Orwell rolls in his grave: Britain’s endemic surveillance cameras talk back<\/a>
05\/30\/2007 @ 10:56 am
Filed by Will Byrne<\/p>\nObserved by over 4.2 million closed circuit \u2013 or CCTV \u2013 cameras across the country, Britain is already the most surveilled industrialized state in the Western world. It was recently estimated that the average Briton is captured by electronic eyes more than 300 times on a typical workday.
a
Yet the country\u2019s surveillance network, which boasts one camera for every fourteen citizens, is no longer merely facilitating observance: It has now begun talking back. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s dystopian vision of 1984, loudspeakers in one small-town center in northern Britain scold anyone they catch engaged in \u201canti-social behaviour,\u201d including littering, drunkenness, or fighting.<\/p>\n
Observing a bank of monitors in the council \u201ccontrol centre,\u201d Middlesbrough town officials use the technology to broadcast warnings to deviants in real-time. The crime-fighting strategy behind the \u201cspeaker cam\u201d draws upon the humiliation of being rebuked in public. A representative explained its function to the BBC in April as being to \u201cembarrass\u201d misbehavers into following the rules. Reports of wrongful chiding have been plentiful.<\/p>\n
In one case, a young mother named Marie Brewster was falsely reprimanded for littering. She recounted her experience for The Guardian. \u201cWe were in the town centre and I’d got some chips at McDonald’s for my daughter Ellie, but they were hot so I tipped them into a box and crumpled the packet up. I put it on the bottom of Ellie’s pram to take home but then heard this voice say: \u2018Please place the rubbish in the bin provided.\u2019\u201d She filed her complaint when she saw footage of the event in a televised news piece advocating the effectiveness of the new innovation in combating crime.
…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It appears that in addition to bad orthodonture, the British share a fetish for surveillance cameras. Blah Orwell rolls in his grave: Britain’s endemic surveillance cameras talk back05\/30\/2007 @ 10:56 amFiled by Will Byrne Observed by over 4.2 million closed circuit \u2013 or CCTV \u2013 cameras across the country, Britain is already the most surveilled …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1064,978,1066],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199730"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}