One Nation under CCTV

'One Nation Under CCTV', just off Oxford Street, picture lifted from Google Images. Note the camera on the right, and the barbed wire fence in the foreground. Quite impressive.













I came across the Banksy above when I out at lunch a couple of weeks back. Like any good bit of art, it made me think.
I am not this blog's expert on CCTV, given that Marie did a research project on it during her Honours year, so I can't expound on whether cctv is actually effective as a crime prevention or crime detection tool with anything to back my statements up. And if there is one thing you don't want to do, it is to contradict a crim geek in their area of expertise. What I can say is that Britain is the most heavily surveilled country in the world, and my personal experience is that there are cameras everywhere.

After admiring the Banksy for a while, I wondered exactly how many CCTV cameras capture my image; more specifically, how many cameras do I walk under on my daily walk to work.

The next morning I reached 17 cameras as a first count, which is quite high for an 18 minute walk. Nearly one a minute, that is pretty heavy surveillance I thought. But wait, it gets worse...

Once I began actively looking for them, I started to see cameras everywhere I looked. There are a couple of major reasons for this:
1) My walk to work is past Kings Cross, which as a major train station and past terrorism target is one of the most heavily surveilled public areas I have ever seen, and
2) I walk along the north eastern fringe of the London congestion zone, so there are cameras everywhere looking for congestion fee dodgers.
This meant that my number of cameras just kept going up, to the point where my initial tally of 17 appeared woefully inadequate. My revised tally is 48, comprising 27 in the first four minutes of my walk past kings cross) and the remainder down Euston.

That is one camera every 23 seconds. Unbelievable.

What happens to this camera footage? Does anyone look at it? Should I take more care in my appearance when I pop out for the paper in the morning?