BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING...

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Walk out of the house and a street CCTV system may be watching. Cameras can pick you up driving to work or on the train, your office may be under surveillance and your bank certainly will. Go to a shopping centre and your face will be stored dozens of times. Your local restaurant will record you picking up your takeaway and the leisure centre will snap you working out. Surveillance cameras were first introduced to Britain in the 1950s when they were used to control traffic in major cities and towns. The use of CCTV really expanded in the late 1990s with the deregulation of planning processes, which made it easier for councils, shops and businesses to install cameras. As crime, and fear of crime, became a major issue, John Major's government gave millions of pounds in Home Office grants to police forces and councils to install CCTV systems. Big grants for surveillance systems have continued under Tony Blair, particularly since the terrorist attacks of 11 September.

Barry Hugill, of the human rights group Liberty, said, "It has been the catch-all solution for government, councils and police - you get criticised for rising crime, so you put in some CCTV. It is something visible you can point to when you are asked what you are doing about crime. The two assumptions about CCTV have been that it reduces crime and that if you are not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about. This is incredible really, because there is no real evidence that it does reduce crime, and in Europe and America there has been real debate about people's right to privacy. Britain has more cameras than any other, anywhere else, but we are not even having a debate about the rights and wrongs of it." Countries such as America, Canada and Germany have strict rules on where CCTV systems can be installed and how images of the public can be used. But it was only with the introduction of the Data Protection Act in 2000 that any legal controls for CCTV were put in place in Britain.

Under the law, there should be signs informing people that they are being filmed, and giving details of how to exercise the right to see footage of your own image. Before installing systems, councils or businesses must have a "legitimate basis" for cameras, such as preventing theft. This means, for instance, that a council using CCTV to protect a municipal car park can only use the footage to help in a criminal investigation and should not pass it on to a third party, such as a newspaper, or use it for other reasons. But civil liberties groups say regulation of CCTV is not strong enough and the rules are regularly broken. Liberty estimates that up to 70% of surveillance systems in Britain are illegal in some way.

Professor Clive Norris, who carried out the latest assessment of CCTV coverage in Britain, said, "Often there is no sign that you are being filmed and no information on who to contact to see your footage. In some cities CCTV systems are being used as a way of social cleansing. A group of teenage boys in a shopping centre will be followed round by cameras simply because of their age and gender, not because they are doing anything wrong. Security guards will spot a tramp on camera and eject him from the centre because he looks scruffy. The argument always goes that individual privacy has to be weighed against the benefits to the community, but privacy should be an absolutely fundamental right."

There have been reports of security companies selling CCTV footage of people having sex in the street and last year, a British man was awarded £7,800 in damages after footage of him attempting suicide was given to newspapers and television companies. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Geoffrey Peck's privacy had been violated after Brentwood Council in Essex passed film from their surveillance cameras to the press. Mr Peck had tried to slash his wrists in Brentwood high street in 1996. He had become severely depressed after losing his job and learning his partner was terminally ill. He was found and led away by police but not charged with any crime. However, Mr Peck said his life was "shattered" when the council used the footage to publicise the success of CCTV cameras in preventing crime.

Even the crime reduction argument is now being seriously questioned. A Home Office study in 2002 found that more than half the CCTV schemes in city centres, housing estates and public transport have had no effect on the crime rate. Other research concluded that street lighting was seven times more effective than cameras in reducing crime. Mr Hugill said, "I think if you asked most people, they would rather see a bobby on the beat than have cameras trained all over the street."

The Government is planning the surveillance of all children, including information on whether they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Plans include a £224 million database tracking all 12 million children in England and Wales from birth, but critics say the electronic files will undermine family privacy and destroy the confidentiality of medical, social work and legal records. Doctors, schools and the police will have to alert the database to a wide range of "concerns" and two warning flags on a child's record could start an investigation.

