Tech & Biz

UK Police Drowns Itself in Surveillance Data

by Jordan Yerman | May 15, 2009 at 10:04 am

296 views | 26 Recommendations | 7 comments

In a widely-predicted development, the UK police has found itself drowning in surveillance data from its 4 million CCTV cameras.

CCTV cameras are ubiquitous in British public life, and all that information has to go somewhere. The problem is that such info must ultimately be parsed and evaluated by human eyes. The British police has found itself staring at a thousand screens of white noise.

Perhaps this new clarity will bring Parliament more in line with what I found to be the popular thinking: pervasive surveillance erodes civil liberites with no palpable benefit to society.

The plate recognition system uses optical character recognition to convert digital pictures of car number plates into characters, which are then held in a list. The technology was launched in part to aid the tracking of suspects, but, according to Readhead, there is simply too much information for the police to be able to use.

The U.K. has about 4 million surveillance cameras in use.

0 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon

recommend This comment thread is now closed

paullewis

at 11:37 on May 15th, 2009

Cameras have been installed to watch people entering and exiting public toilets.

paullewis has contributed a photo to this story.

Jordan Yerman

at 18:27 on May 15th, 2009

Creepy? Most definitely.

Effective crime prevention? Not likely.

gerrypopplestone

at 03:08 on May 16th, 2009

There are an awful lot of them. There are three outside my flat! When I asked the workers who put up the last one what they doing, they told me their employers had forbidden them to answer any questions! Yet, when the place got broken into (I was away) and my flatmate lost things, the police would not bother to look at the footage to see who did it!

Uwe Paschen

at 04:23 on May 16th, 2009

Now they have to come up with a program and computer able to handle the massive data input to sort it out or rather filter, or they could out source it to China and they monitor it all and let the UK know when ever there is some thing worth looking at or it the UK is looking for some one then China can review all the data and videos for them.

I am not sure that would be in the interest of the UK citizen though.

DPT56

at 22:55 on May 16th, 2009

A sight which is becoming more and more common in Australia. A surveillance camera outside a domestic dwelling surveilling the immediate area outside it.

DPT56 has contributed a photo to this story.