In an article on surveillance in the current edition of the New Statesman (2nd October 2006, p.18-21), Brendan O’Neill makes the familiar point about the UK being home to 20 percent of the world’s CCTV cameras – around 5 million. Fine. But he ends his piece with a melodramatic gush:
‘Under the tyrannical gaze of today’s CCTV, none of us is really free. Instead, we live in a permanent state of parole, where we must walk, talk and act in a certain way, or risk having our collars felt by a cop or council official alerted by the spies behind the cameras. It is time we took some action against these peeping Toms of officialdom, and told them to switch off their spycams.’
This is a knee-jerk response to a supposed Orwellian present.
The quotation above follows on from quoted comments from a youth worker in Glasgow who feels that cameras ‘disempower people from deciding for themselves how problems and issues should be resolved.’ It is not clear that everyone is in a position to take the law into their own hands; nor that they should. And good citizens who do try to intervene to prevent anti-social behaviour frequently get beaten up or worse. On the other hand, most of us recognise that there is something disconcerting about being watched without knowing who is watching you, why they might be doing so, and what they are going to do as a result.
I’m not particularly comfortable with the proliferation of cameras in Britain, but let’s not buy this easy line that if someone is watching you then you are no longer free. The situation, as always, is more complex than this. And we have to ask ‘free to do what?’ There is a difference between liberty and licence. It should hardly be a source of complaint that you are not free to commit the crimes you want to unobserved in city centres these days. Every meaningful kind of freedom has its limits. It’s when the State – or someone else - starts using these cameras for more sinister purposes that we should get worried.
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