Big Brother is Getting Closer

Tuesday, 27th March, 2007  - Richard Farmer 
The ability to discover which street a person walked down five years previously, which pub they stopped at and what they drank is closer than we think. The Royal Academy of Engineering yesterday released its report "Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance - Challenges of Technological Change" noting that digital surveillance means that there is no barrier to storing all CCTV footage indefinitely.
Ever-improving means of image-searching, in tandem with developments in face and gait-recognition technologies, allows footage to be searched, said the Academy, for individual people. "This will one day make it possible to 'Google spacetime', to find the location of a specified individual at some particular time and date."
As if to reinforce the point that Big Brother is getting closer, Britain’s police chiefs reacted to the report by revealing they wanted to be able to easily download picture data from privately installed cameras to aid criminal investigations. They found in an 18-month study with the Home Office that new digital systems came in too many formats. "We want a generic technology that allows us to download images easily and quickly," Deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire Graeme Gerrard told the Daily Telegraph. "All those who don't conform would have to change", added Gerrard, who is the CCTV spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
The Royal Academy of Engineering's report calls for greater control over the proliferation of camera surveillance and for more research into how public spaces can be monitored while minimising the impact on privacy. Citizens should be able to access information from local CCTV cameras, if only to find out who had been studying the pictures. "If we are being watched, then we need to be able to watch the watchers," said Ian Forbes, one of the report's authors told Reuters. "I may have nothing to hide, but it is still my business. We want technologies which allow us to be both secure and private."
The RAE report argues methods of surveillance need to be explored which can offer the benefits of surveillance whilst being publicly acceptable. This will involve frank discussion of the effectiveness of surveillance. There should also be investigation of the possibility of designing surveillance systems that are successful in reducing crimes whilst reducing collateral intrusion into the lives of law-abiding citizens.
The Home Affairs Select Committee of the British House of Commons will soon begin an examination of the growing surveillance society. Britain is said to be the most watched country in the world, with more than four million CCTV cameras, or one for every 14 people.
In Australia the Australian Law Reform Commission is currently reviewing privacy laws. In its submission to that inquiry the Federal Privacy Commissioner acknowledges that current principles under the Privacy Act are based on the OECD data protection guidelines that were developed almost 30 years ago At that time: • personal computers were scarce, and the internet did not exist
• there was little of biometric technology beyond ink fingerprints
• international counter-terrorism initiatives were not the focus they are today
• surveillance systems like closed circuit television and global positioning systems were not as widespread and
• mobile phones and camera phones were a distant prospect

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