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Home » You can run... » London: Panopticon Cracks

London: Panopticon Cracks

Londoners are seen on the city’s vast amal­gam of sur­veil­lance cam­eras an aver­age of 300 times a day. Which means that the ter­ror­ists behind yesterday’s bomb­ings almost cer­tainly knew they’d be caught on tape — and went ahead with their attacks any­way.
cctv13.jpgBefore Britain began installing its net­work of 4.2 mil­lion spy­cams, before spy­cams were even invented, back­ers of sur­veil­lance were argu­ing that peo­ple are less likely to do hor­ri­ble things when they know they’re being watched. That’s the rea­son Jeremy Bentham in 1791 pro­posed in 1787 a “Panopticon” — a jail in which the war­den could always see what his pris­on­ers were doing. It’s the rea­son Chicago is link­ing together more than two thou­sand cam­eras into a sin­gle sur­veil­lance net­work.
But whether bad guys actu­ally act dif­fer­ently under watch is debat­able. After dozens of stud­ies of Englands Close Circuit Television spy­cam sys­tem, there is “very lit­tle sub­stan­tive research evi­dence to sug­gest that CCTV works,” the U.K.s National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders reports.
In America, some cities have reported short-​​term crime drops after the cam­eras have been installed. But English stud­ies sug­gest that these dips are tem­po­rary, at best. Why? My guess is that crooks get used to the spy­cams — and, after a while, real­ize that no one’s watch­ing, at least in real time. There are just too many cam­eras to keep track of. And the aver­age mon­i­tor jockey can only watch six to eight video feeds, for about twenty min­utes, before he starts to lose focus. It makes for an awfully weak deter­rent.
Now, there’s cer­tainly some foren­sic value to hav­ing all those elec­tronic eyes installed. As the AP, among many oth­ers, have noted, “the British capital’s ubiq­ui­tous closed-​​circuit TV cam­eras may hold the key to deter­mine who was behind Thursday’s series of ter­ror­ist strikes.” But as a pre­ven­tive mea­sure, the 7/​7 attacks have shown the spy­cams to be flimsy, at best.
If there’s a hope for surveillance-​​as-​​deterrent, it may lie in places like Chicago. Instead of forc­ing squads of mon­i­tor jock­eys to make sense of con­fus­ing, over­lap­ping video feeds, the city is installing video under­stand­ing algo­rithms into its spy­cam net­work. Come too close to a restricted gov­ern­ment build­ing, leave a pack­age on an El plat­form, or even hang out for too long on a ghetto street cor­ner and — smile! — you’re on Criminal Camera.
But it’s going to take years for the soft­ware to get installed. And no one’s really sure whether it can work on a mas­sive, city-​​wide scale. For now, we’re stuck with the same old sys­tems — and the same old results.

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July 8th, 2005 | You can run... | 39190 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2005/07/08/london-panopticon-cracks/London%3A+Panopticon+Cracks2005-07-08+14%3A11%3A30noahmax You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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  1. Fergus Doyle says:
    July 8, 2005 at 10:59 am

    almost cer­tainly knew they’d be caught on tape — and went ahead with their attacks any­way.
    You can cut the almost out of that. On my daily short walk round London I tried to count the cam­eras once and man­aged 47. Sure I missed some.

    Reply
  2. Ronald Coleman says:
    July 8, 2005 at 2:04 pm

    Yeahbut. You can­not look at the ques­tion in iso­la­tion. If upon review of the tapes there is in fact use­ful evi­dence found, and this results in a cap­ture and — if such a thing exists in Europe — a con­vic­tion, much less pos­si­bly other impli­ca­tions (i.e. with respect to a spon­sor­ing state), then will we be so quick to say these are the “same old results”?
    I’m not say­ing that will hap­pen. But isn’t it pre­ma­ture to say it won’t?
    And, by the way, how many ter­ror­ist attacks _​were_​ deterred by the cam­eras? We don’t know. How can we come to a con­clu­sion about a pol­icy or sys­tem meant to make it harder for ratio­nal peo­ple to com­mit an act when we know there is an ele­ment that will always be reck­less — does that mean there is never deter­rence?
    Based on my crack about Euro-​​justice above, I think that is the real prob­lem. Being caught, much less after the fact, is not a par­tic­u­larly high risk in a sys­tem where pun­ish­ment is inher­ently regarded as cruel and inhu­man. That is why crim­i­nals don’t mind tak­ing their chances.

