It’s not just the state watching us with CCTV cameras,
we’re also talking about private companies like Tescos,
with their massive databases of personal information.
We’re taking about all sorts of different organisations
that keep watching us for various reasons.
It's more like lots of Little Brothers rather than one Big Brother.
From the beginning it's been about providing us with welfare benefits, housing benefits,
all these kinds of things the state wants to provide to us.
Certainly, there are caring motivations in many cases and there are many good outcomes.
In the 90s when this all started, the police and the government
were trying to persuade us that CCTV would prevent crime.
People say they feel safer with cameras around.
People confess in court if they see their image on CCTV, they will plead guilty,
the case will go through quicker, less time, less money and therefore more efficient justice.
It doesn't really seem to do the things that police said it would do back in the 90s,
which is keep us safe and prevent crime.
There have been examples of officials pointing CCTV cameras
into a woman’s bathroom and taking footage of her.
The people that committed the atrocities on 7/7 in London
were caught numerous times on CCTV cameras,
it didn’t stop then for a minute.
90% of the crime prevention budget has been spent on CCTV over the last 10 years
when in fact all the evidence shows that it's far better in terms of crime prevention
to have police officers on the street and things like better street lighting.
Individual CCTV systems can cost anything
between a couple of hundred thousand pounds up to millions.
At a national level, we're probably talking about maybe billions having been spent
on CCTV and security since the early 90s.
It's interesting to note that crime in general has been gradually declining,
we're talking over a long term here,
maybe from the Victorian period over the last 100 years.
Crime in general has been declining throughout that period.
There's very little you can say about the introduction of CCTV
that links it to any specific decline in crime.
The government has passed a piece of legislation two years ago
called the Identity Cards Act, which the government
would like a register of every person in the UK.
That will contain all sorts of information about us.
The cost of ID cards would be 17 billion pounds,
when you're talking about that amount of money,
you'd expect very good reasons and very good benefits,
people suggested it's going to be 100% accurate, proof of ID.
Experience of things like passports and driving licences
shows that serious criminals will work out a way around the technologies.
People have every reason to be afraid that their information will get into the wrong hands,
that it will be misused, because in practice that's happened in the past.
One of the government's preferred arguments against people like Liberty,
who raise concerns about personal privacy,
is that if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.
"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", is one of the worst arguments
that I've ever heard about surveillance and it always comes up.
We don’t know what we might have to hide in the future.
It's something that we'll regard as perfectly normal now.
If a more authoritarian government comes into power,
or even a government that has different priorities,
things that are normal now may be something
that the government in the future may intensely interested in.
People often forget that the right to privacy is a human right and a civil liberty.
It's not the case that we have fewer options
in terms of protecting our private life than we used to.
The rise of surveillance and of CCTV means that
we're always expecting people to be watching and expecting other people to intervene.
It means we integrate less ourselves as a society.
We're always watching out for other people, we're always suspicious.
I think this actually goes to increase the things that CCTV is supposed to address,
that loss of trust, the loss of social relationships between people.