The Thomas Chronicles

It was reported Tuesday by the Guardian that the British police solved “[o]nly 3% of street robberies in London… using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.”

The CCTV phenomenon in the UK has thus far been very much akin to car alarms here in the US. In the US, car alarms shake rattle and roll the neighborhoods at all hours of the day, waking people up from their slumbers at two a.m. just because an eighteen-wheeler truck decided to pass by, etc. And with all that ruckus, after all the beeps, honks, and wha-wha’s, these obnoxious things don’t prevent barely any car thefts.

Likewise, the CCTV’s in Britain has failed to provide any meaningful deterrent to people committing crimes. After all, people who’ve been trying to stay abreast of this controversial Orwellian fiasco have heard trickling reports of victims of crimes standing in front of the camera crying for help to no avail.

Here are a couple of the more visible examples of the CCTV’s failure:

Earlier this month [January 2008], a court heard how a microphone mounted on a CCTV device recorded the groans of father-of-three Mark Witherall, 47, as he was beaten and left to die by raiders after catching them at his house in Whitstable, Kent.

In another case, a microphone on a CCTV camera picked up the screams of a woman and her child who were attacked and abused last year by a would-be arsonist at their home in Lancashire.

The cameras literally sat there and observed a man beaten to death and a woman and child attacked and neither it nor anybody behind the camera did anything to stop it. And British police are often loathe to backtrack to the CCTV’s images of committed crimes because, well, “it’s hard work”.

After spending billions of pounds on this ineffective system, and in the process created the foundation for a dictatorship, Britain’s reaction isn’t to admit failure and recommit resources elsewhere. It is to up the ante.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said, “Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.“[Emphasis is mine.]

That’s an interesting statement, isn’t it? People are committing crimes and the CCTV’s are not preventing them from happening because, ultimately, people don’t fear it. The logical question to ask is: If criminals have to fear the CCTV’s in order to not commit crimes, what can they do to make the criminals fear the CCTV’s? What deterrent should be in place to instill that fear?

But there is another elephant-sized problem they haven’t addressed. CCTV’s are indiscriminate in their observations; they see and hear whatever is in their paths irrespective of a person’s status as an ordinary citizen or a criminal.

So, what assurances can they possibly give to a population which is already under the watchful eye of tens of thousands of cameras that these new measures won’t further erode their freedoms? Would whatever is made to instill fear in the hearts of criminals through these CCTV’s would also instill fear in the hearts of ordinary citizens?

To give the CCTV’s more teeth than they currently have, New Scotland Yard is launching these new initiatives:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

The reasoning behind this increase in the centralization of information is clear enough. The local police is overwhelmed with criminal cases, and it is just too much effort to track down and ask for permission to share information from various authorities and jurisdictions. An integrated national system to share information, video images, etc. would make the jobs of the British police easier.

However, this kind of system is fraught with perils, and I’m afraid the power of this system would eventually or immediately devolve to the bureaucrats in Whitehall.

[Detective Chief Neville said] “We are also going to start putting out [pictures] on the internet, on the Met police website, asking ‘who is this guy?’. If criminals see that CCTV works they are less likely to commit crimes.”

Cheshire deputy chief constable Graham Gerrard, who chairs the CCTV working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Guardian, that it made no sense to have a national DNA and fingerprint database, but to have to approach 43 separate forces for images of suspects and offenders. A scheme called the Facial Identification National Database (Find), which began collecting offenders’ images from their prison pictures and elsewhere, has been put on hold.

…

Asked about the development of a CCTV database, the office of the UK’s information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said: “CCTV can play an important role in helping to prevent and detect crime. However we would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are only used for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained as part of the initiative.”

When one of the primary safeguards against widespread governmental abuse has been to keep information decentralized in many different spheres of authority, what safeguards then can there be? Is any being currently proposed or is this nothing other than a vague genuflection toward civil liberties?

It should bear mentioning at this point that one of the primary arguments for the CCTV’s, especially the talking CCTV’s, was to discourage “anti-social behavior”, and since “anti-social behavior” can mean a number of different things to a number of different people, one can only conclude that the standard of judgment for what is “anti-social” is entirely subjective to the viewer who sits somewhere behind the nebulous glass lenses of the camera.

Will people demonstrating “anti-social behavior” be registered and cross-referenced and collated into Britain’s national image database of potential criminals? Also, when does the identification of “anti-social behavior” or undesirable behavior become the identification of undesirable people?

