So the labour party need look no further for Gordon's replacement....oops! I don't do politics.
My regret is that I've found Canadians to be really nice people, when in Canada, and I went with a rather naive perception that they resented us, because of the former Empire.
I can recall in Vancouver, having a drink with some who said that the only trouble with the Country is too many rules(laws), which is rather the perception that Bruno is trying to foist upon us.
Vancouver is one of the nicest places in the World, an old friend of mine went there to live and, I think, died happy there - I'd love to go again.

Obviously you are living in the very heartland of criminality. Aren't you concerned about your safety? What kind of a miscreant would expose his family to such rampant danger by living in these excruciatingly deadly circumstances? You should move somewhere safe, like Rwanda or Afghanistan.



tanstaafl.

I've been unintentionally economical with the truth, we had a poacher killed when his 4&4 rolled on him in the night: I can't understand why people take these risks for wild rabbits, it's hardly big game!

From the US perspective, most people here see an issue with CCTV in the UK due to the government controlling so many cameras in public places. This is likely due to the small government mentality that many here carry. I've never heard complaints about privately owned ones, and see quite a few cameras in stores, malls, and so on. Personally, it's not something I think much about, and find benefits with the CCTV cameras installed along the highways.

What was this thread about?

I think someone was concerned they hadn't done enough for the BBS community, so to make amends they started the best flamewar we've had in ages.

Peter

Excellent, now who's going to see if they can block Brunos Daily Mail sub? (Does he get the News of the World on sundays too?). Our Indian Takeaway doesn't go for anything as racy as the Mail, we have to make do with the Essex Chronicle, the same scary headlines with even less substance.

Why did I think that the Daily Mail was a reputable newspaper? It looks like it's about equivalent to the New York Post. Is it also a Rupert Murdoch rag? I must have gotten it confused with the Daily Telegraph. The (New York) Daily News probably got mixed in there somewhere, too.

I don't know. Does anyone ever remember what a thread on this BBS originally started as?

Forbes has a graph comparing overall taxation rates as a percentage of GDP. The US is at 28.5%, Canada at 33.5%, and the UK at 35.9%, a whopping 2.4% higher than Canada, and almost the lowest rate in western Europe, after Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain.

Well look at what happened with the 7/7 bombings, they were able to track some of the movements back and catch people etc... If I am in a public space I don't really see the problem, if they were outside my house filming my front door then I may have an issue.

Is it really that much different here in the UK? Doesn't every government operate some kind of surveillance in big cities etc...

Cheers

Cris.

Some times it feels good to get it out of your system. And sometimes there is national pride at stake.

So there you go Chris you have made a valuable contribution in starting this thread, without even knowing you were doing it. Granted it may not be that clear a contribution, but if you look side ways at it I think it counts. I certainly feel I have come away from this thread with a little more understanding on certain topics!

Cheers

Cris.

This is one element that Bruno seems to have right. There are (supposedly) far more CCTV cameras per capita in the UK than anywhere else in the world. (Admittedly, I don't have numbers.) It's clearly become part of your culture. In the US, wealthier retailers will frequently have surveillance cameras indoors, cash machines have cameras, and parking decks frequently have cameras. But there are very few cameras that randomly survey public areas. And the only cameras I know of that the government operates are traffic light cameras. (Well, they probably have some security cameras inside some government office buildings.)

FYI, the video cameras in ATM machines are High-def, but only record 40 seconds after a transaction. Found this out when we had a car broken into at work, and it turned out that since no one was using the ATM at the time, there was no video.

I think that was me actually!
Only today, here in Yorkshire, police were able to publicise a picture of a man wanted in a murder case, because he got on a bus with CCTV (We have an occasional problem with violence on buses).
That's fine with me!- I don't break the law, so I have nothing to fear.

The awful irony of my rounding on the good old Daily Mail only struck me in the small hours: I went to Vancouver(LA & SF) at their expense in the 70's, having won the trip as a prize at a trade conference!
I've been waiting for this thread to turn its malevolence to the health & safety gestapo, so that I could point you to my favourite clip

You're going to need to do better than that, because the first "study" that determined that was amazingly flawed. It involved the "researcher" taking a walk from their city centre office and scaling up the density to the rest of the country.

Despite that the same "study" was rehashed again and again in the media for years afterwards.

I think at this point we should point out that very, very few of these CCTV cameras in public spaces in the UK are controlled by central government. They mainly are under the control of: town councils, county councils, shopping centres, bus companies, train companies etc

Heck, those Daily Mail hacks are quick getting on to a story, are they lurking here?
Today's front page heading of the colour supplement:

"Bruno Must Die"

Personally I don't subscribe to this, he's entitled to his opinions and, at the end of the day, this thread has been both fun and enlightening.

