Just come back from touring around a number of european countries and the absence of the surveillance cameras was very noticeable. Yet I did not feel threatened at any time even in public spaces with crowds gathering, nor did I feel my safety was compromised. Maybe surveillance cameras are just a reflection of a society that is insecure within itself and distrustful of its citizens. Without consultation or prior public consent, they are installed at the whim of authorities. Safe in their uncontested defence that the public welcomes all cameras as they protects them from acts of violence and no innocent has anything to fear!
That protection is of course an urban myth with very little substantive evidence to support it. The increasing numbers of installations are self-defeating. Every camera needs a person to sit and monitor it, for every 525599 (or 527039 in a leap year) minutes of a year. Just incase something is about to kick off. Other than that, your security is just a factor of luck. Is your particular monitor being watched at the moment you are under threat? Chance are so long against it you would stand more chance winning the european lottery! So cameras are next to useless protecting from an event but can have use after an event. As you lie unconscious on the floor, with luck, you might get spotted within half an hour if, of course a caring passing citizen does not respond first!
These cameras promote an entirely false sense of safety. They are of course of great interest to authorities wanting to control a submissive society. They gather vast volumes of data tracking each and everyone of us. With face recognition software they can, when they choose, track a person for their whole active day or life. All in the interest of our greater security of course. Such resources would only ever be employed against known national threats, like terrorists. It just does not add up. They do not know the terrorists in adavance, there are too many cameras for such a focussed need. No, they are used routinely to monitor you and I as we go about our every day lives. To make judgements about our actions and compile dossiers of citizens with behaviour patterns deemed suspicious. Nothing to fear as I live within the law. Yet your behaviour is being judged every day by you know not who. Software designed to pick up on nervous behaviour or by a low paid psychotic with a warped sense of normality. You have absolutely no idea nor any rights to know. Yet if by some mechanism you are placed in the suspect pile, your life can be change dramatically. To prove innocence is impossible. Once you are deemed a witch, or in this day and age, a terrorists, you are beyond help. Your cries of innocence merely confirm your guilt to those judging you.
No, let us get it straight, surveillance cameras are a weapon to be used by an authoritarian state against it citizens that are too submissive and indifferent to care.
Whilst I am at it of course the other aspect are speed cameras. Went through far too many road works when abroad and not a single one had an average speed camera let alone a fixed camera during the works. The organisation of the roadworks were far less controlled and organised than over here. If anything the risks were far higher there, but no cameras. Traffic density could be equal to or exceeding that here. I simply do not believe, and the evidence of my own eyes supports it, that we are not worst drivers. So why such a different reaction? Average speed cameras tightly controlling traffic speed through roadworks and even reducing the speed through the works arbitrarily down to 30 or even 20 mph, compared to, no cameras.
If the accidents rates were remarkably different between one country and another there would be an public outcry in the country at variance. No I suspect that accident and or driving death rates, one country to another, are more or less on par. Even in Germany where they still have unlimited speeds on parts of the autobahn I doubt whether there is a significant difference. So why does this country have such an obsession with speed cameras. It has to be distrust and control. Distrust by us the citizens of ourselves and the willingness of others to behave and an authority that leaps at that permissiveness, to exercise more control over its citizens that is never contested. All muddled and muddied up with good aspirational goals that allay social concerns, the need to save fuel in equal measures with doses of all speed kills. Twaddle but self-righteous twaddle so not easily dismissed.
At the heart of all this is a conundrum. The conundrum is that strong leaders are expected to be seen to act and be decisive and in times of threat, action is expected. In response to those expectations those in control publicly tinker. It matter not what they tinker at so long as it tickles the public's expectations of what is thought to be effective. In reality those tinkerings have very little actual impact on events other than massaging the public's concerns. There are no reliable studies to prove efficacy but they accumulate building up into a mythology of effective reactions to events. Just fantasy solutions for a submissive public that has given up on caring, thinking or protesting at self-evident bad decisions. It is up to you, have surveillance or speed cameras been proven to actually work? Get off your butt and do something.
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