Its always been the job of society to be rational about this and look at the cost of further infringement upon your liberties vs the marginal utility offered by a tool which enhances crime fighting ability.
Drones can circle a city for days and with high resolution sensors can not miss a thing.
This isn't just a more advanced CCTV, it's a near-infallible machine.
Why not?
Use some common sense: CCTV cameras aren't ubiquitous. There are gaps in coverage all over the place.
Possibly even 200yds!
While we're on camera most of the time in London, we can be pretty confident that the sheer hassle of obtaining footage and cost in processing them keeps the police from abusing it all that much...
You don't need total coverage. You just make sure some cameras have calibrated timestamps and automatic number plate recognition. That allows you to build up a sequence of cctv coverage of suspects.
The UK has one fifth of installed CCTV in the world. With that many cameras they pretty much are ubiquitous.
EDIT: The link above is a Reuters reports (Uploaded in 2011) on London's use of Ipsotek's Tag & Track software (now owned by BAE Systems http://www.baesystems.com/page/BAES_026518)
EDIT 2: Sorry, apparently not owned by BAE Systems, they're partners.
Yes it is, that's quite common in Britain, or at least London, because CCTV coverage is so dense there. To turn your argument inside out, drone deployment is temporary whereas CCTV deployment tends to be permanent.
The vast majority of them are low quality privately operated cameras that are not networked in any way, and with varying degrees of retention - all the way down to no retention at all.
It is incredibly hard for the police to trace someone based on CCTV even after the fact - even after the 7/7 bombings it took an immense amount of manpower to stitch together the movements of the bombers.
So while in theory, yes, you could be traced that way, in reality police often don't even bother gathering CCTV tapes from the cameras they know cover a relevant area unless it's for particularly serious crimes and they lack other evidence because of the cost involved.
In the central core of London, it's a little bit different in that there are sections that are well covered by police operated CCTV, but even then "well covered" usually means that operators decide what to focus on and zoom in on, so ongoing coverage of a specific location might be spotty.
None of these problems will last very much longer, in the grand scheme of things.
Westminster and City are probably the two small parts of London where there'd be a reasonable chance of "total surveillance".
But even Westminster is also chock full of CCTV dead zones due to the narrow streets and complicated building facades with lots of nooks and crannies - it might be "easy" to get coverage of people moving along the streets in Westminster, but incredibly hard to eliminate opportunities for people to hide away.
Here is where the discussion jumps the shark.
This is about forensic and surveillance technology advancement vs civil liberties, the expectation and right to privacy, and the abuse of new powers.
> ..tool for when crime happens but what do we do when it's guaranteed to be abused?
Law enforcement would love to be able to record all phone calls and keep comprehensive videos of every event.
Going backwards, people have argued for having people fingerprinted by default vs only when being processed during a criminal investigation.
In each case, it is the acceptance that while the tools are valuable, we draw the line saying that :
"Yes, the marginal utility of having 1 drone flying or 1 or a 100, vs their impact and chance for abuse is something we are uncomfortable with."
The question I suspect that is worth looking at, which I don't have data for, is the value of increased CCTV/Monitoring technology in solving crimes.
I'd rather offer a Stradivarius to someone who can get the most out of it, vs someone who can occasional hit the right notes from it.
An example of one benefit to having CCTV spread out over downtown is that you can relieve some police presence and spread them out to places that aren't. Another benefit would be that crimes committed in downtown would be recorded forcing criminals to wear masks rather than relying on the shock of the incident to make the victim forget details about the perpetrators features. If you have criminals walking around wearing masks then they can be quite easy to spot.
Another benefit would be in the case of this bombing. When I first heard of the bombing I was pretty interested, I wanted to know who put the bombs there, when and then who they were and what their problem was. I figured well they'll pull up CCTV and we'll all know what happened.
Instead police are being relied on to manage all of it in the moment.
It isn't a violation of freedom to be filmed in public, that's completely legal. People just start getting up in arms about it when it's a service offered by the american government for some reason. Any private individual is allowed to film for who knows what reason.
Somewhere else in this thread people were talking about drones. But that can happen right now, through private surveillance firms that would then sell information to the government. But then you're just lining some CEOs pocketbook instead of having a surplus. How is that a benefit?
"legal" is hardly the same thing as "[not] a violation of freedom"; in fact they're often orthogonal.