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July 08, 2005
London surveillance
London surveillance: The Wall Street Journal reports that closed-circuit video technology will be useful in generating leads on yesterday's mass murders: "The British capital has more surveillance cameras monitoring its citizens than any other major city in the world. The highly visible gadgets are posted on the corners of many buildings, on new buses and in every subway station. Since 2003, the license plate of every car driving into central London during weekdays is filmed as part of a program to reduce traffic congestion. London charges a fee to cars and also uses the films to catch and fine cheats. In all, there are at least 500,000 cameras in the city, and one study showed that in a single day a person could expect to be filmed 300 times." It's usually too expensive to pull coordinated detail out of this loose network of cameras -- too much info has problems, just as not enough info does -- but in a case like this, these video archives become useful resources when identifying the anonymous attackers.
Posted by John Dowdell at July 8, 2005 11:43 AM
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Comments
What's interesting is that the template for the mainstream media is that despite being lauded as the "Land of the Free", US citizens face ever increasing encroachments on their personal freedom - many due to new rights granted to "Big Brother" by the Patriot Act.
Rarely are stories about the Patriot Act and persoanl freedoms in the USA put in the context of what's described above.
Posted by: Alex Sherwood at July 8, 2005 12:51 PM
I know it's a popular campaign now to anti- government consolidation of its databases, but the greater evolution we'll need to make anyway is with private, individual, decentralized use of such databases and viewing mechanisms.
George Orwell may have warned of "Big Brother" (with which we were programmed during school), but he never anticipated Googling a date or dealing with minicams.
Posted by: John Dowdell at July 8, 2005 02:30 PM
It seems that 'big brother' technology might have 'found' the bad people involved in this terrorist act.
Posted by: Patrick Whittingham at July 13, 2005 05:43 AM