Orwell rolls in his grave

It appears that in addition to bad orthodonture, the British share a fetish for surveillance cameras. Blah

Orwell rolls in his grave: Britain's endemic surveillance cameras talk back
05/30/2007 @ 10:56 am
Filed by Will Byrne

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.
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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.
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