Yes, we would like to talk about certain aspects of the privatization of surveillance today
and especially about Internet Eyes, which is a website where you can watch live footage
from CCTV cameras and, as they call it, catch a criminal online.
For this, I will say a few introductory sentences about privatization of surveillance and then
Susan will give you a short overview over the development of CCTV, which is, in our
opinion, a good example of the privatization phenomenon, and then I will talk about Internet
Eyes.
So, we will have some switches of microphone and I hope this will not be the most interesting
part about the presentation, how we fall over each other and get lost.
As it has been mentioned recently that there is a trend in Western societies to see every
possible source of harm as a crime.
Zeddner speaks of a pre-crime society where crime is no longer viewed as wrongdoing or
harm but as a risk or a potential loss.
She sees, connected with these two shifts, a temporal shift and a sectoral shift, the
temporal shift being that the reaction to crime is no longer the sanctioning after something
wrong has happened but to start to prevent it from happening because it is seen as a
risk.
The second shift is that if you want to prevent something from happening, then, of course,
you need more and more surveillance and this surveillance cannot be done solely by state
actors as it has been traditionally done but it is necessary to involve a lot of other
actors, especially private actors.
She says the responsibility for security against the risks falls not only to the state but
extends to a larger panoply of individual communal and private agents or in other words,
in my words, the privatisation of surveillance.
As I said before, we think that CCTV is a good example for this and Susan will tell
you more about it.
After taking the microphone, I'm going to talk about how camera surveillance started
in England and how its privatisation began.
As early as the end of the 1950s, the British police was interested in installing cameras
to watch public streets.
The British people were told that it was used for traffic control but the systems were installed
for crime prevention to secure governmental areas and to keep an eye on political demonstrations.
In 1969, the British police had only a total of 70 cameras installed and of those 70 cameras,
only four were able to record.
Back then, the installation costs were pretty high.
In 1967, the company PhotoScan offered a new camera technology that was used for the surveillance
in stores.
Therefore, crime control had shifted from the police to private non-police agencies.
In the beginning of the 1990s, the political climate changed.
There was an increase in crime rates and the strategies to work against this development
was crime prevention and the use of advanced information technologies.
As you all know, after 9-11, surveillance got even more intensive and CCTV was said
to be the instrument of crime control.
Now I'm going to introduce some of the facts of CCTV that I gathered out of Dietmar Kamara's
book which is translated Pictures of Surveillance.
England is pretty much the country of CCTV.
There are over 4 million private and public cameras.
London alone has approximately half a million cameras and the London Underground has now
about 6,000 cameras.
In Germany, there are far less cameras, approximately between 300 and 400,000.
The German National Railway Company, which is the Deutsche Bahnage, has about 2,800 cameras
alone.
The German police is only responsible for about 100 of these cameras but under certain
circumstances is allowed to access footage for safety measures.
Airports have the most extensive surveillance.
The Frankfurt Airport, for example, has 2,000 cameras alone.
There are also cameras at schools, at museums, at soccer stadiums, hospitals, banks, stores
and universities and I'm actually being recorded right now.
The majority of this footage is being watched by private operators.
There are over 600,000 people working in the UK private security industry and the estimated
turnover in respect to CCTV increased from 84 million in 1993 to 509 million in 2005.
Due to new and improved technologies, there's a new level of privatization.
Installation of the products gets cheaper, therefore more people are able to afford such
technology and use more surveillance.
Also technologies like the internet allow for easy access to surveillance and its footage.
This means that even more people can get involved in watching that footage.
There's a lot of debate and criticism about CCTV.
One of them is that it's not even effective.
We would like to concentrate on just that point of critique, its ineffectiveness.
80 cameras can produce about 172 million pictures per day and these operators are on overload.
There are way too many pictures to watch and while on duty, the operators can deal with
exhaustion, trying to watch too many pictures at once or they can get bored because often
nothing is happening.
The UK 2002 home office report showed that through video surveillance, I quote, the overall
reduction in crime was a very small 4%.
