Journal of the Plague Years

• Photography with intent!
• Mugshot Mania.
• A camera seen is a camera respected.
• CCTV Discussions.
• CCTV (in 3 parts)
• Kids and their Street Theatre.
• If you've got nothing to hide...
• Ipsos Custodes.
• Sadiq Khan MP seems to have heard the click!
• Do you hear the click as they intercept your call?
• Panorama and the Security Industry Authority (SIA).
• What do you call the next bit of the wedge up from the thin end?
• An Icy Sense of Despair.
• Being watched:

Photography with intent!

7 June 2008 .

My difference engine is fine, but it's long since been time for me to start thinking about buying a computer for the 21st. century; so out today to buy myself the current Computer Shopper: what I really didn't expect to find in that mag was more for me to exercise myself about on this site.

But there they were, a couple of items on its News Analysis page about tourists and amateur photographers taking photographs in public.

• An (un-named) 79-year-old man taking a picture of his (wheelchair-bound) wife outside a shopping mall in Hull (Hull, again!) was detained and in the end had his stored photos deleted on the grounds that the two of them might potentially be on a bombing campaign.

• Some examples might be a bit more arguable, I suppose: Simon Taylor, an amateur who has started an e-petition on the Downing Street website, was told that he couldn't take photos at the London eye for copyright and security reasons.

• Police forces are putting out posters warning the public to be wary of people taking photos in case they're terrorists.

• Our late mayor proposed that 'No Photography' signs be posted in London's parks, but this time because of the possibility of 'inappropriate' pictures being taken of children. (Security officials have several times been reported in papers telling members of the public that they can't take photos without the permission of everybody in the picture. They are wrong, of course.)

The magazine points out that the police have no real guidelines on photographers and the rules for, say, security officers are so vague (despite a 66-page booklet of advice issued to shopping centres by the National Counter Terrorism Security Office) that they provide "a perfect breeding ground for jobsworthiness that brings out the worst in anyone with epaulettes on their shoulders."

But of course it's quite okay for us to be surveilled more than any country on God's Earth by anonymous (anonymous who?) behind millions of CCTVs.

[On the subject of CCTVs, it's been suggested that two cameras in the local park here tend to focus on young women. One of these days, if I run out of a life to lead, I'll have a look to see if it's true. (And probably get arrested for loitering with intent...)]

'Simon Taylor' 'Photos in public' 'National Counter Terrorism Security Office'

Mugshot Mania.

6 June 2008 .

Merseyside, Lancashire and West Yorks police forces are piloting a 'facial mapping' system which will identify criminals and terrorists within moments of them appearing on CCTV. It seems that it will compare a database of stills or mugshots from selected crime scenes or what-have-you with the pix of everybody caught on tape by public cameras, to produce likely matches.

I have to admit that I'd pretty much assumed that they could already do that... which goes to show how they make us believe that they have the technology to do more that they actually can - part of the threat that 'it's all on the database'.

In order to test the system, which 'could be in use later this year', Merseyside's lads in blue are retaining pictures of the 70,000 people who come through their hands each year to create such a database. This will include everybody who is arrested (for every offence, it seems, right down to littering and parking, even if they're found not guilty or not charged in the first place). So, if you're accused of dropping litter but demonstrate your innocence, CCTV will nonetheless be able to identify you 300 times a day thereafter, every time you go out in public, Since the system will have to be largely automatic (there can't be enough officers to make a decision on every one of 70,000 people plus the same number again each year, hundreds of times a day), and since processing and information storage are so cheap now and getting cheaper all the time, what the system can do, it will be made to do - collect its data automatically. And since the information must be retrievable, a complete record of the movements of each of those people will have to be accessible from a keyboard.

It just gets worse and worse. And it doesn't make me feel one jot more secure.

Still, not to worry: we're in the safe home-secretarial hands of that noted liberal and empathiser with our ancient liberties, Jacqui Smith (qv).

'Merseyside police force' 'facial mapping'

A camera seen is a camera respected.

01 April 2008 .

We should not feel nervous of the cameras which ostentatiously watch us as we go about our business. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith assures us that they are there to make us safer. (A camera seen is a camera respected.)

