I am concerned by the extent of state surveillance in our society. That concern is at the core of what I do and I think that having that concern is reasonable. And yet, over at the Times, in a piece I urge you to read before ploughing through this response, Crime and Security Editor Sean O’Neill says that I and those who feel like me are “mad-eyed” and “paranoid”. Ignoring cheap ad hominems, let us consider his arguments in turn.
He begins with a robust defence of the rapid expansion of the DNA database. Well, if those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear, then I await with interest the instruction to all police officers to give their DNA to the database, and the ensuing stampede of obedient PCs lining up to do so. Of course, in reality, said officers would no doubt refuse to do so, probably on the grounds that they are often at crime scenes and false positives could easily arise from their samples. They would be afraid of the results the surrender of their samples might have, regardless of their innocence. Which is how the rest of us are entitled to feel.
In the meantime, if Mr O’Neill and those with views like his wish voluntarily to surrender their details, they ought to be able to do so.
Likewise, Mr O’Neill mocks those who “fret” about CCTV cameras and their complaints about the “surveillance society” such cameras represent.
However, it is not simply privacy concerns that lead to doubts about CCTV cameras. The enormous expense of installation, maintenance, monitoring and storage of the imagery produced by them represents money taken from a finite pot of funds available to law enforcement that cannot be used in other ways. The sense of security gained from CCTV is frequently entirely false. Cameras often don’t work. When they do work, they're often not turned on. When they do work, and are on, they’re often pointing the wrong way during the course of whatever incident is causing concern. When they’re working, switched on and pointing the right way, footage is often “scrubbed” before an investigator requests it, because storage is expensive. When the camera is working, switched on, pointing the right way and the footage hasn’t been scrubbed, the quality of the imagery is usually so low as to be unusable for investigations and certainly not good enough for court identification purposes.
It is for these reasons that the Metropolitan Police Force estimates that for every thousand cameras in London, one crime per year is solved. In a mutually exclusive, finite resources environment, the presence of those thousands of cameras on our streets means the absence of hundreds of actual police officers.
When the camera has been placed in location X, law enforcement’s resources flow away from X and towards Y. Often, as a result, a crime committed in X goes unsolved, with all the suffering and disappointment for victims that goes with that, because of the wholly false reliance that has been placed on those cameras.
All of those arguments are mounted without even a reference to privacy. Efficacy alone is enough to show up the faults of our CCTV network, the biggest in the world. But there are legitimate privacy concerns. People do feel uncomfortable with the (in principle) permanent retention of the images of innocent people.
Likewise, there is a legitimate privacy concern about the retention of details about our telephone calls and e-mails, or of the most basic aspects of you – your genetic make-up – by the state, which ought to treat us as innocent citizen subjects, free to go about our business without let or hindrance unless and until we do something wrong, rather than treat us as perpetual suspects. It’s a distortion of the primary aspects of our relationship with the state as free people to say otherwise. That the crime and security editor of the Times doesn’t feel such concerns says less about those concerns than it does about the Times.
So Mr O’Neill’s argument falls down on both practical and principled grounds. On the former, he spends time reciting anecdotes he has apparently heard from a police officer about a crime that has been solved by CCTV, and another by DNA evidence. No doubt these stories are true. But it ought not to be beyond the wit of someone in Mr O’Neill’s position to consider the other side of that coin. The millions of man-hours wasted on fruitless DNA searches (as detailed here) or on poring without benefit over masses of CCTV footage cannot be portrayed to Mr O’Neill in a neat anecdote, but the inefficacy of law enforcement spending its time and money doing so ought to be apparent – and the logical result of that, that many cases might have been solved if proper policing had been used during those finite man-hours instead, ought to be considered too.
In relation to the principles at stake here, Mr O’Neill commits the simple fallacy of considering the merit of solving the specific, small number of crimes he says can be solved by DNA evidence or CCTV footage (and the potential of solving those which remain unsolved), without weighing against that undoubted merit the harm that comes from conducting millions of checks against the records of millions of people living in this country entitled to live without being suspected as criminals, or indeed the harm that comes from the surveillance of society en masse without end. He tells us that these technologies have great utility for the police. But that is to state the obvious. I am sure that the expansion of these technologies even further, to the maximum degree possible, would indeed be “useful” to law enforcement. When the state gathers more information about everyone, the solving of crimes obviously becomes easier. But this isn’t a numbers game – it’s a question of the kind of country we want to live in.
