Big Brother is watching you

Last term I went to Paris to meet up with a friend who is doing a year abroad. Being a man of modest means I took the overnight coach, arriving at the coach station at 5am. My friend was arriving by the first train from Clermont Ferrand at about 8am, which meant I got to spend two and a half hours waiting in Gare Du Lyon with nothing but an incredibly expensive coffee and a copy of The Economist for company. Growing quickly bored of The Economist I took up people watching. What struck me most was the fact that the police in France, even the guys in the transport police, are armed. Every officer had a handgun and what looked like a Taser. Several of the officers, when they were just standing around, even rested their hands on their weapons in some bad-ass John Wayne pose. This made me feel exceptionally uncomfortable. The preceding 12 months at home had consisted of bungled policing of student protests, UK uncut demonstrations and the summer riots; which, coupled with my intrinsic whinging liberal outlook on life, had left me very distrustful of the police. Not for the first time that weekend, I found myself feeling a little homesick. Our police can at times be rubbish, racist idiots, but at least they can’t blow our brains out.

However, one aspect where law enforcement in the country still infuriates me though is the ubiquity of surveillance. Primarily due to the CCTV network established in response to the actions of the IRA in the 1970s and 80s, the British are the most watched nation on earth. Although fantastic at providing security by allowing for suspicious vehicles and abandoned packages to be detected, the crime fighting merits of closed circuit television are far from clear to me. By having cameras everywhere, all you are doing to criminals is suggesting that they perhaps wear a hat. Personal experience as a victim of a crime has resulted in me hearing a variety of excuses on CCTV’s behalf, such as being in a camera blind-spot, the tape having already been wiped and, the most ridiculous excuse I ever heard after the assault of a friend, that the camera didn’t work in the rain. In much the same way I cannot understand why the French seem to tolerate their police officers being able to utilise lethal force at the drop of a hat, I cannot understand why we in this country don’t seem to care about CCTV. A woman whose husband was assaulted so violently in a nightclub in Wakefield that he now requires 24 hour care has called for CCTV to be mandatory in nightclubs and bars and an article on her campaign even made the BBC most read section – admittedly on a rather slow news day between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. With all due respect to a person who has been subject to a terrible injustice, how would CCTV have helped? Even in the unlikely event that the cameras were working, what would they have provided? More footage of her husband getting attacked from several angles, perhaps, but not much more. CCTV doesn’t make people behave better, it just means we get to watch them behave badly. Most worryingly, the article on her campaign she is quoted as saying “If you get the Big Brother effect within the clubs then aggression, when it is spotted, can be stopped before it goes any further.”

By having cameras everywhere, all you are doing to criminals is suggesting that they perhaps wear a hat.

Now, as I stated previously, I have a whinging liberal outlook on life. Quoting the phrase “Big Brother” as a force for the public good has made me sweat so much that it’s made the ink run on the copy of the Guardian I was reading. Close friends of mine will appreciate the irony of me complaining about privacy when I am eternally logged into at least one and usually three social media websites at any given moment, but the difference between social media and “Big Brother” is important. That difference is engagement. Big Brother not only requires passivity in its subjects, but, in both Orwell’s books and in practice on our camera-laden streets, actively encourages it. Social media, however, is all about being active. One has to check into Foursquare, tweet about a TV show or post a photograph of where we are on Tumblr for our privacy to be violated.

Brits are enormously famous for being a little bit passive about everything. “Mustn’t Grumble,” is more than a phrase for us, it’s a way of life. However, I feel that in public disorder and crime we are dangerously over-passive. Daring heroics by impromptu crime-fighters are an American comic book invention. A British comic book hero would probably be ‘Loud Tutting and Head Shaking Man’. Have you seen the Croydon Tram video on YouTube? While most comment on the video focuses expressly on the reprehensible subject and her words and ideas, a large amount of mention is given to the woman, pictured at the end of the film, determinedly playing a game on her phone desperately trying not to look up or play any part in the fuss taking place around her. It is important to note, however, that the infamous Croydon Tram lady wasn’t apprehended on the basis of evidence gathered by the no doubt rather expensive CCTV systems that have been installed throughout the TfL network, but rather through evidence obtained via a YouTube video. Mike Skinner, leader of British chart sensation The Streets, once complained on ‘When You Wasn’t Famous’: “How am I supposed to do a line [of coke] in front of complete strangers when I know they’ve all got camera phones?”

I’m not saying that we should screw the system and start tweeting parking offenses in lieu of traffic wardens and post our location on Foursquare if we see an unattended bag, but the constant encroachment of state cameras into our lives is unnecessary. The general public now has the means to capture high quality footage of crimes being committed, rendering patchy, expensive and liberty infringing surveillance systems obsolete. What’s more, encouraging the public to take a more active role in recording and reporting crime could be seen by the “big society” conservatives as strengthening the community. Our police are no more heavily armed than us, and our closely matched ability to document crime strengthens our liberty once more.