There will also be a system of targets and performance indicators for children's development. Children's services have been told to work together to make sure that targets are met. Child care academics, practitioners and policy experts attending a conference at the London School of Economics will express concern about how the system will work. The Children Act 2004 gave the Government the powers to create the database but experts fear that genuine cases of neglect will be missed in the mass of detail.

Dr Eileen Munro, of the LSE, said that if a child caused concern by failing to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include subjective judgments such as "Is the parent providing a positive role model?", as well as sensitive information such as a parent's mental health. Also included would be the consumption of five portions of fruit and veg a day. Arch, the children's rights organisation, was also worried saying, "Government databases have a dreadful record."

It was revealed this year that more than half a million children had been entered on a DNA database created to record known offenders, even though many had never been charged with an offence. The Department for Education and Skills said, "Our proposals balance the need to do everything we can to improve children's life chances whilst ensuring strong safeguards to make sure that information stored is minimal, secure and used appropriately. Parents and young people will be able to ask to see their data and make amendments and will retain full rights under the Data Protection Act." (Source: Daily Telegraph, Jun/06)

A surveillance operation in parts of Birmingham with large Muslim populations has been halted after it was revealed the move was linked to counter terrorism. Bags have now been placed over more than 200 cameras in the Washwood Heath and Sparkbrook districts. They were part of the Project Champion scheme, paid for from a Home Office counter terrorism fund but officials behind the project said it would have deterred various crimes. Steve Jolly, one of those who first began campaigning about the cameras, said people had been "misled".

He said, "Now the truth is out, there's a lot of anger. Certain communities have been ring-fenced and saturated with cameras, making it impossible for you to get in or out without being tracked. What's happening here is the government is spying on its citizens covertly in some cases, without their knowledge or consent, and it's a gross invasion of privacy and civil liberties." Mr Jolly described the latest developments as "a victory" and "a start" but added, "It's not the conclusion, though. The cameras are already in now. There's going to be a lot of reluctance to have them taken away."

A total of 218 cameras, some of them hidden, were put up in various locations across the areas. Of those, 106 were Automatic Number Plate Recognition devices which were able to record car registrations as they moved around the areas. In a statement in April, the Safer Birmingham Project (SBP) said it had received £3m from the Home Office to improve community safety and reduce crime in the Washwood Heath and Sparkbrook wards. However, it has since emerged the cash had come through the Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) fund, which is administered by the Association of Chief Police Officers' (Acpo).

The SBP, a partnership of the police, the city council and other agencies, said, "Although the counter-terrorism unit was responsible for identifying and securing central government funds and has overseen the technical aspects of the installation, the camera sites were chosen on the basis of general crime data, not just counter-terrorism intelligence."
SBP said a number of concerns had been raised and it wanted to give people the right to express their views. Respect Party councillor Salma Yaqoob said people had lost faith in the authorities.

She said, "In terms of reassurance it's going to take a lot more than plastic bags. The residents have lost faith with the authorities for their sneaky handling of the way they went about this and will not be reassured until they have been told the locations of the hidden cameras too." The partnership said it would not be placing bags on the 72 hidden cameras because it does not want to reveal their location but it added none of the cameras would be used until the public have been fully consulted.

Roger Godsiff, Labour MP for Hall Green, said, "I put down an early day motion in the House of Commons expressing my concern about the way it had been handled and saying that there should be proper public consultation before the cameras are activated. If that's what the police have now decided to do, I applaud them for doing so." Ayoub Khan, Birmingham City Council's community safety portfolio holder, said a detailed consultation ought to have taken place before the cameras were installed. He said the partnership was now reviewing why this had not happened.

The camera idea was first proposed by Home Office counter-terrorism officers in April 2009, Mr Khan said. He added, "I was informed that this was to attack anti-social behaviour and various other criminal behaviour with a bolt-on of some terrorism activity detecting too." Mr Khan said because of the way it had been presented the idea received the support of many councillors, but explained that he had no idea that so many cameras would be installed in only a few Birmingham wards or that they would be "circling in" the community living there. (Source: BBC News, Jun/10)