There isn't (yet) the CCTV infrastructure in Lhasa, so Chinese officials and soldiers have to film the inhabitants in person instead. They too are doing it ostentatiously, They, too, assure the world that it is to make people safer. (A camera seen is a camera respected.)

CCTV Discussions.

19 March 2008 .

There were several letters in the Indy today in response to Johann Hari's article yesterday. They, and I (see CCTV I, yesterday), seem to be much of a mind.

However, the word 'benign' turned up again, used in the same context as always (as in, 'the present government is benign, but a future one might not'). I'm not so sure that our present government, even Mr. Brown, should automatically be assumed to be so. I have no doubt that our PM absolutely, and with great sincerity, believes in the benignity of himself and his actions; but I don't think there's any argument but that he's authoritarian by instinct: he, and others, may talk of 'benign authoritarianism'; I don't believe there's any such thing. And I'm quite certain that one doesn't have to read far down the list to find senior politicians who are perfectly capable of great malignity.

'benign government' 'benign authoritarianism'

CCTV I

18 March 2008 .

In 'This strange backlash against CCTV' (The Independent, yesterday), Johann Hari argues that the cameras, by helping to catch criminals and by their deterrent effect, enhance human liberty. 'Yet,' he says, 'there has been a strange, inchoate backlash against CCTV over the past few years.' It's bundled in with the real erosions of human rights, 'lumped onto the end of the list'.

He says that there are two threats to our liberty - an arrogant government, and other people. 'This isn't about "balancing" freedom against something else. It's about figuring which mixture of state action and hands-off inaction will produce the greatest freedom in the real world.'

He says that we will only ever be watched by cameras in public places where we would equally be watched by strangers, so it's no intrusion on our privacy. He finishes with a warning against a 'closed-circuit propaganda which assumes that any extension of state power is a sign of incipient fascism,' and, 'It's time to stop shrieking about a police state at every turn, and start looking calmly and questioningly into the camera lens.'

He's so right (in his last ten words, anyway) and so wrong.

The protests are far from inchoate; some of the arguments are very cogent (see CCTV III, below) and the reason we bundle CCTV with other erosions of our liberty in our protest is that they are being introduced under the same regime. CCTV is not separate from DNA databasing, they're part of the same system; and not trusting Brown on ID cards means that we don't trust him with surveillance, either.

Hari is right to talk about the real world and 'the greatest freedom'. But he's missed the target completely when he says it's not freedom balanced against something else, and I think this is because he seems not to distinguish between our 'liberty' and our 'Liberties' - which are two linked but utterly distinct things. (I don't think 'freedom' is at all a synonym for 'liberty' in this context, either.)

I've seen the way ID cards are used in Europe, not in a fight against crime but in the control of (law-abiding) citizens; I've loathed them from the beginning. CCTV, on the other hand, I wasn't against to start with; I have come to distrust (and in the end to loathe) the cameras because of what I've seen in this country. On a personal note, I'll say this: I'm watched by one particular camera when I walk the dog in the park. (I go late, and there's often no one else there.) It's true that any stranger might be watching me in that place, but no stranger would have the discourtesy blatantly to follow me with his eyes for ten or twenty minutes at a time, nor to do so every day, nor to suggest that there might be discs of my activity kept in an unknown place, nor to glow orangely at me in the dusk (presumably infra-red?), nor to turn towards me if I make a noise (which means he might be recording what I'm saying as well). Then, when I go to the shops, I'm watched all over again.

Anyway, Hari understands Human nature better than he let on in this article.

'Johann Hari' 'freedom and liberty' 'incipent fascism'

CCTV II

When the State is authoritarian, or just plain incompetent, it isn't bothered how it cows us, so long as we stay cowed (CCTV III). [You may say that the state is benign and has no wish to cow us; I hope you're right and that it remains so. But many of those who work for the state have agendas of their own, and some are far from benign, and there are enough folk who do want to cow us.] There's no comparison of barbarity between hanging and surveilling, of course; the chains are lighter, these days. The Bloody Code, with over 200 capital offences on the books, is long gone... but not so far away - look at Texas, or read the pages of some of our tabloids, or just listen: they don't always speak very loudly, but there are plenty of folk who favour judicial culling of our population.