    Reply
  3. David says:
    July 8, 2005 at 2:24 pm

    Isn’t this a bit of a straw man argu­ment here? The only way cur­rent video sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy could pre­vent this sort of ter­ror­ist attack would be if it were used on an ongo­ing basis to track already-​​identified sus­pects.
    From what I’ve read, British gov­ern­ment sources have now stated that the attacks were not car­ried out by any of the usual sus­pects, all of whom were sup­pos­edly already under sur­veil­lance. Perhaps if any of *them* had attempted any­thing, the London CCTV net would have enabled pre­ven­ta­tive action.

    Reply
  4. Otis Wildflower says:
    July 8, 2005 at 2:57 pm

    Besides, for sui­cide bombers, cam­eras are just more wit­nesses to their ‘mar­tyr­dom’..
    Though IDing them after the fact may help in the rooting-​​out of their asso­ciates and cobeliev­ers.
    Still, I’m sure Scotland Yard has a very good idea of who was involved, who inspired them, etc. but were pre­vented or hin­dered from act­ing by cer­tain Law Lords and politi­cians bent on auto­cas­tra­tion for the sake of polit­i­cal correctness..

    Reply
  5. Kickero says:
    July 8, 2005 at 4:04 pm

    A cam­era can only pre­vent crime if the crim­i­nal sees the con­se­quences of being caught as being greater than the per­ceived ben­e­fit of car­ry­ing out their action.
    When deal­ing with a group prone to sui­ci­dal attacks, you can see how this approach becomes inef­fec­tual.
    If the acts were com­mit­ted by a group that val­ued not-​​sacrificing them­selves to kill and maim oth­ers, then the cameras–or rather the threat of them, might have some weight.

    Reply
  6. JS says:
    July 8, 2005 at 4:45 pm

    put the cam­eras on the web .…

    Reply
  7. Clumsy_Clod says:
    July 8, 2005 at 6:02 pm

    As an employee of a com­pany that does video surveillance/​security, cam­eras are not really sup­posed to pre­vent crime, only to fig­ure out what hap­pened after the fact in order to catch the crim­i­nals or for use as lessons learned. Any sort of crime sur­pres­sion is com­pletely an added ben­e­fit. Unless there are users that are alerted through var­i­ous algo­rithms to mon­i­tor a cer­tain video feed, it’s use­less to have some­one mon­i­tor these cam­eras 24/​7. To para­phrase an old adage:
    Locks are only use­ful in keep­ing the hon­est peo­ple honest.

    Reply
  8. Adam Fields says:
    July 8, 2005 at 6:17 pm

    I don’t see any tigers around. Would you like to buy my tiger-​​repelling rock?

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  9. Ari Tai says:
    July 8, 2005 at 7:26 pm

    Seems a lit­tle research and sci­en­tific method is in order. Somebody ought to be able to fig­ure out before and after num­bers, areas where crim­i­nals knew there are no cam­eras v. next door where there were, etc. e.g. what was the rate of shoplift­ing before and after? Pickpockets? Graffitti? IRA attacks? Compare this with the expense of guards and police walk­ing a beat. And the oppor­tu­nity cost (where the money or the peo­ple would be oth­er­wise invested).
    I wouldn’t be so quick to dis­count automation.

    Reply
  10. Byron Skinner says:
    July 9, 2005 at 12:31 am

    Good Evening Friends,
    If I may, I would like to put out a reminder that this is a pub­lic site and we are not the only one who read the “Comment” area.
    Dicussing the events that took place in London yes­ter­day and other sim­i­lar events might be some what fool hardy. Any dicus­sion of where and how secu­rity works or the mechan­ics of bomb mak­ing might be taken out of con­tex and could cause some embarass­ing prob­lems.
    In everybody’s inter­est I think we should “Cool It” on these top­ics.
    ALLONS,
    Byron Skinner
    “Stewart’s Platoon”

    Reply
  11. Rufus Lee King says:
    July 9, 2005 at 2:46 am

    Too imply that sur­veil­lance cams failed to prove their worth here is like say­ing that hav­ing armed police offi­cers on guard in the World Trade Center failed to stop insane cult zealots, so lets stop using them. A fool­ish con­clu­sion.
    The fact is that cam­eras do a com­bi­na­tion of deter­rence, appre­hen­sion of crim­i­nals, detec­tion of more sub­tle kinds of crim­i­nal activ­ity, pub­lic edu­ca­tion of dan­ger­ous acts and tac­tics and many other pub­lic ser­vices.
    Cameras can stake places out with­out fatigue or the deple­tion of armed force avail­able. They can be linked and edu­cated to per­form very sophis­ti­cated kinds of scene assess­ments and recorded access. They do their assigned duty with­out cor­rup­tion or self inter­est.
    They are an irre­place­able part of law enforce­ment and secu­rity main­te­nace in both pub­lic and pri­vate sectors.

