WASHINGTON, 31 July 2005 — Last summer, while my mother was visiting me in the United States, burglars broke into her house in rural England and emptied it of much of what she held most precious. The thieves knew just what they were after, the local bobbies told us as they searched the house for clues. They had carefully removed the most valuable pictures, ornaments and small pieces of furniture. And they were likely to be back with bigger ambitions and a bigger truck.
One of the police recommendations? Install a closed circuit television camera (CCTV) in the house in the hope of getting mug shots of the intruders next time they came to help themselves to my mother’s possessions.
Smile, you’re on Culprit Camera.
Britain has become the world’s premier surveillance society, and not just in private houses. There are more than 4 million unblinking electronic eyes gazing down on shoppers and travelers across the country. London’s railway stations are overseen by some 1,800 cameras, and another 6,000 are trained on the capital’s underground train network and double-decker buses, catching the average commuter on videotape about 300 times a day. It’s the very ubiquity of the technology that brought the world that chilling snapshot of the July 7 bombers sauntering through a station en route to mass murder, as well as the four close-ups of the July 21 terrorists fleeing their botched attempts to redouble the havoc.
Some people have agonized about the Orwellian implications of such surreptitious surveillance, indulging in eye-in-the-sky speculation about the invasion of individuals’ privacy.
Developments such as face-recognition technology and computerized tracking of out-of-the-ordinary behavior have reawakened anxieties about Big Brother. But for the most part, the British have learned to live with — and sometimes even appreciate — the ever watchful eye. And, really, it takes a certain hubris, a strain of self-importance, for Mr. and Ms. Ordinary Citizen to imagine that anyone is watching them, anyway.
Practicality aside, the philosophical argument over privacy essentially bit the dust in Britain more than a decade ago when some unforgettable footage made people I know put aside any reservations they’d had. Recorded at 15:39 on Feb. 12, 1993, and later broadcast nationwide, a grainy CCTV picture showed a trusting toddler taking a stranger by the hand and being led out of a Liverpool shopping center. Just days later, 2-year-old Jamie Bulger was found bludgeoned to death on a railway track, bringing horror to the nightly news programs. The camera hadn’t prevented the crime, but its imperfect images allowed the police to measure the comparative heights of the child and his abductors. Without them, the police might have been looking for a very different kind of culprit from the two 11-year-old boys who were later convicted in the toddler’s murder.
Over the past decade, London has become a kind of urban panopticon, though it’s not clear that the constant possibility of being observed has led to better behavior. Americans are, comparatively speaking, camera shy.
Of course, video surveillance is widely used in supermarkets and hotel lobbies, but when Washington installed cameras on the Mall in 2002, the questions sparked by civil liberties groups led to their use being strictly regulated. Following the London bombings, though, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams called for more cameras to oversee city parks and commercial districts. Other cities, like Baltimore, have begun taking advantage of federal anti-terrorism funds to increase their surveillance systems in the hope of combating street crime, too. But it’s all done against a backdrop of distrust of any kind of official observation, and dispute about how effective the cameras really are.
Still, British authorities have bought into the concept in a big way: CCTV was first used primarily in retail stores but in the ’70s and ’80s gradually moved into public spaces. In an effort to reduce robberies and assaults, London Underground has been using cameras for about three decades now. Between 1994 and 1997, 78 percent of the government’s crime prevention budget was spent on CCTV, according to scholars at the University of Hull in Britain.
And cameras have been used to monitor protests and trouble spots such as soccer games, where the police have used a mobile surveillance unit known as the Hoolivan (equipped, one can only suppose, with hoolicams), to keep an eye on rowdy fans and zoom in on known troublemakers.
Even before the July attacks, CCTV had proven its use in solving high-profile acts of terrorism.
And CCTV certainly won’t deter the committed terrorist, least of all a suicide bomber, who’s not the least bit worried about being caught after the fact, let alone about the possibility of facing earthly justice. Take a closer look at the pictures the British police released of the London bombers. It was at 21 minutes and 54 seconds past 7 a.m. on July 7 that camera 14 in Luton station captured murder in the making; before their successful suicide attacks, the four young bombers appear chillingly relaxed, nonchalant in the face of imminent death. In the July 21 shots, on the other hand, there are signs of confusion, perhaps even panic, in the expressions of the men whose plot so unexpectedly fizzled.
Those images have put faces — and now some names — to men who attempted the unthinkable. But they can’t solve the ultimate mystery behind the bombings. What on earth was going on inside those men’s heads? Had they been brainwashed, as at least one of their families has suggested? We won’t know the answer to that question until we can come up with technology that can read people’s minds.
Now that’s really something to worry about.
