Nation Under Watch: How the U.K. gave birth to a surveillance society

By Paul Chandler

(Visit my blog @ http://worldunderwatch.blogspot.com to find "tons" of other great articles on surveillance and enough video to satisfy even the most hardened techno-geek!)

For me, the only thing worse than being beaten, robbed, stabbed, shot, or violated in any other way, would be for my assailant to escape not only the scene of the crime, but also prosecution in a court of law. If you live in the United Kingdom and this happens to you, the chances of your attacker escaping justice are pretty much slim to none if the assault is carried out in a public place.

For more than a decade now, the people of the U.K. have been living their lives under the microscope of a state controlled all-seeing eye. “Big Brother”, a name commonly used when referring to the CCTV cameras installed throughout the country, has been watching people go about their daily business twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year during this time, and it’s not about to stop either.

Today there are more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras staring down from above onto the streets of Great Britain alone according to a 2006 report to the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network. It’s estimated that just being out and about in London alone, that you are likely to come into contact with these cameras an average of 300 times a day.

You would think that this kind of coverage would easily persuade the criminal minded to behave themselves and become model citizens of their community, but the very real truth is, it doesn’t.

Starting in 1997, when the gun control laws were amended to virtually banish private ownership of all handguns, the number of crimes committed in the U.K. involving the possession of a firearm has actually increased, but even so, the number of gun-related deaths reported has dropped.

Statistics also show that the cameras do not deter violent crime as well as the Home office (U.K. version of Homeland Security) had hoped for, but they do effectively aid in the apprehension, prosecution, and sentencing of those involved in crimes with no witness or physical evidence. Unsurprisingly, these very same cameras can also help in proving the innocence of the wrongly accused when a jury is presented with court evidence that strongly suggests otherwise.

So who or what brought about the transformation of an entire nation into a surveillance society? The answer to this question does not come easily and required many hours of research into the subject of CCTV and its history of use in the U.K.

After sorting through the vast amount of information that is freely available on the Internet and in print, I can tell you that there was no single person or thing that triggered this transformation, but rather a chain of violent historical events (watch video) that left both the citizens and the government of the U.K. desperately needing to feel safe once again.

Once you examine the history of violence in the U.K., it becomes very clear that attacks by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) are most responsible for the move towards the heavy use of CCTV systems in the U.K. by British law enforcement.

Since 1921, Irish Nationalist have been fighting the British over who should control Northern Ireland and its partition from the rest of Ireland by the British government. Ever since this separation, it has been the mission of the IRA to re-unite Northern Ireland with the rest of Ireland nationally, politically, financially, socially, and religiously by whatever means necessary, even if it means resorting to violent measures that more often than not, include civilian casualties.

They are especially fond of bombing crowded mass transit systems and areas where they can inflict damage not only physically, but also economically. The Underground (a.k.a. the tube because of its cylindrical design) and the Mainland Surface Transportation facilities of the U.K. have been a favorite target of the IRA for years simply because of the millions of people who use the system on a daily basis.

Between 1991 and 1998 there were 41 bombs and 6,762 telephoned bomb threats against the railways alone, most, if not all, by the IRA.

When you look at the data, it's no surprise that the rail systems of the U.K. are now littered with state of the art CCTV systems that rival those used in Las Vegas casinos to thwart card counting and other methods of cheating.

The bombing of Bishopsgate (London’s financial district) in 1993 resulted in a massive effort (nicknamed the "ring of steel") by the British police forces to increase the number of CCTV cameras present at entry points into the city and hundreds of other locations.

The expansion effort has continued unabated to this day with ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) technology being introduced in March of 2006 to the already existing CCTV camera systems present in the towns and cities of London. New technology that will allow cameras to detect anti-social behavior by reading body language is also being developed as well as facial recognition and voice recognition technologies.

Currently the U.K. is recognized around the globe as the world’s biggest user of CCTV cameras, and its long-time practice of conducting live monitoring of citizens has now spilled over into the U.S. (Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as of this writing) and other countries. The question now is, will history repeat itself? It looks like it already has.