[Children aren't bothered by the cameras. They weren't scared of the gibbet, either, or so they thought... but it was always there...]

The methods may have changed, but the intention hasn't; and, if we still have a government like Brown's when they discover that CCTV doesn't do the job they want, they'll look for something new to keep us in line.

'The Bloody Code'

CCTV III

"What we have been able to show is that CCTV didn't reduce crime - if anything it has increased - and it didn't reduce fear of crime. If anything there was a slight increase in anxiety." (Prof. Jason Ditton, Sheffield University.)

"The gaze of the cameras does not fall equally on all users of the street but on those who are stereotypical predefined as potentially deviant, or who through appearance and demeanour are singled out by operators as disreputable. In this way youth, particularly those already socially and economically marginal, may be subject to even greater levels of authoritative intervention and official stigmatisation, and rather than contributing to social justice through the reduction of victimisation, CCTV will merely become a tool of injustice through the amplification of differential and discriminatory policing.

"...an instrument of social control and the production of discipline; the production of 'anticipatory conformity'; the certainty of rapid deployment to observed deviance and; the compilation of individualised dossiers of the monitored population." ('The unforgiving Eye: CCTV surveillance in public space.' Dr Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, Hull University)

'The unforgiving Eye' CCTV stigmatisation 'Dr Clive Norris' 'Gary Armstrong'

Kids and their Street Theatre.

15 February 2008 .

Conversation on Newsnight about the recent trial of a 15-year-old girl who recorded a (fatal) happy-slapping incident: somebody commented that young people film and are filmed because they are enjoying a form of street-theatre.

Whether it explains happy-slapping or not, it certainly goes some way to explaining why kids don't appreciate the danger of surveillance cameras.

[What they're saying about the 'Mosquito' is exactly what I said here two days ago (13 February 2008 - Classified - Control). Your webhost is there first, once again...]

Mosquito 'happy slapping'

If you've got nothing to hide...

06 February 2008 .

I couldn't avoid listening to a rather loud conversation, today, which had obviously been started by something one of the protagonists had read in the papers about the bugging of Mr. Khan, MP.

I'm surprised that I could still be surprised when the newspaper-holder said, 'If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about.'

Was that what Charles de Menezes believed?

Who are all these people who have nothing to hide? Don't they have bank account details which they certainly ought to be hiding. Do they really not want to hide their children's details from paedophiles? Are they truly untroubled to find their names appearing in unexpected places?

I admit that I have plenty to hide. And, with the government's cavalier attitude to data protection, that means I also have plenty to worry about.

'Nothing to hide'

Ipsos Custodes.

05 February 2008 .

It might take the minister, from scratch, two to three hours to find out whether Mr. Khan MP was actually bugged, if it was accidental, who authorised it; all the questions he was being asked in the Commons yesterday. In fact, Jack Straw probably knows the answers already - he ought to. So he called for an inquiry; two weeks.

Perhaps, to be fair, he needs to find out who grassed the buggers, and dig up the dirt on said grass.

Straw was asked several times if he could guarantee that no MPs were being bugged now.

(This was speaking to MPs in the House...) "I can't answer that because it would literally be a criminal offence." It is, indeed, against the law to admit the existence of a bugging order.

Never mind that the rules say that MPs shouldn't be bugged.

-/-

I noticed that several good burgers have scribbled to newspapers, including The Times, saying that if the police had bugged a criminal awaiting extradition, even while talking to his MP as is alleged, then jolly good show; it showed our chaps in blue are on the ball.

Either you get it or you don't, I suppose.

'Khan MP' 'Jack Straw' 'The Times'

Sadiq Khan MP seems to have heard the click! (But he can't have done - there was no application...)

04 February 2008 .

Only yesterday (Do you hear the click as they intercept your call?), I shocked you with the number of applications made by all sorts of odds and sods to intercept our communications. As I wrote, I wondered how many interceptions might take place without time being wasted on those boring old procedures - like plenty of other people, I'm sure.

Mr. Khan was bugged while meeting a constituent who faces extradition; apparently those trusty lads from the Met went ahead in secret. Understandable, really, since there's a rule which would have barred permission in these circumstances.

