Categories
Reviews Surveillance TV

Who’s Watching You?

First episode of the BBC’s documentary Who’s Watching You in which Richard Bilton uncovers the hidden world of surveillance in Britain. Quite wide ranging in its scope it takes in everything from RIPA abuses by local councils to surveillance carried out by unmanned drones.

It was a little disjointed as it tried to be balanced in its approach and show both the good and bad sides of surveillance. I think the very fact that the BBC has produced a documentary like this is great and hopefully it will spark some debate amongst the general public about the need for blanket surveillance.

Do the benefits to society outweigh the costs? I think in many cases that the answer is no. For example public CCTV which many people are in favour of because they believe that the cameras reduce incidence of crime. If we consider just in financial terms and ignore possible infringements of civil liberties does spending hundreds of millions of pounds make sense when there is evidence that they have a negligible effect on reducing crime although they are useful in catching criminals after the fact. So the question must now be are our CCTV systems in Britain worth the massive cost just to catch and convict the number of criminals it does. Could the money not be better spent by putting more policeman on the beat?

I think viewers may have had their eyes opened with the part of the programme about ANPR (Automatic number plate recognition). I’d be surprised if the majority of the public knew that ANPR even existed let alone how extensive it was and how long the data that was collected by systems across the country was retained for.

Two more episodes to follow, but on the evidence so far this seems like an interesting and important documentary.

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Surveillance Uncategorized

Camera grid to log number plates

The BBC reports that a national network of cameras and computers automatically logging car number plates will be in place within months. [via]

There is a place for it for the tracking of cars known to have been involved in crime or for the surveillance of suspects in the same way that court approved wiretaps are used to monitor suspects but not for the blanket surveillance of the entire population.

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Surveillance Uncategorized

CCTV has little effect on crime

The Guardian reports that CCTV schemes in city and town centres have little effect on crime.

The review of 44 research studies on CCTV schemes by the Campbell Collaboration found that they do have a modest impact on crime overall but are at their most effective in cutting vehicle crime in car parks, especially when used alongside improved lighting and the introduction of security guards.

CCTV has become like security theatre, the cameras’ primary purpose is to make it look like something is being done about crime in a particular location.

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Politics Terrorism Uncategorized

9-11, 7/7 UK Terror Laws May Be Scaled Back

UK Justice Minister Jack Straw today signaled that some of the terror laws enacted after 9/11 and 7/7 may be scaled back. The announcement is the first indication that Labour ministers want to scale back counterterrorism laws, amid growing consensus that recent powers have gone too far.

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Surveillance Uncategorized

America’s growing surveillance state

The Obama administration isn’t just watching rightwing extremists. It’s watching us all – and we should all be concerned

read more | digg story

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Surveillance Uncategorized

Statebook: Spoof Government site

Statebook is a spoof of Facebook which highlights what the Government knows about British citizens and what more information it wants to collect. [via]

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Security Uncategorized

Of Peanuts and Pedophiles – An analogy for stranger danger

Excellent post over at the Free Range Kids blog which draws a great analogy for stranger danger with a possible treatment for peanut allergies.

By administering first a dust-size speck of peanuts to an allergic child, and then a slightly larger speck and so on and so on, you can sometimes train the child’s immunological system to stop violently overreacting. It is wonderful to think that for some people, this may be a cure at last. But it’s also wonderful to think of the peanut story as an analogy to, of all things, stranger danger.

If a child is allowed to explore the world – a little at first, under loving surveillance, but more and more as the years go by — that child’s chances of overreacting to small, everyday risks diminishes. The child is gradually developing street smarts.

They go on to talk about the overreaction by a mother in a waiting room when her son approached an old lady to see what she was doing with her magnifying glass she had to help her read the paper. Swooping in to carry her child away from the old lady the mother said “He’s got to learn early NOT to talk to strangers.”

Security guru Bruce Schneier has a great essay along similar lines title The Kindness of Strangers

When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.

And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.

These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.

By exposing children to strangers in a safe way you can teach them to recognise the difference to put it simply between the behaviours of good strangers and bad strangers. Teaching them to fear everybody will only hinder them in the future and could lead them to worse danger should they ever get lost or separated from their parents.

Categories
Computing Security

Phishing Scams in Plain English – Video from Common Craft

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Surveillance Uncategorized

Mark Thomas: How I got my genes deleted

Mark Thomas explains how he managed to get removed from the police DNA database, after being arrested without charge, and how others can do the same.

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Security Uncategorized

Contracts for British National Identity Card System to be opened up.

Another grand IT project, another chance of fiasco

The technology needed for a national ID system may be hard to come by, says Michael Cross

The back end for the system will be divided into two contracts the larger of which is a GBP500m contract to supply basic passport systems and a separate GBP300m contract to supply the National Biometric Information Service, which will store fingerprints and facial images. The production of the card itself will be yet another contract to be contested at a later stage.

The division of the contracts this way is reportedly to reduce the likelihood of the ID card system being scrapped by a future government as the systems will be required even if only as part of the future passport service.