Tag police

Proving once again that there is nothing that can’t be turned into a way to make a buck (or, in this case, a pound), a British company called Internet Eyes wants to launch a service where ordinary people are given access to the literally millions of CCTV feeds from all around the U.K. so that they can spend their time looking for people doing illegal things. The money is made by charging the people who own the closed-circuit cameras for this “service”, and the viewers are incented by a monthly £1000 prize given to the person who spots the most actual crimes being committed.

The U.K. winds hands-down for the sheer number of CCTV cameras installed all around the country, with the largest concentration being in London. You see a lot of different numbers bandied about, since there is no real accounting of them, but the consensus is that there are about 4.2 million cameras nationwide, and about 1.5 million of those in London alone. However, it turns out that the cameras do virtually nothing to prevent crime: of those 1.5 million cameras, about 10,000 are official police cameras, but a 2007 report showed that the rate of unsolved crimes in London hovered around 80% and that the cameras were not utilized in either preventing crime or solving cases.

This article in the September issue of Washington Monthly takes an in-depth look at the issue of CCTV monitoring in Britain. The author, Jamie Malanowski, found that the police look at the cameras less as a crime-fighting tool and more as yet another form of security theater — people, they say, are put at ease by the thought of the cameras watching over them, and that is more important than actually, you know, catching criminals and stuff. I think Malanowski too readily dismisses the potential for significant abuse with the argument that there’s no centralization of all these surveillance systems at the moment, because along comes this company who demonstrates EXACTLY how they can all be linked up through their business model, and even offers to “crowdsource” the necessary manpower to create a much more active and coordinated surveillance. Further, the recent revelation that CCTV cameras are being installed inside the homes of people who have been tagged with ASBOs seem to indicate a greater willingness on the part of local governments to use the threat of surveillance as a tool for manipulating behavior.

Jumping back over to our side of the pond, it turns out that the American city with the largest installation of CCTV cameras is Chicago. The Chicago Police have 1500 cameras, which is a drop in the bucket compared to London, but the linked article cites a U of I professor who says that the overall network of cameras is more like 15,000, which puts Chicago just about on par with London. Unlike Scotland Yard, however, the Chicago Police have a much more active program called (quite ominously) Operation Virtual Shield, and they claim that the network has “aided in thousands of arrests” (quote from WSJ article attributed to an unnamed, but official, Chicago Police spokesperson).

You can see where this is going. If the Internet Eyes program is the least bit successful in Britain, how long will it take for some Web 2.0 entrepreneur with a wad of VC cash to launch a similar thing in this country? And how easy would it be for a cash-strapped municipality like Chicago to turn over their surveillance system to a private enterprise? Now imagine the next phase, where the startup decides that they can take this to the next level by offering bigger and bigger cash prizes, and maybe even launching some viral marketing to promote the idea. Maybe even, say, staging bogus crimes to demonstrate the “effectiveness” of the service. Now, let’s say that really catches on big, and a year down the line a television or cable network buys in and starts producing a TV show featuring how ordinary people sitting at home are winning big money and “solving crimes”. How long do you think it would take before there was a CCTV camera in every imaginable corner of the United States, each one being watched ALL DAY by some teabagger-type self-proclaimed “vigilante” ratting out anyone and everyone he doesn’t like?

I give it about two years before that’s exactly what starts happening, just in time for the Republicans to pick it up and run with it as a “law-and-order” issue in the 2012 elections. And President Palin will be ALL OVER that shit, you betcha.