There'll be a lot of fuss and bother about whether an alleged letter from the shadow Home Secretary to The Great Leader in January recounting this alleged episode reached No. 10. There'll be some, too, about whether the alleged episode actually happened.

But the fuss will be about the involvement of an MP with his constituent, and possibly about the lack of (unobtainable) sanction for the bugging.

Nothing will be said, I suspect, about the 400,000 of the rest of us who are bugged with such "dedication and enthusiasm", as the overseeing commissioner describes it.

'Sadiq Khan MP' 'dedication and enthusiasm'

Do you hear the click as they intercept your call? (The Paranoia Slot.)

03 February 2008 .

Recent figures suggest that, in the first five weeks of this year, something between 30,000 and 40,000 (and possibly many more) applications have been made to intercept private communications, most of which will have been approved; this is equivalent to something in the order of 400,000 applications in a year, of which, on recent form, about 1500 will be 'flawed'.

1,000 each day! - and that's the applications: I don't know how long a period an application may cover, but I assume potentially for weeks or months, which would imply that there are tens of thousands of interceptions in operation at any one time.

The New Statesman's leader this week, 'They watch and listen to us, as we blithely give our liberty away', is less than keen on the annual report for 2006 by Sir Paul Kennedy, Interception of Communications Commissioner. The report was presented to parliament by the Father Of The Nation last week: it states that 260,000 applications were made in the final nine months of that year, including by more than a quarter of all the local authorities as well as by police, offices of state, HMRC, etc. ('The UK's 474 local authorities have unbridled powers to pry...' says the NS).

What function is it of local authorities that has them intercepting our calls? If there is something so serious as to warrant that, shouldn't they be passing it to the police?

The article is worth reading if you want your paranoia fed; or the report itself, probably:
www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0708/hc02/0252/0252.asp
Herewith one or two small gems from the article:

Sir PK says that suspected criminals tracked included rogue traders and fly-tippers (which presumably explains why the local authorities are interested, but not why they're allowed to do the tracking). Rogue traders are a serious pain, but do they seriously require an approach out of 1984?

He is 'largely sympathetic to the prying needs of the state'. I thought that when the post was created, we were told that he was to keep a rein on the state. He also 'hails the "quality, dedication and enthusiasm"' of those who listen to our phones and monitor our computers.

In connection with, but of course not in, the report: Britain falls into the lowest-performing group of 'endemic surveillance societies' (Privacy International). Britain is singled out by PI for criticism over the ID cards scheme and lack of government accountability; and unsurprisingly it notes that with 1% of the world's population, we have nearly 25% of the world's surveillance cameras.

And in the same week the parliamentary intelligence and security committee complained that the intelligence services had withheld vital information. The same services are also stopping all moves to have intercept evidence allowable in court, in line with other countries: so there can be no testing of the evidence - and also no courtroom scrutiny of what's collected, or how and why.

I have no idea what a 'flawed' application is; nothing more than one which fails to be approved, I hope... Personally, I find the idea that 400,000 such applications a year are made shows there's a flaw somewhere.

'endemic surveillance societies' 'Privacy International' 'New Statesman' 'Sir Paul Kennedy'

Panorama and the Security Industry Authority (SIA).

21 January 2008 .

Panorama (BBC1) is shadow of what it was. I'm sure that it has a shorter slot than it did, and it certainly has less depth - when, if shorter, it should seek more.

Today's programme examined a couple of areas of concern in the security industry, namely the number of criminals involved, who are using intimidation and violence, and the lax training and testing standards. These reports should have made our blood run cold, as would many other areas of the industry. Instead, somehow, they failed to engage; I think that that has to do with the anecdotal style that's offered these days - there was no rigour in Panorama's research. Fine for a journal like this, perhaps, but not for a BBC investigative reporting programme.

We are the most surveilled nation on the planet by a wide margin: the question of how the industry is run and controlled is absolutely fundamental. The programme did not respect that fact.

What information the reporter did gather was discussed with the Chief Executive of the SIA, Michael Wilson. That was the most depressing part of the programme. Faced with the evidence that criminals are getting around the law preventing them from running companies by relabelling themselves as security consultants, Mr. Wilson blathered exactly the banalities that regrettably one has rather come to expect. 'Criminals are not allowed to run security companies,' he said. But they are doing so, under the guise of consulting... '90% of the industry is complying,' says he. 90% of a multi-billion industry with a power of control unmatched by anyone in the private sector for a century... is that okay? 'If we find non-compliance we will probably act,' he blathers.

