The other day, I made a joking reference to how Santa has no trouble figuring out who’s naughty and who’s nice in England each year, because of all the surveillance cameras. After receiving a roomful of blank stares, I quickly discovered that out of 11 people in the room, not one of them was aware of the number of CCTV cameras in use in the UK. Like me, everyone in the room was American, so our xenotardedness can be forgiven, but I thought it might be interesting to any other fellow ignorant Americans to take a look at the spread of Big Brother in the UK. The installation of CCTV cameras in the country began in earnest in 1993, in response to the Bishopsgate Bombing (see a full history here) and today there are an estimated 4.2 million cameras in use across the country, meaning a typical citizen is captured on camera 300 times a day (or every six seconds, according to this article). So has it been effective? Apparently not ; only 3%-4% of crimes are solved with the help of the cameras, and much like capital punishment, they fail to act as a measurably effective deterrent. So who’s watching the images from all these cameras? Until recently, apparently no-one, or at least no-one who knows what they’re doing, in any case. Extracting the images in an efficient and timely fashion for use as evidence in court has led to the system being referred to as an utter fiasco because of its poor implementation and lack of training in this regard. And what about the citizens of the UK? I’d love to hear more about the average person’s view, because although there are activist organizations like NO CCTV and Big Brother Watch, the major media never reveals a real national sentiment. A classic example stateside of course being the Bush years, when even fairly rabid Republicans would mutter incessantly about the administration, but the media portrayal of the period would reveal little of the “street sentiment” to a person abroad. My personal feeling about this kind of surveillance is that it would only be acceptable if the entire country looked like the sets in George Lucas’ film THX 1138.

On a positive note, you can use all these CCTV cameras to make your band’s video. Manchester band The Get Out Clause did this by performing in front of public cameras and then gathering the footage with “Data Protection Act” requests:

Probably the greatest accomplishment of all these cameras is that they managed to capture an eight foot tall alien on tape:

Posters like this apparently don’t do much more than being creepy…..

…because apparently the cameras on this bus in the 2005 London bombing weren’t even working:

Some images from  NO CCTV and Big Brother Watch: