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Town gets hidden cameras monitoring all routes in and out, creating ‘ring of steel’
 Royston in Hertfordshire will become the first place in the UK with hidden cameras monitoring all routes in and out, creating a 'ring of steel'.
Hidden Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras will be installed by the end of April, recording the details of every vehicle entering and leaving the town. The cameras will store the registration details of anyone who drives through the town on a database in London for up to five years.
The scheme is being trumpeted by its creators as a way to make Royston the safest town in Hertfordshire and will be used to help track the movements of known criminals.
The police, North Hertfordshire District Council (NHDC) and regeneration company Royston First are keen to reassure that the ANPRs won't be used to keep tabs on the general public, but there are inevitable concerns about personal privacy and the amount of data being stored.
The scheme's creators may have the public's best intentions at heart, and those who have nothing to hide should have nothing to fear, as they say. But talk of 'rings of steel' does sound alarmingly Draconian. And hidden cameras do seem to smack of underhand motives.
April 6th 2011|
Big Brother is DEFINITELY watching you: Shocking study reveals UK has one CCTV for every 32 people
 It’s an astonishing statistic that is sure to send a chills down the spines of freedom campaigners.
A huge study has revealed that in Big Brother Britain there is an incredible one CCTV camera for every 32 citizens.
The revelation that 1.85 million cameras are watching our every move confirms the shocking extent of surveillance in 21st century Britain.
Coming a day after it emerged tiny drones could be used to spy on Britons, the new CCTV study is sure to bolster fears that we are nearing a Big Brother state.
The research involved police community support officers counting ostensibly every camera in Cheshire and extrapolating the results nationwide to provide a reliable estimate of the level of CCTV surveillance in the UK.
Officers counted 12,333 cameras in the area, according to a study published in CCTV Image magazine, the majority of which were inside premises, rather than facing public street
March 4th 2011
Whitehall admits CCTV faults as cameras continue to spread
 West Midlands police apologised for installing 200 CCTV cameras in two predominantly Muslim areas last year. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
Whitehall officials have said the value of CCTV to the police is often limited when investigating crime or major incidents because of poor camera positioning, poorly-maintained equipment, or lack of recording facilities. The failings are outlined in a Home Office consultation document proposing a voluntary code of practice for public CCTV systems.
"Where images are captured, a particular problem is the variety of and quality of formats in use to record and store them, meaning that it can be extremely time- consuming and costly for the police to retrieve and convert images into a format that can be viewed or used in court proceedings," the report says.
March 3th 2011
 D.C.'s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency has already centralized the feeds from more than 4,500 cameras operated by the District's department of transportation and school system. Those feeds are watched around the clock by officials from those departments who sit together in homeland security's Joint All-Hazards Operation Center.
By bringing feeds from thousands more cameras to the central watching room through links to cameras at businesses such as banks, corner stores and gas stations, the District is joining other big cities like London, New York and Baltimore that in recent years have turned to cameras to fight crime and terrorism. But critics worry the District's government might be going too far.
January 23th 2011
Beyond Surveillance: Darpa Wants a Thinking Camera
 It’s tough being an imagery analyst for the U.S. military: you’re drowning in pictures and drone video, with more pouring in endlessly from the tons of sensorBy Spencer Ackerman at wired.com s and cameras used on planes, ships and satellites. Sifting through it to find roadside bombs or missile components is a time-consuming challenge. That’s why the Pentagon’s blue sky research arm figures that cameras ought to be able to filter out useless information themselves — so you don’t have to.
Darpa announced yesterday that it’s moving forward in earnest with a program to endow cameras with “visual intelligence.” That’s the ability to process information from visual cues, contextualize its significance, and learn what other visual data is necessary to answer some pre-existing question. Visual-intelligence algorithms are already out there. They can read license plates in traffic or recognized faces (in limited, brighly-lit circumstances). But the programs are still relatively dumb; they simply help collate data that analysts have to go through. Darpa’s program, called Mind’s Eye, seeks to get humans out of the picture. If it works, it could change the world of surveillance overnight.
