Overlooked - Liberty

36 Overlooked: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain
responsibility of the Information Commissioner. With data protection requirements being the only
applicable domestic law, and interpretations of the European Convention on Human Rights still
emerging, the progressive expansion of CCTV in the UK has relied more on stretching the
boundaries of what is acceptable to the public and politicians, than on meeting any testing
regulatory standards.
Public acceptance, and perceptions of the success of CCTV systems in achieving the original
objectives of managing crime, are unchanged, and support continuing use and expansion. What
has changed is the nature of CCTV itself, the technology and potential and actual applications of
camera systems far exceeding the terms of the original set of possibilities and constraints.
Early CCTV systems relied upon analogue recording on videotape, depended upon the
contemporaneous activities of control rooms employing qualified staff, and focused on providing
evidence to support prosecutions in the event of criminal activity being caught on camera. The key
issues were the quality of the image obtained, the skills and standards demonstrated by operatives,
the management of operation rooms, and controls on the retention and handling of tapes. With overt
use of cameras, the importance of signage, in notifying people in public spaces of the presence of
cameras, was also established.
Now, technology, and the uses to which it can be put, has moved on, and it is more appropriate to
talk of visual surveillance than of CCTV. The key issues retain their priority, but additional problems
are emerging. Digital recording has led to the development of face recognition systems and
biometric recognition techniques capable of incorporation into public place systems. Other physical
and behavioural recognition systems are also under development. Failures of technology,
inadequate public understanding, and the need for safeguards and protection systems become
more important as technology becomes more sophisticated, and surveillance systems can
potentially be linked digitally to other databases.
These issues are not confined to public space surveillance. Cameras as a tool of traffic management
systems are not new, and cameras are an integral part of congestion charging schemes. The move
from videotape to digital recording expands the potential of camera systems. Hailing “spies that
never sleep”, the London Evening Standard reported in March 2006 on the installation of “new digital
devices (that) run 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year and are capable of catching vast numbers
of motorists”. The system, which will reportedly involve a constant data stream from 50 cameras,
was said by the London Safety Camera Partnership to already have had a deterrent effect on motor
crime that can be measured by a reduction in road deaths 70 .
Many local authorities are considering the use of Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems, a
tool for tracking vehicles during or after a crime is in progress: initially this is being considered in
connection with serious crime, but there are no technical limits to its potential application. There is
a potential to link overt public surveillance systems with this capacity, with other digital databases
for directed surveillance. At present, ANPR systems are not controlled as directed surveillance under
the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000: this issue would have to be addressed before
these linkages could be made. However, with this general expansion of capability, regulation of the
processing and retention of data becomes ever more important.
70
Evening Standard, 15 March 2006.