Such inferences and questions has led some to speculate whether Britain has just created an “Orwellian Infrastructure” for a future dictator to utilize.

And if this is so, what is to become of freedom in the British Isles. In twenty-five to fifty years, would they even recognize it as being lost?

In another one of those Blair Government original degenerative acts back in July 2007, the British government has deleted Winston Churchill from the school history syllabus. Since modern Britain can’t refute their greatest Prime Minister, they’ve simply deleted any reference to him.

And why not? I’ve read recently that a sizable portion of the British people already believe that Winston Churchill, that eternal figure with a cigar and square-ish hat, was actually a myth and not the reality of the heroic leader who navigated Britain through the worst conflagration in her long history.

Perhaps Britain has become too educated laud courage and valor and too lazy to hold dear their former glory.

But I, an immigrant to these American shores, am not too blind to see greatness when see it. I am sure many “pacifist” Americans would like to also delete Churchill from memory, since we have no other figure in the English speaking world to pronounce the case for action and national patriotism in a clearer manner than Sir Winston Churchill.

And no, this rot is not because of subversive homosexual, weak-kneed surrender artists as many on the Right would accuse. But perhaps it’s because the course our country’s forefathers took demanded much of them, and they asked so very little of their country.

As many of my fellow countrymen mull over the anxiety of conflict and war in the Middle East and our manifold threats worldwide, they would do well to remember the spirit and the words of this great man.

In this speech, think on our war with Islamofascism and see if his argument against the Nazis could be applied it…

(audio removed)

***Update Below***

Good ole’ Google, in addition to imposing internet censorship on China and perhaps unknowingly on other countries, is going a bit too far with their maps. I don’t know if I blogged about their “Street View” feature when it was first rolled out in San Francisco and Las Vegas; if I didn’t I should have.

What they are doing is insane. I can see my parents’ neighborhood in Houston from the adjoining street. This kind of intrusion into one’s privacy is unconscionable whatever anyone says. I know someone is going to say that it doesn’t infringe upon personal liberty because you can only see houses from the outside. This, I submit, is beside the point. Everyone who has watched real TV these past few years knows that a person behaves differently when observed as opposed to when he is not.

An apt analogy for this kind of phenomena is the Panopticon. No, this isn’t a fancy digital do-hickee. This is the name of a type of prison.

In this prison, as the structural theory goes, no inmate has any privacy whatsoever. The structure is so arranged to where all the cells are facing each other in a circle. One inmate can see what another inmate is doing on the other side, and the other inmate can also see him as well. Most importantly, however, is the center guard tower, which monitors and sees everyone. This the panoptic effect where, as the theory goes, inmates would behave better if they know with certainty that they are constantly being observed without cessation. The Panopticon tower sees them, if not their own fellow inmates.

Like a disobedient child under the observation of a strict school teacher, this Panoptic Eye constricted the behaviors of the inmates for fear of being disciplined.

And if I remember Jeremy Bentham’s essay correctly (it has been eight years ago), this psychological tactic worked brilliantly in the modification of inmate behavior. It made them more malleable.

Can’t it be said that Google with their “Street View” feature and other such programs are doing much of the same thing on a mass nationwide level? For people scoffing that such a thing can’t be done, who think this is much to science fiction in tone and manner, they can take a long hard look at Britain. Far from just implementing these intrusive cameras, in true Orwellian fashion, they have given them voice and speech, with an authority figure behind the camera issuing commands.

However, issuing commands to unwitting pedestrians to throw away their trash in the trash cans isn’t the main thrust and purpose of these talking cameras. Like the Panopticon, it’s main purpose is to assure you that someone is watching, and so, you had better behave yourself. The fact that Britain now has live people behind those cameras berating itinerant pedestrians simply lends it more teeth, but give cameras a voice box isn’t entirely necessary.

This tyranny of the seeing eye makes prisoners of us all.

Update:

I found this tidbit off the Drudge Report tonight. It’s an article from Britain talking about their latest expansion of the CCTV talkie cameras in Norwich Park.

“We want CCTV because it means people will use their parks and aren’t frightened to be there,” added Mr Bremner. “People are asking for it. We have surveyed the whole city and the response is incredibly positive.

“We are not in a police state, we are in a democracy and people understand we are doing it for their safety. This will help make these places safe.”

Although critics have likened the new talking system to the nightmare vision of the future George Orwell wrote about in his novel 1984, many people believe the advantages are worth it.

