I D E É S   F O R T E S    Issue 2.11 - November 1996

Making Private Eyes Public

By Stephen Graham



The recent posting of live video surveillance of Michael Portillo's house on the Internet is a good illustration of how closed circuit television (CCTV) is infiltrating every aspect of our lives. An expanding army of electronic eyes, controlled by a wide range of public and private organisations, monitor an ever larger proportion of our urban spaces. Some citizens are now under their gaze at virtually every moment of their daily existence, leaving electronic images of themselves on TV systems at home, work and play. So the next logical stage in the development of CCTV systems is to connect them all up into a single network - and nationalise it.

CCTV camera systems are no longer simple security devices for public car parks. Increasingly, they are viewed as cost-effective parts of the local policy toolkit for dealing with a range of urban problems, from cutting crime to reviving business confidence in town centres. Every large British city centre except Leeds has a wide area CCTV system, over 200 rural and small town schemes are being developed and 95% of councils are considering CCTV.

Everyone - with the exception of a few civil liberties activists - agrees that CCTV is A Good Thing. Few politicians dare to criticise it, fearing that they will be labelled as "pro-crime" by their opponents and the media. The Home Office Minister recently dubbed CCTV the "friendly eye in the sky". But at present, there are few regulations governing who can run CCTV systems and what they can do with them, bar some minor stipulations in the Data Protection Act.

Currently, a myriad of private CCTV systems, covering everything from football stadia and schools to pubs and malls, are interconnected by large public systems which "fill in" the spaces left between them. The shift to "smart" highways has inevitably involved the wiring up of roads with CCTV in the form of automated speed trap cameras. Real and mock CCTV cameras are a fast-growing element of the trend towards "fortressing" many individual houses and elite neighbourhoods.

The police integrate some of these systems to carry out particular types of tracking surveillance. By linking them with database technology, systems can be programmed to automatically scan for specified faces or car number plates, or to ensure that people are where they "belong". And it's the fact that so much of this monitoring can be done by machine rather than by humans that makes the idea of a national utility all the more plausible.

The most striking thing about the wiring up of Britain with CCTV is how similar the process is to the initial development in 19th century cities of the networked utilities that we now all take for granted - gas, electricity, water and telecommunications. While we now assume such networks to be ubiquitous and treat them as invisible supports to every aspect of our lives, this was not always so. Water, waste, energy and telegraph utilities first emerged as small, specialised networks and the larger networks eventually sprang up as complex patchworks of both public and private facilities.

If CCTV's development continues to evolve in the same way that it has in the last few months, it looks set to become the fifth utility. The danger of this is that such a network will systematise exclusion and discrimination and embed them in automated, algorithmic, invisible systems of social control. Although, given the spirit of the times, full-scale nationalisation is unlikely, a situation can be imagined in which some form of national regulator (Ofeye?) would oversee service providers from the telecom, cable, media and IT industries, offering many different services, from the simple "watch your home while you're away" to enormous networks covering all the premises of a multinational or multisite organisation.

While the "Big Brother" potential of all this is unsettling, making CCTV a utility would at least force the regulators, the CCTV industry and the media to address the very real problems of abuse, the lack of regulation and the extraordinary degree of secrecy that now exists. The endlessly-repeated maxim of the CCTV band wagon - "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" - needs to be reflected back on the industry itself, which has, so far, managed to squirm away from the scrutiny it suggests we should all welcome.

Stephen Graham works at the Centre for Urban Technology at Newcastle University. He is co-author (with Simon Marvin) of Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (Routledge).