http://uk.news.yahoo.com/02112006/140/britons-most-spied-world.html Is this a bad thing? No of course it's not. If the police want to see me walking down a street then thats up to them. I'm not doing anything wrong and not planning on doing anything. Alot of middle aged southern housewives with far to much time on their hands and far to high an opinion of themselves are trying to convice us that its "invading our personal space" I really don't see how watching people go about their daily lives with the aim of making our daily lives as safe as possible is invading our personal space. Also without these cameras would we have any idea what the July 7th bombers looked like? Or more importantly would we know what the July 14th attempted bombers looked like? We might have gotten an average discription of a couple but not clear facial pictures of them.
Hmmm. Except ... we were 'most spied upon people on earth' before the bombings that this form of intrusion apparently safeguards us from. I'm not breaking the law. Why should the government spend my tax pounds (and yours) compelling me to prove it every time I step outside my front door? CCTV as an effective safeguard against criminality of any kind is there to be debated. A lot of evidence suggests that the effect is massively overstated - primarily by politicians who are pandering to the dreary paranoia that defines the world view of precisely the sort of middle-class southern housewives in your example. Here - have the benefits of two seconds of my life spent on Google on your behalf as a starter for 10 in your quest to actually get informed about this issue you've chosen to spark up on. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2071496.stm
Well thanks for the article, it seems to support the fact that CCTV is pretty good. Crime reduced in 13 out of 24 cities, 13 is better than none. The report from Scottish Centre for Criminology actually seems to be rather negative by only focusing on how CCTV has failed to reduce crime levels rather than solving them.
I see. You have a reading comprehension thing. Fair enough, we'll just take this more slowly. Eleven out of 24 showed no improvement - four got worse. And the report provides no substantiated causal links between the decrease in crime in the other 13 examples and the use of CCTV. That's because, as above, it's really hard to substantiate a causal link between the introduction of CCTV and a reduction in crime as a subsequent effect. Rationally analysing the impact CCTV has (as this report from the Scottish Centre for Criminology does) tends to throw up results that advocates of intrusive blanket surveillance will view as "negative". That's why, just by the by, pro-intrusion advocates need to resort to individual instances of CCTV being useful to the police in their attempts to prove that blanket use of CCTV is an effective counter-criminality measure. Which is, of course, bollocks. The instances cited are examples of how CCTV helped solve a crime, not prevent it in the first place. And do bear in mind what I said - that one single source is just the result of my first two seconds searching for such things. Imagine the damage that could be done to your view if we spent, say, two whole minutes looking into it.
How sturdy are these things? What would be the effect of walking down the street aiming lasar designators into any CCTV which made itself avaliable? How about 5-6 lasars at the same time? Would it affect them?
Britons 'Most Observed' In World May the police station a constable on the public sidewalk outside your door? May he legally observe the activities of you or anyone else in the street? May he make notes of his observations? May he photograph or videotape anybody walking or driving by? If he were later summoned into court, would his memory be questioned as fallible or limited? Would his verbal evidence be challenged as insufficient in this age of high technology? Can the police be everywhere? Do cameras assist them? Can one officer monitor a bank of monitors to observe many locations simultaneously? Can a detective later review video to evaluate certain activity that may have been overlooked or in hindsight have been part of a criminal scheme?