    Reply
  12. John says:
    July 10, 2005 at 2:42 am

    1. The cam­eras can (at least con­ceiv­ably) assist in the cap­ture of the sus­pects once they’re iden­ti­fied. Assuming they intend another act of ter­ror­ism, then that’s at least one bit of pre­ven­tion.
    2. I sus­pect that crim­i­nals aren’t yet very aware of how effec­tive the cam­eras may be in spot­ting their crime and pro­vid­ing damn­ing evi­dence against them before a judge or jury. A high pro­file arrest to two would go long way toward their effi­cacy as a deterrent.

    Reply
  13. Very Concerned Guy says:
    July 10, 2005 at 5:10 pm

    I see that peo­ple have been dis­cussing how cam­eras and the like might affect ter­ror­ists.
    I would like to remind you that the gen­eral pub­lic are able to read this web­site!
    Dicussing the events that took place in London yes­ter­day and other sim­i­lar events might be some what fool hardy. Any dicus­sion of where and how secu­rity works or the mechan­ics of what ter­ror­ists do might …
    … lead the gen­eral pub­lic to know things that ter­ror­ists already have stud­ied up on …
    … to be some­what more able to rec­og­nize ter­ror­ists or even to vote some lead­ers out of office for some­one who has a clue and is bet­ter at catch­ing or killing ter­ror­ists.
    So let’s all just “cool it” before peo­ple start to think.

    Reply
  14. Harold Gray says:
    July 15, 2005 at 10:37 am

    The cam­eras are a lot bet­ter than set­ting on your hands and wait­ing for some one to kill you because you have done noth­ing but talk.

    Reply
  15. Lance Winslow says:
    July 15, 2005 at 12:20 pm

    We need a Surveillance enhanced decoy rego­ni­tion sys­tem. For instance a human pur­posely avoid­ing a cam­era will look away in another direc­tion, this is were the actual cam­era should be to get a clear shot. Also when this hap­pens it reg­is­ters them as a pos­si­ble. If they attempt to avoid all the cam­eras, they are para­noid and up to some­thing? Thus cre­at­ing an anom­aly and reg­is­ter­ing as a pos­si­ble. Perhaps a thought?
    What good are cam­eras, except for hind­sight, it did not stop them. It may pre­vent a future attack, but there are more bad guys even if we catch a few assis­tants to this event. Meanwhile play­ing the video tapes on TV only gives one the impres­sion that they can­not pre­vent attacks and embold­ens those who wish us ill in the future. Video feed with­out action is sim­ply lots of data col­lec­tion for no rea­son. If you are not going to use the data in real time to pre­vent events, why bother? Now some­one will debate me here because they sell CCTV sys­tems and indeed they are pro­tect­ing thier inter­ests, fine. But the truth is with­out advanced enhanced tech­nolo­gies cam­eras alone will not pre­vent attacks. The costs to Mass Transit for ele­vated secu­rity and labor, sys­tems and instal­la­tion is pro­hib­i­tive as Mass tran­sit sys­tems oper­ate on economies of scale and when you increase costs, rid­er­ship goes down and the thing does not work. I.e. Toll Ways in the US, EuroTunnel, BART in SF, MetroRail in LA, Amtrak, I can go on; email if inter­ested in com­plete study.

    Reply
  16. Slammin Sammy says:
    July 17, 2005 at 8:53 am

    It is fool­ish and short-​​sighted to expect the cam­eras to deter ter­ror­ism, just as it is unre­al­is­tic to expect to be able to pre­vent all ter­ror­ist acts.
    In my opin­ion, the cam­eras have shown their worth by pos­i­tively iden­ti­fy­ing the per­pe­tra­tors, prov­ing to their friends, fam­ily and the world at large that these were “Jihadists” and Muslim extrem­ists, not Mossad, CIA, IRA, ETA, any­one but… et al. The Moslim world can’t hide behind the lies and con­spir­acy the­o­ries this time, and I think the wake-​​up call will be effec­tive.
    Islamic ter­ror­ism will end when it becomes a uni­ver­sally unac­cept­able thing for fer­vent believ­ers to con­tem­plate. That devel­op­ment should have a rip­ple effect on the other ter­ror­ist belief sys­tems of our time.

    Reply
  17. Ronald Coleman says:
    July 18, 2005 at 7:51 pm

    Byron, and Very Concerned Guy — this is just us peo­ple. I don’t want to burst any bub­bles but I don’t think any­one here is privy to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion nor, with all due respect, is think­ing of any­thing the AQ boys haven’t thought of.

    Reply
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