I think it is the measure of England’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy that they cannot see the tyranny in this. The justification for the implementing this tyranny is so mind-blowingly facile, you have to double take, re-read it and pinch yourself to make sure this isn’t some bizarre Twilight Zone dream. The British gave up their liberties just so that can feel nice and safe, as though a disembodied voice will stop a murder, a robbery or make a prig less prig-ish.

Obviously it won’t. What it will do is to tyrannize otherwise decent people, and shred any hope of privacy. The loud speakers will berate you publicly for leaving a candy wrapper on the ground, but it will be powerless in the face of a violent crime.

Indeed, I’ve been hearing reports here and there of the police completely ignoring a person shouting up to the cameras for help in desperate matters. If there were police nearby, they’d just drive by, and the person in desperate straits might as well rule out any action taken by that person behind the camera. In effect, these cameras prey on the average citizenry while the criminals still do what they’ve always done since time immemorial. Breaking laws.

And it seems America is going full speed in the same direction. Virtually overnight, these CCTV cameras have popped up in cities all over the United States at street intersections. I don’t recall us ever voting on the measure as a people; either on the national level or city level. It seems the decisions have been made for us by judicial and legislative fiat.

And the lack of protest on this matter in the land of Liberty is deafening.

After sifting through much of the news on the recent car bombing at Glasgow International Airport, I think there’s a critical question not being asked, and I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not. Just days before the Glasgow car bombing, two car bombs were found outside nightclubs in central London. It is clear that both of these attacks were linked and authorities are afraid that another attack is well under way.

We have been given information that the some of the suspects associated with these attacks are doctors.

The fast-moving investigation into failed car bombings in Glasgow and London has swept up at least five physicians and a medical student, officials said Tuesday, including a doctor seized at an Australian airport with a one-way ticket. Many of the men had roots outside Britain—with ties to Iraq, Jordan and India—and worked together at hospitals in Scotland or England, officials said.

None of the plotters arrested so far is named on U.S. terror watch lists that identify potential suspects, according to a senior American counterterror official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

When you think of doctors, you don’t think of explosive gas cylinders strapped to a car. At least I don’t. While infamous al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri was a doctor, I don’t remember him acting in concert with a four other doctors in a coordinated attack. Even Zawahiri displayed a methodical mind in his brutality.

But the question we are not asking is: Why are professionally trained doctors using crude such methods of attack?

Why would these people attack others by methods outside their competencies?

I am not shocked at the allure that this fascist ideology has over people, even physicians. Fanatic ideologies warp and twist the human mind into shapes we can hardly identify regardless of their levels of intellect. That is beyond doubt.

Maybe I’m giving these terrorists doctors too much credit, but it just seems that their method of attack was sloppy and… well, just plain stupid.

Related Posts:

Mrs. Michelle Malkin, as on top of it as usual.
Shrinkwrapped

London is sitting on edge today. Another wave of terrorism strikes the UK.

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) - Two men rammed a flaming sport utility vehicle into the main terminal of Glasgow airport Saturday, crashing into the glass doors at the entrance and sparking a fire, witnesses said. Police said two suspects were arrested.

The airport - Scotland’s largest - was evacuated and all flights suspended, a day after British police thwarted a plot to bomb central London, discovering two cars abandoned with loads of gasoline, gas canisters and nails.

“One has to conclude … these are linked,” Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former head of Britain’s joint intelligence committee, told Sky News. “This is a very young government, and we may yet see further attacks.”

Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, who took office only Wednesday, was being briefed on developments by his officials, Downing Street said.

In Glasgow, the green SUV barreled toward the building at full speed shortly after 3 p.m., hitting security barriers before crashing into the glass doors and exploding, witnesses said. Two men jumped out of the burning vehicle, one of them engulfed in flames, they said.

“The car came speeding past at about 30 mph. It was approaching the building quickly,” said Scott Leeson, who was nearby at the time. “Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight in to the door. He must have been trying to smash straight through.”

I’m going to keep an eye on these events in the coming week.

Speaking of tolerance, this article from the Guardian perfectly elucidates my point of the pseudo-tolerance that’s endemic to the ideology of the Left.

A ban on a teenage girl wearing a “purity ring” was attacked at the high court today as an “unlawful interference” with her right to express her Christian faith.

Lydia Playfoot, 16, is one of a group of Christians at the Millais school in Horsham, West Sussex, who wears the ring as a sign of her belief in abstinence from sex until marriage.

