The UK is for some reason very surveillance-friendly. CCTV's were prevalent there much earlier than most other countries.
I guess since Orwell was British they think they are on top of this.
I guess since Orwell was British they think they are on top of this.
I don't think Orwell has anything to do with this. British society is very different to, say, American society in many ways. History will probably help explain things.
Like many European feudal societies, there's a long-standing expectation that government is expected to care for the citizens. In spite of how individuals acted, there have been laws to protect peasants from predatory landlords (even if their application wasn't perfect). In addition, it was the role of the local "government" / community to care for their homeless for a very long time.
What I'm trying to get at is that the suspicion of government is not really there in the way that it exists in the USA. This allows the government to hold vast powers and, for better or worse, be trusted that it's not going to abuse that (against its own citizens at least).
On CCTV specifically: in the modern day, in practice, most CCTV is concentrated in London. This means that the vast majority of the UK is not really affected by this surveillance. Also, I do recall most CCTV is privately operated, not state, and most organisations delete it within a few weeks to save money.
What this means is that, in practice, you don't have a Bourne Identity situation where the police can watch a live feed of someone running through London. They have to acquire that information afterwards through a series of requests and subpoenas to different companies.
In practical terms, the numbers are pumped up by things like corner shops having shitty live feed cameras with limited recording capability and no networking to deter shoplifters when there’s a single shopkeeper who can’t see the whole shop from where they stand due to tall shelves and cramped spaces. Yet it seems common for Americans to imagine this as Enemy of the State style omniscience where the authorities can view anything happening in London at any time. It’s got no connection to reality.
Your local police own several hundred cameras directly. [2]
Your police can request access to any public facing camera at any time. There does not exist a right to decline. No warrant process exists. [3]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/may/22/localgovernm...
[2]: https://www.dyfed-powys.police.uk/foi-ai/af/accessing-inform...
[3]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
The third article says pretty much the opposite of what you state: there is absolutely a right to decline a law enforcement request (under GDPR) and that there is a warrant process ie a court can oblige you to.
I can't access the second article but I don't live in Wales so they aren't my local force.
I hate to say it but "not all cameras." A relatively small number of CCTV cameras focused in areas intended to catch and deter specific petty crimes is hardly Enemy of the State stuff, is it? In fact, if you polled the populated, you'd probably not get a lot of objections here.
> Your local police own several hundred cameras directly. [2]
Again, not all cameras. This is really only strengthening my argument about the patchwork nature of CCTV and the practical reality that it's not the all-encompassing Bourne Identity live feed tracking you round the country.
> Your police can request access to any public facing camera at any time.
I already addressed this: this would usually be an after-the-fact tape, not a live feed. They can't just take the tape because that's not their property. They don't necessarily have to tell you because the tape isn't your property either. Does the general public necessarily object to the police being able to use available evidence to solve and prosecute crimes?
https://securityjournaluk.com/public-cctv-cameras-tops-10000...
Boroughs alone operate over 20,000 cameras.
https://clarionuk.com/resources/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-in...
How many more cameras until you feel safe?
Even if one property owner declines to hand over cctv footage and somehow the search warrant is denied (which basically never happens) then there are probably several other camera owners who will provide footage.
Everywhere you go, everything you do is on film. The police have access to it either in real time or by request form.
And yes, those cameras are used to stop crimes.. like not picking up after your dog. Obviously this intrusion is necessary for your safety and security. How else can the police provide such valuable services?
> Your police can request access to any public facing camera at any time. There does not exist a right to decline. No warrant process exists. [3]
from
[3]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
That page is about companies sharing CCTV with law enforcement by choice, not about being forced to do so?
Secret services got their start in Elizabethan (I) England and it does have something to do with British history and that history was the bloody civil war between the factions. Spying on citizens as a matter of state security came into being during her reign, as a natural product of a society divided against itself, sometimes even in the same (extended) family.
> European feudal societies .. government is expected to care for citizen
Feudal societies had no notion of “citizen”. Nor was the “government” ever tasked with ‘caring’ for the poor. That, as a matter of fact, was the domain of the church and in England the monasteries (that were destroyed during the above mentioned bloody civil war that raged for a long time). After the demise of the monastic system of caring for the poor, and after the lands of the church were confiscated and parceled out to the winning nobility, which gave rise to the British “manor”, for the first time the notion of poor houses became central. And that is when the post-feudal (new order) British Capitalist system gave rise to charities, poor houses, debtors prisons, etc.
The other historic “British” factor here is the propensity of the English for intrigue. They spy the heck on each other because they know themselves.
I didn't say this at all, so please don't put words in my mouth.
> Secret services got their start in Elizabethan (I) England and it does have something to do with British history
This simply isn't true. Spying goes back a long way for various reasons, both state-security related and religiously-motivated.
> Feudal societies had no notion of “citizen”.
You're correct. I should have said "subject."
> Nor was the “government” ever tasked with ‘caring’ for the poor.
Churches were part of this but the monarch was either the head of the church (post-Tudor) or were at least God's anointed Prince of that domain. There are many recorded cases of people suing their local lords for abusing their position, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. The fact is, there were clearly laws on the books to allow the big government to protect people from the small government. These cases predate Tudor England.
> which gave rise to the British “manor”, for the first time the notion of poor houses became central.
So you're saying that the state did take a responsibility to care for people.
> The other historic “British” factor here is the propensity of the English for intrigue.
This isn't exclusive to the English at all. The later British Empire became famously good at spying (all the way up to WW2 and beyond) but it's not unique to the British. Besides, the Byzantine Greeks and the Russian Empire are historically more renowned for intrigue and internal plotting. But again, they weren't the only ones doing it.
Third party here, but this reads in line with what you wrote imo.
You also said feudal governments were responsible for caring for the poor. No one is putting words in your mouth - just correcting your fictional “history”.
Are specific words important or not? You seemed quite blasé about it at first (insinuating something I clearly did not say) but now you find the exact words very important.
You're correct in that they're not direct analogues, as is the case when you go back in history, but I don't see as much difference between secret services and spying, or local guards and police forces, bar the legal and societal structures they operate within. The purposes of the organisations tend to map onto one another.
> You also said feudal governments were responsible for caring for the poor.
And now, suddenly, words are no longer important. I said there was an "expectation" that this happened and gave examples. This is not a legal responsibility but a societal expectation. I could point out that church leaders were exhorting monarchs to fall in line with Papal doctrine to save the souls of their subjects. Again, expectation to care for your subjects in a spiritual sense.
At this point, however, we're arguing specifics, of which you seem to have little idea, given you're nitpicking without any context in your attempt to "correct" me.
We've gone far from the initial point which was that British people do not have an inherent distrust of the state. The expansion of CCTV must be seen in that context.
Cheaper than paying off-duty cops to watch your customers.
Calling private CCTV Orwellian seems like a confused metaphor. The CCTV in 1984 was run by the totalitarian government.
Yet in the free very surveillance-unfriendly haven of the world, everyone has a camera recording their front porch and uploading the video to amazon... (and then posting the video of any person who dares walk past their front door on the internet)