing and left-wing all the time is.

chand

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2008, 01:17:20 PMThe future of CCTV is facial recognition though, they won't need peoples manning the cameras, they'll have computers able to recognise 10,000 different faces in a few seconds -

Why with such technology, wouldn't it then be jolly useful to have a giant database of the entire population with a hi-res photograph and every single piece of personal data imaginable about them?

Heh, I fucking hope this happens soon; I administer payroll for construction sites using a clever-clever biometric face recognition clock-in system, which is beyond useless. Most people fail to get over the required 83% match threshold despite using the exact same camera that their file photo is taken with, in the exact same booth. One guy has literally managed to evade automatic recognition for years with his cunning 'only having one eye' plan.

biggytitbo

Quote from: shiftwork2 on March 19, 2008, 01:29:59 PM
Not true, CCTV was instrumental in catching and convicting the 21/7 bombers.

First point - there were no 21/7 bombers. No bombs. No explosions. Nobody died. And CCTV wasn't instrumental in 'catching' them. The security services knew exactly who they were as soon as their no bomb plot comically failed.

The 21/7 CCTV was instrumental in fooling everyone into thinking it was from 7/7 because those pesky TV stations and newspapers accidently forgot to tell us that what'd they'd been showing us was from the day no bombs went off and nobody died rather than the day 4 bombs went off and lots of people died. Mysteriously there's no CCTV from that day.

George Oscar Bluth II



Not that it made any difference or anything. Fairly sure there's others that haven't been released.

El Unicornio, mang

The whole "we still have loads of crime even though we have CCTV" argument doesn't hold any water really, as you don't know that there would be more crime if there wasn't any CCTV.

Mary Hinge

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on March 19, 2008, 03:20:47 PM
The whole "we still have loads of crime even though we have CCTV" argument doesn't hold any water really, as you don't know that there would be more crime if there wasn't any CCTV.

That runs the other way as well. As you don't know if you would have had the same/less/more crime without the cameras. Maybe if we had put the money into other areas we could have reduced crime more effectively.

More police on the beat. More activities to occupy young males (the major crime causing group), etc, etc.

Look at speed cameras, less about road safety more about revenue streaming.

El Unicornio, mang

Quote from: Mary Hinge on March 19, 2008, 03:29:52 PM


More police on the beat. More activities to occupy young males (the major crime causing group), etc, etc.



Less twats having babies would help too

Mary Hinge

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on March 19, 2008, 03:32:38 PM
Less twats having babies would help too

Indeed. I have posted links to the legalised abortion in the US lead to a drop in crime levels before (somewhere), the debate continues....

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/more-video-on-abortioncrime-a-collage-of-evidence/

shiftwork2

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2008, 03:11:52 PM
First point - there were no 21/7 bombers. No bombs. No explosions. Nobody died. And CCTV wasn't instrumental in 'catching' them. The security services knew exactly who they were as soon as their no bomb plot comically failed.

The 21/7 CCTV was instrumental in fooling everyone into thinking it was from 7/7 because those pesky TV stations and newspapers accidently forgot to tell us that what'd they'd been showing us was from the day no bombs went off and nobody died rather than the day 4 bombs went off and lots of people died. Mysteriously there's no CCTV from that day.

Please fill me in on how would we have known their identity without CCTV.  And by 'they' I mean the four men rightfully convicted last year, regardless of whether their chapatti flour was a day past its sell-by date or whether they had inadvertently bought the wrong peroxide.

I don't understand your second point, sorry.  It reads as if you allege the media tried to pass off 21/7 footage as 7/7 footage but unless you're a contrarian I must have got the wrong end of the stick.

chand

Quote from: Mary Hinge on March 19, 2008, 03:29:52 PMMore police on the beat. More activities to occupy young males (the major crime causing group), etc, etc.

We'll be alright once Pedro's 'legalise rape!' plans go through. Not only will it cut crime by making rape no longer a crime, we'll all be too busy raping the shit out of bitches to bother stealing and fighting and shit. 


Borboski

Quote from: biggytitbo on March 19, 2008, 11:09:56 AM
That's just the old 'if it helps solve crime then it's worth it' argument, which is of course bollocks.

Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability!


Ha, that one really stood out to me.  I mean, what if "it" does solve crime?  Then might not "it" be worth it?  Nah, bollocks to it!

Pylon Man

QuoteLook at speed cameras, less about road safety more about revenue streaming.

Now, that's not true. Even Jeremy Clarkson admits that; on Top Gear once he said that the government gets more money from Simon Cowell's income tax alone than it does from all of the speed cameras in the country.

Mary Hinge

Quote from: Pylon Man on March 19, 2008, 05:15:11 PM
Now, that's not true. Even Jeremy Clarkson admits that; on Top Gear once he said that the government gets more money from Simon Cowell's income tax alone than it does from all of the speed cameras in the country.

The man himself does use that line and the figure of £20million surplus after administration which the Dept of Transport had to release under the FOI act but it is for several years ago. Does Cowell even pay tax? Most people that rich don't except of course Ricky Gervais.

However reading the article he seems to be in agreement with Biggytitbo.