I appreciate that the programme has to focus, since it can only do so much in the time available. However, I would like to draw attention to just one, much more mundane, aspect of the surveillance we endure 300 times a day. If you have the opportunity, go and find out how many surveillance camera operators have been found guilty in court of using their cameras to look into private houses and bedrooms: the figure is not massively large, but it should still startle you. Then ask yourself what proportion of camera operators acting like that have been found out - I bet most incidents are dealt with in-house if at all. Then ask yourself how much the practice goes on without ever being uncovered. Then say that you're not worried about the people who are watching us.

'Security Industry Authority' 'Michael Wilson' Panorama

What do you call the next bit of the wedge up from the thin end?

14 January 2008 .

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, proposes that chips should be surgically implanted into sex offenders in order to track them more easily. Whatever you may feel about rapists and paedophiles, it's already clear that the scheme will not stop there; there is talk of chips being used to monitor prison inmates (why?), to monitor conversations or even to administer electric shocks. You can bet there'll be creep - first suspected terrorists, then truanting children?

Never mind all that, however. It's a justification (???) that Mr Jones employed which fills me with the creepy horrors: "If we are prepared to track cars, why don't we track people?"

'Ken Jones' 'Association of Chief Police Officers'

An Icy Sense of Despair.

15 November 2007 .

I think that, in setting up a site, I've been trying to do the right thing, but perhaps in the wrong way; but I'm going to need to think about it.

This bit of introspection is brought on by news in the rag today that the government is introducing an e-borders scheme in which travellers entering or leaving the UK will have to provide a large amount of information 24 hours before travel. The particular rag I read is concerned about the chaos at ports/airports, and at the cost of the scheme: so far as those are concerned, I wonder what else is new - the government seems to have been dedicated to increasingly expensive and disruptive bureaucracy for a very long time now.

It's the questions themselves that worry me:

i) that there are so many of them (53 questions, apparently), (nearly) every one so reasonable but all together - to my eyes - intolerably intrusive;

ii) that some questions are none of the government's business - such as where I'm going to be staying and what my contact numbers will be;

iii) that the govt wants all answers at least 24 hours before travel;

iv) that these questions and notice will apply even for day trips to Calais - or simply going for a sail on the south coast;

v) that this comes just after a week after de-bureaucratised borders within Europe are being opened up for the new entrants to the EU in eastern Europe;

vi) that all this is to fight against a terror - a hatred against us, in other words - that our own government has precipitated over the past 80 years, the current mob arguably being responsible for the lion's share.

I don't know yet how accurately this business was being reported - no doubt it will become clearer in time and perhaps a bit less alarming - but what I do know is the icy hand that gripped me as I read about this control-freak government tightening the screw yet again.

More anon when I've thought about it.

e-borders 'watching travellers'

Being watched:

04 October 2007 .

In the evening I take our dog for a walk in the local park, which is often otherwise deserted. For most of the time we are in the line of sight of two surveillance cameras set on tall posts. One pans to follow us; it has ears which can certainly hear noises and which for all I know can understand conversation. The other lurks behind clouded glass.

At first I found being watched so blatantly, and so fixedly, mildly intrusive. After a few months I began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Latterly I am becoming almost paranoid.

I have no idea of who it might be watching me: certainly it would be regarded as very odd to be stared at thus consistently by a stranger on a bench, and I don't see that the fact that the stranger hides from me makes it any less odd.

The other evening, in a mad moment, I was tempted to make a discourteous gesture in the direction of the watcher. Then it occurred to me that, although the park was totally empty apart from me and the dog, there would be a bevy of policemen and council officials waiting for me by the time I left the park and that I would be arrested and ASBOed for breaching the peace.

Since I am being surveilled (!), I could presumably even find myself at the receiving end of our anti-terrorism legislation.

(Recent news: young woman arrested for bearing her backside on a beach - empty apart from a distant surveillance camera.)

'Anti-terror legislation' ASBO 'breaching the peace'

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