The teenager claims her secondary school, which allows Muslim and Sikh students to wear headscarves and religious bracelets, is breaching her human rights by preventing her from wearing the ring.

But authorities claim the band, which is engraved with a Biblical verse, is not an integral part of the Christian faith and contravenes its uniform policy.

Today, human rights barrister Paul Diamond, appearing for Lydia, argued that secular school authorities had no right to set themselves up as arbiters of faith and “cannot rule on religious truth”.

He asked deputy high court judge Michael Supperstone QC to declare that the school had acted outside its powers when it banned the wearing of the purity ring.

He also claimed that the school authorities were violating Lydia’s right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” under article nine of the European convention on human rights.

It is not the first time students have faced school bans over Christian symbols.

Earlier this year, 13-year-old Catholic schoolgirl Samantha Devine was told not to wear a crucifix on a chain because it breached health and safety rules at the Robert Napier school, in Gillingham, Kent.

The school said the only exception it would make to its uniform rule would be if the jewellery was an essential part of a particular religion, which they did not feel was the case for the teenager.

After years of observation on the point, the Left has a consistent pattern of choosing to be tolerant of ideologies and religions and behaviors that are antithetical to Western Christian culture. Of course, this article was addressing a particular injustice in Britain, not the United States, but the pattern of behavior from the Left here in the United States is very similar.

Indeed, most of our liberals want to re-make America into the image of Europe and discard our outmoded pedestrian views. Americans are really a backward people, didn’t you know?

More

Michelle Malkin has a longer post up on this topic.  Bookworm has one up as well.

From the way the Ministry of Defence is talking, one might actually think that the seizure of British subjects by Iran earlier this year was nothing more than a bureaucratic oversight. According to today’s online edition of the Independent, one of the Royal Navy’s chief mistake was to allow their freed hostages to sell their stories to the press. In fact, the article discussed how the Royal Navy needed to have better public relations with the press much more than addressing its failings as a maritime power.

The capture of British sailors and marines by Iran in the Gulf was the result of a series of mistakes by the Navy, and the decision to let the freed hostages sell their story to the press was a “collective failure of judgement” by the Ministry of Defence, two official inquiries have concluded.

The selling of stories by armed forces personnel would be banned and reforms implemented to prevent a recurrence of the incident which led to a heated diplomatic confrontation between London and Tehran, the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, said. The damning reports expose Royal Navy failings in many key areas, in appreciating the threat posed by the Iranians, in dealing with intelligence, and in decision-making leading up to the crisis. The handling of the media by the MoD was marked by disorganisation which allowed the auction of the hostages’ story to newspapers and broadcasters, causing “anger and concern” among the public.

One of the reports, by former Royal Marines Lieutenant-General Sir Rob Fulton into the seizure of the naval party remains classified and will not be published for “operational reasons”, said the Government. No individuals have been named as culpable for the mistakes, and no disciplinary action will be taken.

In order to prevent a future crisis, these are the recommendations printed in the Independent.

The action plan by Royal Marines Lieutenant-General Sir Rob Fulton:

* Need for improvement in the handling of intelligence, in communications, in doctrine, and in both individual and collective training.

* Boarding parties should no longer be made up of composite personnel but must be specialist teams.

* More should be learnt “from the experience of other nations operating in the area” (meaning the US) and better sharing of information.

Tony Hall’s recommendations for media relations:

* Ministry of Defence ban on selling of stories by military and civilian personnel employed by the armed forces.

* The Ministry of Defence press office should be strengthened both in terms of numbers and expertise.

* There should be a rebuilding of trust between the MoD and the media.

Of course, what these recommendations fail to address in any way whatsoever is the declining number of military personnel in the Royal Navy. They’ve been steadily losing manpower since 2001, even as militaries around the world is expanding their armies. It was reported back in February that the Ministry of Defence planned to scuttle half of their existing fleet, making Britain’s once proud Royal Navy into a coastal defense force.

British officials should be finishing their review of the Royal Navy some time this July and come to a decision on the future of the Royal Navy. Many are saying that they’re going to abandon Dartmouth’s shipbuilding yard altogether…

The Telegraph also reported in February that faulty weapons systems aboard RN ships were ignored “in order to save money.” I’ve often wondered if the British sailors were abducted because the nearest ship didn’t even have a slingshot to fire from their ships.

Instead of fixing these fundamental problems, it seems that the MoD is more interested to covering its sizable zit with heavy makeup, even if everyone see it.