Is Big Brother watching? (and if so, who’s keeping an eye on him?)

Closed-circuit TV screens now record the most mundane moments of our lives in the name of law and order and the fight against terrorism. Lucy Shackleton reports.

There are now 4.2 million closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras in the UK, one for every 14 people, and British analysts are predicting a ten-fold increase in the number of cameras over the next five years. Surveillance is increasing too in France. The French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie announced in July that she aimed to triple the number of CCTV cameras (currently about one million), with the aim of combating vandalism and violence.

Cameras are already widely used in Europe for traffic management and many motorists are grateful for their use in monitoring congestion and smoothing traffic flow.

Whereas once cameras might have given a fixed image of a particular section of motorway, now the controls are more sophisticated, changing the direction of view and the field of vision. They can now be linked to computers to identify stolen or speeding cars. More Orwellian is the development of ‘talking CCTV’. Officials can identify wrong-doers in public places and admonish them through a public address system. ‘Facial recognition technology’, which can match a face in the crowd with the mugshot of a known criminal, is already in use and, at the University of Maryland, experts are working on systems which can identify ‘Gait DNA’ - the specific information for the way somebody walks - and, therefore identify and track suspects across a crowded hallway.

While current developments in technology may be useful, particularly for the fight against terrorism, there are also fears about their consequences.

Richard Thomas, the UK’s Information Commissioner, last year warned that the installation of such sophisticated systems was tantamount to the population ‘sleep-walking into a surveillance society’.

According to campaigners to protect civil liberties, our right to privacy is at risk. ‘Facial recognition technology’, for example, risks making innocent members of the public, particularly from certain ethnic groups, subject to police investigation as a result of incorrect facial matches. CCTV is one of the few means of data processing where the ‘data subject’ (the person being filmed) does not have the opportunity to deny ‘the controller’, (the person or persons doing the filming), access to information. Civil liberties campaigners fear that the authorities will indulge in ‘function creep’ - using CCTV footage for something other than catching and tracking criminals.

But the spread of CCTV cameras creates new tensions over privacy. For example, CCTV cameras are deemed necessary to protect schools against arsonists and vandals but no parents want their children spied upon. Security firms now offer CCTV systems in which the cameras are usually dormant but are triggered and begin relaying images if an alarm is set and an intruder is detected.

In Brussels, Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor, whose duties include keeping an eye on whether the EU institutions respect data privacy, is putting together a series of guidelines to ensure that the CCTV cameras around the institutions do not violate privacy rights.

There are also concerns over the storage of data from CCTV cameras. Different EU states have different guidelines as to how long images may be stored. A lot depends on the purpose of the CCTV cameras. If, for example, they are to make more secure payments by credit cards, then the images have to be kept for long enough for an owner of a credit card to report possible credit card fraud. The general principle is that images should not be stored indefinitely. The better security firms can set up their data storage so that files are wiped automatically after a certain time, depending on what country they are relayed from.

Although surveys show that most Europeans believe that the advantages of CCTV outweigh the disadvantages, attitudes vary widely across Europe. A survey published in 2004 by the Centre for Technology and Society at the Technical University of Berlin, examined the differences in public opinion towards CCTV, between citizens in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the UK, Norway and Spain. Britons tended to agree with CCTV surveillance whereas Germans and Austrians were more sceptical.

The greatest variation was between attitudes toward CCTV in the open street: 90% of Londoners thought it was a ‘good thing’, compared with only 25% of respondents in Vienna. Regulating the authorities’ access to CCTV was considered ‘low priority’ in Vienna but in Budapest was considered ‘very important’, which might reflect a distrust of state surveillance from the communist era

Privacy International is a human rights group which acts as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions carried out by governments and corporations. In 2006, it published an International Privacy Survey. The study, which compares national privacy performance and surveillance levels, ranks Germany highest for having "significant protections and safeguards". Belgium, Austria and Greece were also deemed to have "adequate safeguards against abuse". The country which, according to the study, ranked worst for privacy is the UK. It was classed, alongside China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia, as a country with "endemic surveillance". France, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were described as having "some safeguards but weakened protection", while Ireland, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania and Sweden "systematically failed to uphold safeguards".

Closed-circuit TV screens now record the most mundane moments of our lives in the name of law and order and the fight against terrorism. Lucy Shackleton reports.