Camera shy

You’ve probably all heard about the car bombs discovered in central London. Tiger Tiger, (for the uninitiated, the club one of the cars were parked by) is well on the beaten track, just off Piccadilly Circus. It’s a bizarre feeling, to see photos in newspapers of a place you tramped past two days ago. This just doesn’t happen in NZ.

The papers on the tubes were awash the following day with hasty speculation. The primary suspects of course are Al Qaeda, as if there were only one group with sufficient reason to hate the West and the moxy to pull something off. Much hot air was also passed trying to analyze the situation with the present scant evidence. Typical journo stuff.

But being London they’ll soon have evidence-a-plenty. Almost every patch of public space seems to be under the ever-present gaze of CCTV. An army of police were reportedly analysing the footage to track the vehicle to its source.

England doesn’t appear to be camera-shy. It owns up to having 4.2 million CCTV cameras in operation (a whopping 15 million according to Andrew Marr’s doco on Britain that screened recently, but none of my Google ‘research’ could verify that number). However, crunch even the most conservative figures and you’ll find that it’s almost a hundred days of CCTV footage filmed every second. If each second is recorded, then each day would accrue 360 billion seconds of camera footage. That’s eleven thousand years of footage a day.

London is one of the most camera-friendly spots on the planet. The Home Office reportedly spent three quarters of its budget for crime prevention on CCTV cameras in the late 90’s. With such a staggering amount of cameras, the capability exists for surveillance crews to monitor an individual’s progress through London from camera to camera.

Walk anywhere in London and you’ll see hundreds – hundreds of cameras. The underground is a popular spot, but only because they’re visible. Cameras have been installed on busses, on intersections, on the motorway (interestingly, they tag cars by automatically reading the license plates as they enter the city). Of course they’re also in many public areas. It’s enough to make you spooked.

It’s a regular surveillance society round these parts, which conjures the stereotypical imagery of 1984 and the like, but let’s briefly zoom back to last weekend. I was sitting in a train on the Piccadilly line, shooting northward the day after the attempted bombing. It was eleven at night, and the carriages were packed. As we passed by Piccadilly Circus, I had a surreal moment where it occurred to me how venerable I was. Sitting there, nowhere to move, I couldn’t figure out what I’d do in an emergency. And for just a moment, a few scant seconds, there was something reassuring about someone watching your back.

They’re here to protect you. The irony, however, was that they didn’t do jack in this situation. The car bomb was accidentally discovered by fire fighters. Crime figures have dropped significantly since 1995, but many people are questioning whether the saturation of cameras were the cause of this drop. Where they will be useful is identifying and tracing the suspects; detective work at the click of a button.

Frankly, I still don’t like ‘em. The real world isn’t a conspiracy-bound thriller, I realise. But if the cost of personal freedom is having some people with the power to covertly watch me as I stumble around the city, then the price ain’t right, and it’s more than just a little freaky.