Society is experiencing a subtle shift in opinion about CCTV surveillance systems. Orwellian predictions of ‘Big Brother’ have never found much resonance with the public as a whole, but we may be about to see any lingering suspicion swept away by an active acceptance – even an insistence – that video has a vital role in ensuring a safer society.
In a fundamental shift of emphasis, the Big Brother who watches us – albeit benignly – is about to become the ‘Big Mother’ who watches over us.
Last September’s terrorist outrage and the subsequent threat of biological terrorist attacks have done a lot in a short time to influence the way society views security surveillance. Ambivalence is being replaced with positive feelings of solace. Several UK studies underpin this view with clear evidence for the effectiveness of surveillance: town centre businesses and stakeholders nationally have identified CCTV as more important than any other element of crime prevention, even including greater police numbers, and a recent independent assessment showed a new installation reducing crime by 49 per cent in one town.
An essential ‘umbrella’
We are hearing increasing support for the universal introduction of digitally networked surveillance systems. Systems that monitor and record high quality video from an unlimited number of cameras, that use intelligent applications such as face recognition to safeguard our towns and cities and biometric programmes to secure our airport check-ins, are now being discussed not as a reluctant price of a safe democracy but as an essential security umbrella.
In the wake of September 11, the ability of digital technology to slash the time it takes to painstakingly analyse video evidence is being seen as an urgent necessity in pursuing the guilty.
The fact that most current CCTV systems still use analogue technology, with its all-too-common shortcomings in scale, quality and management, has raised many uncomfortable ‘what ifs?’ What if Boston’s Logan airport had, like Brussels, been networked with digital video? What if the digital feed had been interpreted automatically and in real-time by a national security agency? The ‘what ifs’ are, in some respects, almost too painful to contemplate but steps that the public may once have tolerated will soon be demanded by them.
We will soon see a radical change in the status of capabilities such as the digital screening of passengers at check-in and prior to boarding, and live air-to-ground digital video feeds from inside aircraft. These technology-driven products of today are about to become market-driven.
New sophistication levels
The existence of proven international reference sites will only accelerate this process. Brussels International Airport has a 700-camera system which, besides being the world’s largest and most advanced video-over-IP system, records continuous crystal clear video from every camera and provides access to airport operations and external agencies, from baggage handling to customs, fire, police and security.
This level of sophistication takes security and monitoring way beyond even the present genera-tion of hybrid analogue/digital systems and it will take the fight against terrorism to new levels of effectiveness. We regard IndigoVision’s work with industry leading manufacturers such as Panasonic, Ultrak and Baxall as a seven-year proving ground that enables the new concept of Big Mother to be implemented now.
It has already begun in high risk environments that require surveillance, monitoring, real-time analysis or recording, such as the digital video network used to great effect in policing the recent G8 summit in Genoa and in subsequent prosecutions. And we can now reveal that the technology was also a key feature in the Ground Zero operation in New York. Embedded in the cameras carried by remote search robots during the rescue operation, its video footage was of such quality that it was later broadcast on American TV news networks. Reassuringly, the same technology is in protective use now on the new JFK-Manhattan light railway.
Perhaps one of the truest embodiments of the new Big Mother perception is the way digital networked video has contributed to improved community relations and local democracy, the very rights that security seeks to preserve. In Hull, for example, recent studies show the positive impact of digital CCTV on the regeneration of a large inner city area. And in France, at COGEMA-La Hague, a major nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, the ’24×365 Always-on’ digital CCTV network is allowing the public to view cameras around the facility over the web, providing reassurance and a virtual ‘open door’ for public education.
Big Mother has arrived and all the evidence indicates she will not only be welcomed by societies around the world but demanded by them – and sooner rather than later.