...and it almost got you talking about politics

Heh. Until "they" decide that what you do is against the law. Until "they" decide to misuse data about you.

How would you feel if there was a policeman assigned to follow you around every day? How is this any different?

These are just the obvious arguments. There is a huge corpus of opinion on this subject from civil liberties advocates. Just google for "nothing to hide nothing to fear".

I think I touched upon that point

I've seen and read plenty along these lines, but I'd still prefer the cameras, and to trust to reason - otherwise your giving in to what you might call Robespierre syndrome, to take a lesson from history.
Incidentally, in this country I also frequently see and read of perfectly ordinary citizens calling for more cameras.

A (delayed) backlash against the draconian and partisanly vindictive authoritarianism of the Reign of Terror?

I am in zone 4 in a development with a 20k sq ft lot. They say to plant trees in the spring or fall so I was planning on doing a few next spring. I was thinking of just ordering a bunch of small ones from http://www.arborday.org then I won't have to worry about them all not making it.

We would like to do a garden too. I have really sandy soil so I think I would need to buy some or add something to mine. Maybe raised beds would be the best ?

Having visited the operations centre's for Manchester Council, Police and Highways Agency, it's nothing like Minority Report, in fact, if I had to draw a parallel to a film I'd say it was like Billy Baldwin's den in Sliver.... ie. 90's technology. I certainly didn't see the video equivalent of Echelon either.

The systems aren't connected, they're staffed by a rather lacklustre bunch of fellows (certainly not a 1:1 ratio to the number of people in Manchester) and the cameras are PAL quality at best. Those were the ones that are working, a sizeable chunk of the highways agency ones were out of action.

We have a dozen or so CCTV cameras at work which helped weed out the cleaner who was pinching stuff off people's desks. So I'd say that was worth having.

Similar happened in the US with the 9/11 attacks. CCTV cameras captured every one of the hijackers going through security at the airport. While CCTV in both cases provided valuable evidence for investigating what happened, it did nothing to deter the attacks. CCTV might do well for post crime investigations, but there are many conflicting reports about how much they help to prevent crime. This article says that the head detective of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard claims that CCTV was only useful for solving 3% of crimes. Other stories claim much higher, so it's hard to say for sure.


It depends. Most of them I see in Austin are all traffic monitoring cameras tied in with the road monitors to help identify what is causing a traffic jam. These cameras are operated by the state department of transportation, and are the only ones I know of controlled by a government entity outside surveillance of government buildings. This story from 2007 talks about some cameras in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles being operated usually by the local police departments. The NYCLU currently has an open lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security about information regarding the systems in New York, as they worked with the NYPD to design it.


Even the ABC news article I posted above has the same stats in it, so it looks like a lot of places are using it as fact now. Channel 4 FactCheck looked into it and the methodology of where the numbers came from.

CCTV is definitely a useful tool for certain situations. But it's only one of many tools, and I would hope that most institutions using them realize this.

Unfortunately the article isn't very clear on whether that's 3% of solved crimes, 3% of reported crimes, or 3% of all crimes. That last would be an impressive and worthwhile figure IMO.

Peter

And, one would assume, it will never be upgraded.

Also, don't get me started on the abortion that is the movie version of Minority Report. It's a complete bastardization of the short story, with a completely different, possibly diametrically opposed, viewpoint.

I'm sure it'll be upgraded. But upgraded to something that can automatically recognise and track every person it can see on each of it's cameras? God knows. So the chances to being caught by the feds walking through Manchester city centre while wearing a hat is pretty much 0% at the moment. The idea that I'm being constantly watched by CCTV in this country is nonsense. I'm walking past the cameras and it's possible that I'm being recorded, but will anyone actually ever view the video and say 'Yes, that's Andy Marriott, why isn't he at work?', no. I'm sure once technology advances sufficiently then the US government will install it everywhere as well.

The best way to track me would be to look at my debit card transactions, you'd then know where I park, where I fill my car up, where I do my shopping, where I buy my lunch etc. That technology is in place in every developed nation.

Minority report was the only film I could think of... although if we use TV shows, then the CSI franchise always manages to use massively advanced CCTV footage to catch their criminals.

Well, what about when your government does something you don't like and you protest about it? Then they aren't looking for you. They're looking for anyone near that protest at that time. Then they come and detain you against your civil liberties. After all, they had no problem spying on you all that time; why should they be concerned about whether you've actually done anything illegal or not.

This isn't science fiction. This happened in the US under Bush.

"Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte."