If you live in England you might be being watched by a CCTV right now. Britain is officially the most watched country in the world. There are close to four million CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) cameras, one for every 14 citizens. If you live in London, the chances are you are caught on camera about 300 times a day. England has always been ahead of the game was installed by London Transport in 1961.By the middle 90’s every major city in England had security cameras in their central areas and the government has spent 78% of its crime prevention budget on cameras. Up to £300 million pounds a year is spent on the when it comes to security cameras and surveillance.
The first such surveillance system surveillance of streets, housing estates, sports arenas, car parks and other public spaces. With numbers like this one can almost bet that someone is almost always watching you.
As sophisticated as technology has become cameras are now linked to databases set to scan and identify individual faces in crowds. For all the “eyes in the sky” crime numbers have not dropped that much. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV. Mr. Neville, who heads the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) unit, told the Security Document World Conference that the use of CCTV images as evidence in court has been very poor.
This has not detoured England from investing in the newest and most high tech cameras.
If famed author of “1984” George Orwell, a story about the government watching everything we do, could see the world today he would see that he wasn’t far off.
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