Regulating Big Brother: The UK Approach

Abstract

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) is generally used in public spaces as one of a number of tools of crime prevention and detection, and has been more recently explicitly referred to as an important domestic defence against terrorist activity. The success of such schemes is mixed and appears to be context specific rather than acting as a more general 'silver bullet' in crime prevention. Nevertheless, its apparent success in, for example, aiding the detection of those responsible for the London subway bombings in 2005 has provided ample evidence for those who advocate the further spread of this surveillance technology. The New York Times has reported recently that three thousand surveillance cameras would be in place in New York by 2008 with the possibility of utilising facial recognition technology. Whilst the argument commonly heard is that if one has nothing to hide one has nothing to fear, it is more appropriate that the state is able to both justify its use of such wide spread surveillance and put in place a transparent form of video surveillance regulation that ensures public confidence in a system with the potential to collect personal data on a huge scale and thereby impinge on individual privacy. The United Kingdom, which is considered by many to be the home of widespread public space video surveillance, has a regulatory system governing the collection and storage of data obtained by CCTV surveillance. This paper outlines the requirements of the legislation in theory before reporting the results of a survey into the adherence to the legislation in practice. It illustrates that the majority of the respondents were ignorant of the requirements of this complex legislation and as a result were potentially breaching individual rights as well as compromising the gathering of strong evidence. In many respects CCTV operators were also ignorant as to what an ethical approach to such surveillance might include. It is suggested that in its current form UK regulation is working in theory but not practice and this raises the question whether such a regime concentrating on data protection is appropriate in other jurisdictions.