As many as 95 per cent of CCTV systems in the UK are operating illegally, according to a CCTV expert. The revelation comes as new legislation is about to take effect in Scotland which could render even more systems illegal.
Companies whose premises have CCTV systems in operation must alert the Information Commissioner that they are gathering personal information about the people they are recording. They must also put up signs to warn the public that recording is taking place.
A new law will come into force in Scotland on 1 November requiring those operating systems on a contract to have a separate licence. The law, which is already in effect in England and Wales, does not apply to operators working directly for the company whose premises are being surveyed.
Bernie Brooks of CCTV compliance consultancy DatPro told OUT-LAW Radio that he comes across few systems that operate within the law.
“From my own my experience after personally surveying many, many hundreds of buildings, I would say probably less than five per cent are compliant,” said Brooks. “I would say that 95 per cent are non-compliant in one way, shape, form or another with the [Data Protection] Act. Obviously, that’s quite a worrying thing. If the system is non-compliant it could invalidate the usefulness of the evidence in a court of law.”
Brooks’s assessment matches that of non-profit CCTV awareness raising body Camerawatch. It said in June that its research showed that over 90 per cent of the UK’s 4.2 million CCTV systems were not compliant with the Data Protection Act.
“That has profound implications for the reputation of the CCTV and camera surveillance industry and all concerned with it,” said Camerawatch chairman Gordon Ferrie in June.
The new law in Scotland could push even more systems into illegal territory. The new licences for individuals is operated by the Security Industry Authority (SIA).
“If you operate CCTV equipment monitoring public or private space and you are monitoring members of the public then it is likely you will need a SIA licence,” said SIA head of investigations Jennifer Pattinson. “The reason for licensing is to remove the criminal element from the private security industry but also to improve levels of training and professionalism in the industry.”
People who work directly for the firm which owns the monitored premises do not need a licence. Pattinson said that this was because companies which directly employ security workers are likely to conduct the kind of thorough background checks that it does when issuing a licence.
The news that almost all systems are likely to operate illegally will raise questions about the effectiveness of CCTV.
The news follows the revelation last week that London’s dense network of CCTV cameras may not have an effect on the solving of crimes. An analysis of London’s 10,000 cameras showed that boroughs with many cameras had no better crime-solving statistics than those with few cameras.
For the people wondering about CCTV, the ‘it’s for your safety, to protect you’ etc crowd. I have addressed CCTV here.
Like I keep saying, it is about watching you. About your state keeping tabs on your movement, location and behaviour.
Yes, behaviour, software has been developed that can analyse your temperature, body language and other signs, and use that data to predict your mood. And that protects you how exactly?
Do you really think if you pretend it isn’t happening, that somehow it will cease to exist? Talk about a weak, child like view of things. ‘I’ll put my hands over my eyes and it will go away.’
It’s also called head in the sand syndrome. Here is another article showing you the potential of this ‘protective’ technology.
Before you dive in, remember this. This is regarding China. China is a communist dictatorship. Not a democracy. They execute those who are in disagreement with the states’ policies. They enforce population control. The one-child policy that encourages families to kill baby girls until they get a boy. They harvest organs of those they execute and sell them to the West.
But now comes the latest occasion for these comments. Next Magazine, a weekly out of Hong Kong, reports that the latest delicacy in Communist-occupied China is the expertly prepared corpse of a baby. No, you’re not going crazy; you did read what you thought I just said. People in Red China now are cannibalizing humans. In China, you can even buy choice body parts from the hospitals.
The story appears in the Epoch Times, which says that Next Magazine got wind of it in Taiwan, where a businessman hosted a banquet. There, a servant named Liu from Liaoning Province on the mainland inadvertently revealed the cannibalistic practice and her intention to return to participate in it for health reasons. The Taiwanese women present at the banquet were horrified.
The magazine asked the servant to escort a reporter to a location where he could see a baby being prepared and she did so. The reporter saw a woman chopping up a male “fetus” and making soup from the placenta. The butcher told observers, “Don’t be afraid, this is just the flesh of a higher animal.”
Epoch Times says that on March 22, 2003, police in Bingyan, Guangxi Province seized 28 female babies smuggled in a truck from Yulin, Guangxi Province going to Houzhou in Anhui Province. The oldest baby was only three months old. The babies were packed three or four to a bag and many of them were near death No one claimed them.
On the morning of October 9, 2004, someone rifling through the garbage on the outskirts of Jiuquan city in the Suzhou region, found dismembered babies in a dumpster. There were two heads, two torsos, four arms, and six legs. According to the investigation, the corpses were no more than a week old and they had been dismembered after cooking.