January 7th 2011
Tyranny Response Team Exposes Mobile Guard Tower
December 25th 2010
Freedom not fear: protestors rally against govt. surveillance
Civil liberty defenders across Europe are preparing to rally against what they see as a Big Brother approach to surveillance by government and businesses
Concerned people throughout Europe will take it to the streets to demonstrate on Saturday. Their motto is “Freedom, not fear” and they are protesting against intrusion by government and businesses into their private lives.
They are protesting against the collection of data with CCTV cameras and other monitoring devices, as well as creating national databases on the private lives of citizens.
”Our position is to say that security and freedom walk hand in hand,” said Leena Simon, organizer of the rally in Berlin. “They do not oppose to each other.”
Protestors speak against sensitive data collection which happens, not only nationally, but also on behalf of the European Union. They say that the Stockholm Program action plan includes plans to join European databases and that is alarming.
While governments say that the measure is key to fighting terrorism and crime in Europe, some say it breeches the very principles of democracy.
”If we want to live in a democracy, we need to risk a little,” Simon said. “Democracy means risk. Democracy needs risk.”
Source RT.com
September 11th 2010
Last week there was a slight tipping of the justice scales in relation to the London protests against the Israeli offensive in Gaza in January 2009. Protesters were awarded reduced sentences by the court of appeal who judged that the starting point for their sentences had been too high. Meanwhile, we had the first acknowledgement of police wrongdoing at the demonstrations. Beyond these documented facts lie much wider concerns about how the police used CCTV of the protests and how that affects the judicial process.
July 20th, 2010 |
Schools are being turned into “prisons” as children are subjected to increasingly sophisticated surveillance and security measures, according to a report.
 Researchers found the widespread use of CCTV, ID cards, electronic registration systems, fob-controlled gates and fingerprint technology as schools attempt to crackdown on troublemakers.
Staff at one comprehensive patrolled corridors and playgrounds with radios to make sure children behaved at lunchtimes, while teachers at a private school used technology to spy on children’s computer and internet use
July 8th, 2010
Their call comes after microphones that can detect aggression by the tone of someone’s voice were installed in Coventry, where they will cover an area blighted by drunken violence.
The Coventry decision has raised the prospect of microphones coming to Scottish cities, as Glasgow was one of the places where a trial was conducted.
The system, called Sigard, is able to direct CCTV cameras towards suspicious sounds, which can also be gunshots or the smashing of glass.
Operators can then direct police straight to a confrontation, in the hope they can stop violence before it erupts.
Sound Intelligence, the Dutch company that manufactures the system, claims Sigard could be vital in combating violence on British streets. But campaigners fear it may be used to record conversations and claim that
Sigard is another milestone in Britain’s transformation into a surveillance society.
 The UK is taking part in a European surveillance programme which is designed to gather personal information about suspected "radicals" from across the political spectrum.Confidential documents reveal how an initiative to gather data on "radicalisation and recruitment" in Islamic terrorist groups has been expanded to incorporate other organisations.
Political activists who have no association with terrorism could now find themselves monitored by authorities mandated to discover information about their friends, family, neighbours, political beliefs, use of the internet and even psychological traits.
Police and security agencies have agreed to monitor "agents" who adhere to ideologies potentially involving violence. The documents define targets for the surveillance as people involved in "extreme right/left, Islamist, nationalist, anti-globalisation" groups.
 Speed cameras which communicate with each other by satellite are being secretly tested on British roads.The hi-tech devices can follow drivers’ progress for miles to calculate whether they have broken speed limits.
Combining number plate recognition technology with global positioning satellites, they can be set up in a network to monitor tens of thousands of cars over huge areas for the smallest breach.
Known as SpeedSpike, the system uses similar methods of recognition as the cameras which enforce the congestion charge in London, and allow two cameras to 'talk' to each other if a vehicle appears to have travelled too far in too short a space of time.
After a covert national trial which has not been publicised until now, just days after a report showed motorists have been fined almost £1billion in speeding tickets under Labour, authorities hope the new cameras will enable them to re-create the system used on motorway contraflows.
Suspect Nation- Is this our future ??????
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