Don't blink here's the link.

http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/jeremy_clarkson/good_car_bad_car/article743526.ece

Pinball

Quote from: Ignatius_S on March 19, 2008, 01:39:32 PM
As to the misusing of tapes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4609746.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/6266564.stm
Maybe a system could be set up whereby genitals (tits etc.) activate via auto-image recognition a camera to photograph the CCTV operator, that is then forwarded to another CCTV operator who calls the police...

Actually, that would just amount to a 'best of' compilation.

A while back I went through Heathrow where they were testing (I think) the millimetre wave scanner that sees through clothing. About 20 'security personnel' were crowded round the display, and yes a woman was walking through it. Hmmm... How long before that gets onto the Net?

The world's mad.

Quote from: George Oscar Bluth II on March 19, 2008, 03:18:45 PM
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Londonbombing2.jpg

Not that it made any difference or anything. Fairly sure there's others that haven't been released.

Oh God, don't, you'll only start him off about it being faked again.

marwood

#47
Started to get a bit annoyed by the article in the OP before remembering it's just Johann Hari, doing what he does all the time. There was a story today on the Standard/LondonLite website related to this topic. (here)

QuoteLondon has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

The figures were obtained by the Liberal Democrats on the London Assembly using the Freedom of Information Act.

Dee Doocey, the Lib-Dems' policing spokeswoman, said: "These figures suggest there is no link between a high number of CCTV cameras and a better crime clear-up rate.

"We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it's not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.

"Although CCTV has its place, it is not the only solution in preventing or detecting crime.

A report by the criminal justice charity Nacro in 2002 concluded that the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent.

Given these types of figures, you have to wonder whether the well publicised CCTV successes in serious crimes etc make the vast expenditure on our "publicly funded spy network" worthwhile.

Also, this documentary looks like it might be interesting, there appears to be a google video link but the useless computer I am posting from won't let me see it.

edit - it's just a trailer. Still quite interesting though. I wonder if the doc. has been/will be aired on UK TV.

Trailer - Nino Leitner's Every Step You Take - a documentary about CCTV in Britain (YouTube);
Spoiler alert
[youtube=425,350]http://youtube.com/watch?v=YJb0PWGjHe4[/youtube]
[close]





Pinball

Chinese government planners must get a serious hard-on when they liaise with 'our' government. The UK has just what the commies want, if only they could afford it. But I bet they're saving up real hard...

The only difference between the UK and (still) Red China is the definition of 'dissident', though I suspect the differences are reducing as the UK State circle-jerk continues.

Pylon Man

I don't know what Clarkson is going on about in that article. I've NEVER seen a speed camera that was hidden in a bush, because there's no such thing. And yes, I know the first part of that sentence could be construed as slightly stupid, but then I've never been fined for speeding and I speed everywhere. As for not smoking in public buildings, how anyone could construe that as "police state" I don't know. And this from a man who in the previous paragraph rightly had a go at the hysteria surrounding the EU. About ID cards he has a point, although that article is two years old and ID cards are now rightfully a dead duck and I don't expect any other party would introduce them either, as it wasn't strictly the government's fault for the loss of data, but the civil service so the same thing would happen.

George Oscar Bluth II

ID cards aren't dead, and even if they were the database, by far the worst aspect of the scheme is still going strong.

olafr

Quote from: Pylon Man on March 20, 2008, 12:54:21 AM
As for not smoking in public buildings, how anyone could construe that as "police state" I don't know.

I know that was probably a specific example of what doesn't constitute a 'police state' but the problem with the term 'police state', generally, is that some people have a rather quaint idea of what a police state is. They're waiting for black vans carting people off in the dead of the night and masked police on every street corner before they'll go 'oh shit!' - and maybe even then they might wait until it's someone they know that's affected before giving a shit.

That police state stereotype, if you will, only exists because people are thinking on an ostensibly early 20th C. model of what a real police state could be or even some incredible, far-off sci-fi film set

What will happen is a police state-lite that's crept in through the back door whilst the paedophiles, terrorists, benefit cheats and every other scapegoat is frog-marched out the front door. A nice comfortable prison with a nice mural of the outside world pasted over the locked door.

Ignatius_S

More on the facial recognition thing:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/19/ukcrime.humanrights

QuotePolice trying out national database with 750,000 mugshots, MPs told
Offenders' faces tracked through CCTV images
Scheme part of 'hi-tech revolution on the beat'

The police are developing the first national database of mugshots so that they can use face recognition technology to match CCTV images with details of offenders, MPs were told yesterday.

The system is being developed in a pilot scheme involving the Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Merseyside police which has generated a database of more than 750,000 facial images over the past 18 months. Peter Neyroud, the chief executive of the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA), told MPs yesterday that the development of a national facial images database is just one element of a technological revolution in neighbourhood beat policing.

Neyroud, former chief constable of Thames Valley, hopes that by the time of the 2012 London Olympics beat officers will be equipped with advanced "second-generation" hand-held computers which can take and transmit fingerprints, download mugshots and details from the police national computer, and access images from local CCTV cameras.

His hi-tech vision of the future of policing was given during the final evidence session of a year-long inquiry by the Commons home affairs select committee into the "surveillance society".

