It’s NOW true to say that society is demonstrating a subtle shift in opinion with respect to CCTV surveillance. 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 digital video surveillance has a vital role to play in ensuring a safer society.
Last September’s terrorist outrages and the subsequent threats of biological attacks have done much to influence the way in which society views security surveillance. Ambivalence is being replaced by positive feelings of solace. 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.
Several UK-wide studies have underpinned this view, with greater evidence of the effectiveness of surveillance. Town centre businesses and stakeholders nationally have identified CCTV as being more important than any other element of crime prevention – including greater numbers of police on the beat.
Only recently, an independent assessment in one English town showed that a new surveillance scheme had reduced crime by 49%.
Digitally-networked surveillance
We are now hearing ever-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, and that use intelligent applications such as facial recognition to safeguard our towns and cities.
And what about the biometrics programs that secure our airport check-ins? Now, these are being discussed not as the reluctant price of a safe democracy, but as an essential security umbrella.
And, in the wake of 11 September 2001, the ability of digital technology to slash the time needed to painstakingly analyse video evidence is being seen as an urgent necessity in pursuing society’s guilty parties.
The fact that most current CCTV system designs are still based on analogue technology (with it’s all-too-common shortcomings in scale, quality and management) has raised many uncomfortable ‘what ifs?’ What if, for example, Boston’s Logan Airport had – like that in Brussels – been networked with digital video? What if the digital feed had been interpreted automatically (and in real time) by a national security agency?
In some respects, the ‘what ifs?’ are almost too painful to contemplate. That said, steps that the public may once have tolerated they will soon begin to demand. Inevitably, we will 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. Products that have thus far been technology-driven will now be driven by the end user marketplace.
The existence of proven international reference sites will only accelerate this process. Brussels International Airport boasts 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.
Such levels of sophistication take security and monitoring way beyond even the present generation of hybrid analogue/digital systems – and will also take the fight against terrorism to new levels of effectiveness into the bargain.
Implementing Big Mother
At IndigoVision, we regard our research and development work with leading CCTV manufacturers – Panasonic, Baxall and Ultrak among them – as something of a seven-year ‘proving ground’ that enables the new concept of Big Mother to be implemented now. Indeed, the concept has already begun in high risk environments that require surveillance, monitoring, real time analysis and/or recording. Witness the recent digital video network that was used to great effect in policing the G8 Summit in Genoa, and as part of several prosecution cases.
More importantly, perhaps, the technology has also been a key feature in the Ground Zero operation that is still taking place in New York. Embedded in the cameras carried by remote search robots during the rescue operation, its video footage was of such quality it was later broadcast on American TV news networks. Reassuringly, the self-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 any security installation seeks to preserve. In Hull, for example, recent studies have shown that digital CCTV is having a positive impact on the regeneration of a large inner city area. CCTV installations pioneered by the Goodwin Resource Centre Association have halved reported crime on the troublesome Thornton Estate (‘Caught in the Net’, SMT, February 2001, pp28-29).
Meanwhile, in France (at Cogema-La Hague, a major nuclear fuel reprocessing plant) the 24-hours-per-day, 365-days-per-year ‘always on’ digital CCTV network allows the public to view cameras around the facility over the World Wide Web. This provides a comfort zone, not to mention a virtual ‘open door’ for public education and reassurance.
Make no mistake. Big Mother has arrived. All the evidence at our disposal indicates that she will not only be needed by societies around the world, but positively welcomed by them. And sooner rather than later.
