July 8, 2009

I’m being watched

I live in a quiet village. A really sleepy little one – or so I thought. The big news this week is that somebody tried to burgle the bowling club. Not exactly crimes of the century, but the pensioners obviously don’t agree. Clearly something had to be done. So they have now put up two CCTV cameras. Add those to the four around the village hall and the whole battery at the school, that’s quite a lot of snooping going on in one tight-knit village community.

Are any of them necessary? In London, I once counted nearly 100 cameras on my walk from the station to work. Why? How? When did we become a nation obsessed with filming people going about their everyday business? The sheer scale of our obsession with CCTV is staggering. Police officers and traffic wardens are now wearing security cameras as part of their uniform. And actually now I think about it the nesting box in my rose arch has a camera in it too! So we are even beginning to snoop on our innocent feathered friends.

Take a guess on how many times do you think you are filmed on CCTV every day. Here’s a clue. There are over 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK. One for every 14 of us – the highest number anywhere in the world. On average each of us is now filmed 300 times a day. Who buys all this stuff? Maybe captains of industry and councils just cannot resist. Just look at CCTV core, the industry’s on-line magazine. It’s jam-packed with all the latest offerings.

Does CCTV stop crime? Does it heck! Crime rates have not come down despite the cameras breeding like rabbits. Only 3% of London’s street robberies have been solved using CCTV footage. And when there is a particularly horrific crime, the best a CCTV camera seems to come up with is a grainy and unusable bit of film on Crimewatch. But never fear, a security consultant like Brite Securrity will help you through this high tech jungle.

But CCTV is just one of the more visible parts of our surveillance society. Britains security companies have a holt host of sophisticated snooping technology at their disposal. If you really want to feel protected you can even get your house or business a motion detector as part of your CCTV system. And many businesses are now using call recording (effectively telephone tapping to you and I) that monitor all your telephone calls.

I’m being watched

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