The development of an electronic mugshot database is still at an early stage. In the pilot scheme areas the digital photographs are logged of everyone who has been arrested for a criminal offence, with the image linked to the criminal data held on the police national computer. While each force is able to search the electronic mugshots in its own area to match them with CCTV images, the technology does not yet exist to search on the scale needed for a national database.

The NPIA said the database would allow forces around the country to search for, retrieve, store and transmit facial images or video images with scars, marks and tattoos if appropriate. The idea is that each force will store its images on a central national database to give all forces immediate access to the mugshots for intelligence and investigative purposes.

So far only three police forces have been involved in contributing and viewing images, but several other forces, including Greater Manchester, North Wales, parts of the Metropolitan, and the immigration police have been given "read-only" access. So far £6m has been allocated on developing the technology with a national launch date of 2009 pencilled in.

NPIA evidence to the committee raises the prospect of "automated face recognition" to identify known offenders or terror suspects. But Neyroud said trials around the world had shown that there was still a long way to go before such systems could be used reliably.

The police are also developing "behavourial matching" software to pick out odd behaviour in a crowd using CCTV picures. "That might be particularly useful in counter-terrorism or tackling street crime," he said. "The proliferation of CCTV cameras in the UK - with about one for every 14 people - means that we are now accustomed to our movements being monitored in this way and for most people this is not an issue."

The Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, told the committee that people's fears over a "surveillance society" were the "meat of myths". He said that the regulatory oversight of surveillance was far more robust than many assumed. "The idea of big brother or big sister sitting on everybody's shoulder makes great copy for the newspapers but it is simply not the case."

Quote from: Pinball on March 19, 2008, 08:18:54 PM
Maybe a system could be set up whereby genitals (tits etc.) activate via auto-image recognition a camera to photograph the CCTV operator, that is then forwarded to another CCTV operator who calls the police...

Actually, that would just amount to a 'best of' compilation.


True, but think how quickly the cost of the system could be recouped!

Mary Hinge

Quote from: Pylon Man on March 20, 2008, 12:54:21 AM
ID cards are now rightfully a dead duck and I don't expect any other party would introduce them either, as it wasn't strictly the government's fault for the loss of data, but the civil service so the same thing would happen.

Do you have a reliable authentic source for that, because as far as I know they are still going ahead, not on schedule of course.
Which aside from the civil liberties points is another annoying thing about them. This will be a massive Government project and like almost every other massive Government project won't be allowed to be written off so the contractors can charge a fortune for it. Millenium Dome, Scottish parliment building, etc, etc.

I sure if it had been killed stone dead in the water I'd have seen Henry Porter and Peter Hitchens dancing arm in arm. (checks outside window...to see a mysterious new camera on the wall opposite pointed straight at.....)

Anyway some interesting figures obtained under the FOI about just how effective the scheme might be in tackling benefit fraud.

Don't blink here's the link.

http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2007/04/home_office_id_card_scheme_assumptions_published_by_the_dwp_via_foia_request.html

Pylon Man

Well, come on, the government (well the civil service) lost loads of data. They couldn't politically risk pushing forwards ID cards now.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Pylon Man on March 20, 2008, 11:02:33 AM
Well, come on, the government (well the civil service) lost loads of data. They couldn't politically risk pushing forwards ID cards now.
But they are doing, the Home Secretary announced it last week didn't he?

olafr

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on March 20, 2008, 11:07:18 AM
But they are doing, the Home Secretary announced it last week didn't he?

I thought he did. The trick is they'll keep on redefining it and move the goalposts so  it will be an ID card, but not that ID card. New Labour like this 'redefining' move a lot and apply it in lots of areas.

Ignatius_S

Jacqui Smith may have owned up to a ot of things, like smoking cannabis, but pretending to be a woman isn't one of them.

But yes, the plans for ID card have merely changed, not been cancelled:

QuoteQ&A: Identity card plans 
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has unveiled revamped plans for the introduction of identity cards in the UK.
What are the ID card plans?

Everyone over the age of 16 applying for a passport will have their details - including fingerprints and facial scans - added to a National Identity register from 2011/12. The first identity cards will be issued to non-EU foreign nationals coming to work in the UK in 2008. From 2009, about 200,000 airport workers in the UK will have to get identity cards as a condition of employment. From 2010 students will be encouraged to get ID cards when they open bank accountants. From 2011/12 the Identity and Passport Service plans to issue "significant volumes" of ID cards alongside British passports - but people will be able to opt out of having a card if they don't want one.

How have the plans changed?

The widespread introduction of ID cards for all passport applicants has been put back by two years to 2012. Under the original plans the first British citizens would have been issued with ID cards in 2008, with the widespread roll-out taking place in 2010. People applying for passports will also no longer forced to have an ID card whether they want one or not, although their details will still be entered in to a central identity database. The government says the ID scheme will now cost £1bn less than originally planned. Plans to take iris scans of passport applicants have also been put on the back burner.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3127696.stm

olafr


Pylon Man

I'm sure there was something on the news about ID cards being quietly dropped. Or maybe that was a "leak" designed to fool people like me.