Red China does have laws that prohibit the eating of human flesh, but it also has a law that limits each couple to only one child. The law is strictly enforced, and it motivates couples to kill girl babies until they get a boy. Second babies and so on are forcibly aborted. The result is many baby corpses that can be cooked and eaten.
Now, to the main event. I encourage you to read the article in its entirety. I will insert a selection of quotes here and add comments in order to explain the common elements between China’s actions and the UK governments actions.
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.
Britain has over 4 million CCTV cameras.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.
The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.
Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.
Do you think it would be acceptable for your government (yours, as in it belongs to you, not the other way around) to maintain tight controls over you?
“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.
That is what this is about. Control, not protection. Or when they use the term protection, they mean protecting themselves from you.
But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.
…
Some civil rights activists contend that the cameras in China and Britain are a violation of the right of privacy contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
My emphasis. I want you to realise something. ‘Human rights’, ‘freedom’, ‘privacy’ are only concept like everything else. They can be taken away from you. It isn’t like the laws of physics. Just read history to learn of the atrocities committed. If the people allow it, they can be forced into complete slavery and nothing will stop them. You cannot rely on the concept of human rights to justify your apathy, you must be willing to fight for them. You must be willing to enforce those rights.
Governments want to track the population. They want to know everywhere you go and everything you do. They want to know who you talk you, what you look up on the internet, what emails you send, what food you buy, what films you watch. Everything.
The idea behind big government is unlimited power. They can only gain this power by taking that power away from the people. That can only happen if the people allow it. That’s what fear is for. To scare the population into giving up their liberties.
The government seeks control over the population by controlling the populations assets. In this technological age, data is power. (Knowledge is power). The massive centralisation of data will be further enabled by ID cards. Biometric data belongs to you. It is as private as the thoughts in your head. The government wants this from you.
There is something of a continual debate here in the UK regarding CCTV. On one side are those who see the technology as a benefit, to catching criminals etc, they usually have had something happen to them, or know someone who has so it is a lot more personal. Otherwise they just use the ‘well if you have nothing to hide…’ argument.
Your private life on show to civil servants? More bureaucrats, local and national, having access to your personal information - through data-sharing and data-matching bet- ween government databases, through access to your telephone and email data, through the national database that will lie behind a “smart” identity card. Your health records on tap to researchers by ministerial order - your doctor can’t say no. Local authorities, even health trusts, able to put you under covert surveillance.
I am firmly in the ‘NO CCTV’ camp. The idea that the ever-growing parasitic corporate government and its equally corrupt subsidiaries have eyes (and now ears and mouths) watching almost every square metre of Britain does not encourage the concept of a free people. Most people who bleat on about CCTV have little or no idea about how prevalent it is, who has access to it and the potential for function creep.
I am going to address some of these issues now.
Prevalence.
Britain is now widely known as a surveillance society[1], it contains 20% of the worlds CCTV cameras. Quite high when you consider the fact that the UK only makes up 0.164% of the planets inhabited space.[2]
People say it lowers the crime rate. Well it doesn’t, the crime rate is rising.[3] (There are, to be fair, a large number of factors involved when producing the crime rate, as it represents a reflection of the state of society in general, I will deal with this later).
The first CCTV was more or less useless, with low resolution black and white cameras so bad they couldn’t spot the difference between a globalist and a human being. But it accomplished what it was really intended for, which was getting the people used to being watched. That means all of us. By placing cameras all over the place, the weak-minded public were brainwashed by the government into believing it is there to prevent crimes against them, like robbery, rape etc.
In some situations it has helped with evidence, but that is almost inconsequential in the scheme of things. The psychological consequence of the people thinking they are being ‘protected’ serves to actually disarm and weaken the public. By thinking someone or something else will do the protecting, the people lose the ability of doing it themselves. This is part of a larger plan to render you, the people of the UK, completely harmless and infantile, ready to run to your daddy government for any little reason.
Your complete submission and reliance on the government is the big picture here. Part of the justification of placing ever-more CCTV about the place is the idea of ‘combating crime’. As I said earlier, crime is a side effect of anti-social social policies. Encouraging chaos and fear is part of the Marxist governments idea of becoming your ’saviour’.
It is the classic problem-reaction-solution paradigm. If you don’t know what that is, I suggest you read up on it as it is THE modus operandi of those who seek to enslave you.
So, now the ignorant, frilly entertainment loving, apathetic public have been desensitised to the point of attacking those who question the need or the real motives behind CCTV. the government is liberated to begin upgrading those CCTV with microphones and loudspeakers. Now they need to listen to your conversations and bark orders, 1984 style at you because you obviously cannot behave according to the state’s rules.
Remember what I said about infantilism? Now you need to be told to pick up your rubbish, you bad child!
And while they’re at it, you wouldn’t mind if they installed x-ray scanners in lamp posts to see through your clothes, who knows, you might be a terrorist. How about smart software to be able to judge and predict your behaviour from those warm cuddly cameras you love so much.