There are psychologists in the field of cognition that have found that the identification of
unknown people on videotapes is often faulty, even if the footage is pretty clear.
While known faces are recognized more often, not depending on the quality of the footage.
That is an interesting thought.
There's this idea of involving the masses to watch for the people they might know and
can identify instead of having operators watch the masses they don't know.
There are some television shows that have already implemented that method.
In 1967, there is the German show, which aired back then for the first time.
In this show, criminal cases are reconstructed and viewers are encouraged to give any leads
and help solve the case.
According to the program's editorial, about 40% of these cases are being solved.
In 1984, the UK also started a program similar to that, which also encourages audience participation.
Then there is this program called Crime Stoppers that started up in 1988, which is operated
in many communities worldwide.
It encourages its community members to provide anonymous information about criminal activity.
On the Crime Stoppers UK website, they give you 20 hot facts about Crime Stoppers.
One of them is that one in five murders in London are solved through information from
Crime Stoppers.
In May 2006, in Shortage England, citizens of certain houses were able to connect to
a so-called community safety channel, which had transferred pictures off the neighbourhood
to their TVs at home.
And the subscribers also had access to police security warnings, as well as pictures of
wanted people.
And then more recently, in 2009, technologies like the internet made it possible to get
a website called Internet Ice started, which Christina will now introduce to you.
Not surprisingly, this internet site is in charge of a UK company is in charge of this
internet site.
It is the company Internet Ice Limited and it started, I think our computer broke down.
It was launched in October 2009 and they called this scheme an online instant event
notification system.
The idea is that footage from cameras that are planted in shops and other businesses
are transmitted through the internet directly to the homes of private viewers that can register
on this internet site.
And it can be watched and you can alert if you have seen something you think there's
a crime.
Until now, it is only cameras in Stratford-upon-Avon, a relatively small town in England of 23,700
inhabitants and to have a comparison, until now nearly 15,000 US have registered so far.
So this project has not really started.
So let us see how Internet Ice is supposed to work.
Anyone over 18 can register on the website.
The only condition is that he is living in the European Union.
And when you have registered, you get five alerts each month.
So when you watch the footage and see something, you just click on the bottom and alert the
owner of the camera and then the owner of the camera can react how he deems appropriate.
To prevent misuse, the location of the camera is unknown to the viewers.
The owners of the camera have to rate the alert.
So after they have been informed, they give you points for your alert.
If your alert was incorrect, you get zero points.
If you acted in good faith, but it wasn't really a crime, you get one point.
And if indeed a crime was committed, you get three points.
And the best crime spotter, the one with the most points, gets at the end of the month
a price of 1,000 pounds.
So as you can imagine, there was a little bit of criticism about this scene.
And especially the organizations know CCTV and Privacy International filed a complaint
with the Information Commissioner's office that is the authority in the UK that is in
charge of data protection.
The organizations feared that there's no way to control who is actually watching what happens
to the footage.
Is it stored somewhere?
Is it uploaded on YouTube?
Whatever they do with this thing.
The ICO stopped internet eyes temporarily because they want to investigate further and
to see what regulations they have to do so that this project may become reality.
But in this context, I would like to mention that with regard to the Community Safety Channel
mentioned earlier by Susanne, the ICO deemed it necessary but also sufficient that the
footage that was transferred to the private homes was encrypted so that it couldn't be
saved easily, at least, and that the faces of the people were not really recognizable.
It was not very good pictures.
So if indeed this project should become reality not only in the UK but in other European countries
like, for example, Germany, the data protection concerns will surely be a big topic.
But the head of NoCCTB also has another concern.
He says, this is a private company using private cameras and asking private citizens to spy
on each other.
It represents a privatization of the surveillance state.
And with this, we come back to our original point about the privatization and surveillance.
And we could ask if maybe this also has an impact on our field, the criminology.
Zadna says, the growth of non-state actors in the production of security is such that
if he ever could, it no longer makes sense to focus on the workings of the criminal
justice state to the exclusion of private, commercial, communal, voluntary, and individual
actors.
So thank you for your attention.