Observed by over 4.2 million closed circuit – or CCTV – cameras across the country, Britain is already the most surveilled industrialized state in the Western world. It was recently estimated that the average Briton is captured by electronic eyes more than 300 times on a typical workday.
Yet the country’s surveillance network, which boasts one camera for every fourteen citizens, is no longer merely facilitating observance: It has now begun talking back. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984, loudspeakers in one small-town center in northern Britain scold anyone they catch engaged in “anti-social behaviour,” including littering, drunkenness, or fighting.
Observing a bank of monitors in the council “control centre,” Middlesbrough town officials use the technology to broadcast warnings to deviants in real-time. The crime-fighting strategy behind the “speaker cam” draws upon the humiliation of being rebuked in public. A representative explained its function to the BBC in April as being to “embarrass” misbehavers into following the rules. Reports of wrongful chiding have been plentiful.
In one case, a young mother named Marie Brewster was falsely reprimanded for littering. She recounted her experience for The Guardian. “We were in the town centre and I'd got some chips at McDonald's for my daughter Ellie, but they were hot so I tipped them into a box and crumpled the packet up. I put it on the bottom of Ellie's pram to take home but then heard this voice say: ‘Please place the rubbish in the bin provided.’” She filed her complaint when she saw footage of the event in a televised news piece advocating the effectiveness of the new innovation in combating crime.
The British government, it would seem, harbors little doubt about the system’s efficacy. On the same day that authorities in Middlesbrough issued an official apology to Ms. Brewster, the Home Office, the UK’s governmental branch on security and crime, announced its intent to distribute $1 million for the outfitting of such talking cameras in 20 other city centers. In one of the selected towns, local officials have opened up a contest for schoolchildren in which youths will compete to provide the recorded warnings to be broadcast in cases of infraction.
The “speaker cam” may be only the first in a row of new surveillance techniques to emerge in the British public sphere. A range of novel pre-emptive security technologies is being considered for addition to the CCTV arsenal throughout the country. In London, police and officials are discussing the widespread installation on pre-existing cameras of highly sensitive microphones that can detect “aggressive tones” based on the decibel, pitch, and speed of words spoken. More than 300 of these listening devices are already being piloted in offices and public spaces.
Citing a leaked memo from a January meeting of the Home Office, the London–based daily The Sun recently revealed that the government was also considering the installation of X-ray cameras in lampposts on public streets. “Detection of weapons and explosives will become easier” the memo read, but added bluntly, “Privacy is an issue because the machines see through clothing.”
The British technology review Electronic Design reported in late April that the Home Office is interested in utilizing new lip-reading technologies which, triggered by “key words and sentences,” could act to automatically alert authorities to criminal or terrorist intent. Research on the technology, part of a three year venture undertaken by a computer vision scientist, is already being funded by a $780,000 grant from the British government.
On Monday, police in the county of Merseyside unveiled Britain’s most dramatic surveillance contrivance to date: a CCTV camera that flies. Propelled by helicopter-style rotors and directed either by remote control or pre-programmed flight plans, the nearly silent two-foot drone can be outfitted with thermal-powered cameras and loudspeakers. Assistant Chief Constable Simon Byrne explained the primary purpose of the device as “to support our anti-social taskforce in gathering all-important evidence to put offenders before the courts.”
As the observation of behavior takes on bizarre new forms, and data collection on the public continues to lose transparency, red flags have begun waving among privacy groups. Many have expressed wariness over the potential for undemocratic abuses of personal information, a concern that has also been raised with regard to the UK’s police-controlled DNA databank, which now contains over 3.5 million profiles.
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