If you aren’t doing anything wrong how can you argue against them? It’s a classic excuse based on a a set of rules that have been arbitrarily defined by those who seek to dissolve your freedoms. They weren’t set by you or me. How about the idea of putting cameras in your house, in every room?
Oh you wouldn’t like that. ‘But my house is my private space, the street isn’t’.
No it isn’t, but the street doesn’t belong to anyone, or it belongs to everyone. It sure as hell doesn’t belong to the government so what makes you think it’s okay for them to drench the country in CCTV? How about if private companies starting putting them up on every street, selling the data they’re collecting on you. Using it to judge your shopping habits so they can market more crap to you maybe?
By the way, I almost forgot. Just because the state administers the cameras, don’t go thinking for one second that all sorts of private firms don’t have easy access to it.
Do you want CCTV images of yourself sold to broadcast TV and video companies, without your permission, and without paying any royalties to you ? Where CCTV images are used as evidence of crime, are there proper procedures to prevent unauthorised editing or tampering with the evidence ? Is it right that CCTV systems can automatically tag your behavior in a public place as “suspicious” ?
What are the criteria for removal of suspects images in facial recognition or video ID parade databases ? Are they entered for the duration of an investigation, or are you branded as a suspect for life, in the same way as DNA databases seem to be abused ?
Will the results of facial recognition analysis e.g. number of women, numbers of whites, asians or blacks walking down the street, be sold to marketing companies, or handed over to racists ?
How do you know these things won’t happen? Because the communist daddy state said so? Ah diddums, the government has already done back-room deals to sell the data it collects about you to private firms.
The fact that the government has decided that everyone needs to be watched all of the time should make you think.
Think. The government wants to watch us all because it considers us all a potential threat. It wants to be able to watch and study our every movement, not because we are free individuals in OUR country, but because we are sheep in THEIR country. They have no trust of us.
But their job isn’t to trust us or not. Their job is to serve us. That’s it. Anything else they are doing has ulterior motives. It is that simple. You can try and avoid it all you like. ‘Oh the government wouldn’t do that, bleah bleah fucking bleah.’
You limp-wristed morons. Get a fucking spine. Unless you don’t mind being enslaved, with technology that can scan your face from a distance, track your movement through the city, link you with your purchases, spending habits, track everyone you come into contact with, analyse your walking pattern, see through your clothes, build an unbelievably detailed profile of you (which the state needs for what exactly, apart from selling it on?) and all of this to protect you? From what, terrorists? The same ‘terrorists’ who have the wonderful good luck of having this CCTV constantly fail whenever they were out there doing their alleged terrorist stuff. Seriously, 400,000 cameras in London and all over the Underground, and none of them were working?
Maybe if they were working they would have seen this:
Bruce Lait, in a tube carriage in which an explosion occurred:
As they made their way out, a policeman pointed out where the bomb had been. “The policeman said ‘mind that hole, that’s where the bomb was’. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don’t remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag,” he said. [Cambridge News]
Maybe they would have been able to show the same things this man saw:
Which brings up something else about CCTV. As the government markets their public surveillance network as an infallible crime-rate smashing-super-good-great-thing (which never seems to fucking work when it’s convenient for the government), the people grow to believe in it’s ‘truth’ completely (that is part of the psy op). So showing one frame of so-called footage is enough to convince the public that whatever the police say must be true, they’re got a picture! Sure it’s distant and grainy, and actually looks like it’s been forged, but it must be true! I mean, it’s on the TV!
Think.
Don’t you feel safe?
They want to make us feel like we don’t need our freedoms so we won’t complain when the government takes them (for our safety of course). It wants to administer your life, your money, your freedom to you when it sees fit. If it sees you and the body language recognition software flags you as a potential pain in the states’ arse, it can just send the police round, or get more invasive surveillance put on you. Technically you could be a terrorist. What I mean by that is, someone who incites terror in the scum bags running this country. (Like those who want their freedom and their country back from the globalists).
There is only so much power in any society. Societies always begin with the people having it, as societies are built up around communities, and for those communities to accept the idea of a council, the council must agree to serve the people.
This current UK government is Marxist/ Communist. This is apparent in its continuing attempts to power grab everything from the people, to control everything. Like I said earlier, it does this by convincing you idiots that you need the State to do these things because you can’t do it for yourself.
Wake up people, please. Time is running, CCTV is a pinprick compared to other issues I have become aware of. But you have you understand the State is dedicated to scaring the shit out of you, then attempting to portray itself as your friend as it swoops in to ‘protect’ you from whatever fear-mongering IT’S been doing to you. But you have to give up some of your power as people. Every time. Just a bit more here, a bit more there.
