ubisurv

I'm shifting this blog over to Wordpress. Well-intentioned as Newcastle University is, you can't run a serious blog if only registered university members can comment (and you can't even upload photos).

I'll let this stay as a redirect for those who do bother to check in here for a while...

Head over to: http://ubisurv.wordpress.com

I know it's from the Daily Mail, but the underlying story is important - it looks like the growth of CCTV in Britain may be one of the first casualties of the recession...

This just bears out what I've noticed in discussions with Local Council CCTV people recently - there is a massive argument going on behind the scenes about who will pay for CCTV monitoring. At a recent Users' event I attended, some local government officers were suggesting that the police should pay local authorities for the use of cameras, which of course the police saw as ridiculous. Other operators argued for a competitive model where 'successful' money-making operators could take the 'business' of other authorities. And some, like Worcester are just mothballing their monitoring operations.

It brings up another bigger issue which has been bugging me for a while which is that whenit comes down to it, it will probably not be resistance that is the biggest enemy of surveillance, but capitalism. The size of the surveillance industry may not be big enough to counter the losses incurred through increased border controls, and the imposition of inefficient monitoring practices...

Some weekend newspapers showed clear signs of a (rather disgraceful) PR effort by the British security services of the kind we haven't seen for a while. What is worse is that the newspapers, even supposedly critical ones like The Observer, lapped it up as if it were self-evidently true.

The article concerned the monitoring of the Earth First! group in the UK by The National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit. Now, I know EF!UK very well, having been involved in setting up one of the first groups in the country over 18 years ago. We were involved in anti-road building and support of indigenous tribal groups against the illegal logging of their lands. EF!UK is certainly a direct action organisation, but it is also entirely non-violent and always has been. Indeed the only violence I ever encountered when I was involved came from police and private security guards against activists.

The Unit say that they are really worried about the 'lone extremist' or the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) - which also opposes violence against humans but advocates property damages - but the implications are that EF!UK is harbouring terrorists and isn't really non-violent. It is a disgraceful and unworthy example of state propaganda, which is probably - as these things often are - part of an internal argument in the security services about resources. EF!UK has of course faced these accusations before: the London Evening Standard, which has always been a rabble-rousing rag, back in the early 90s tried to claim that it was a terrorist group ('that could be next door to you!) alongside the African National Congress - then just about to liberate South Africa! The Observer should know better, and the journalists concerned, Mark Townsend and Nick Denning, should hang their heads in shame at their lack of research and their credulity. Mark Townsend in particular, I am surprised at - he is usually a lot better than this.

The retreat of the state from the the old fashioned policing of city centres in favour of public-private partnerships (PPP), ubiquitous video surveillance, Town-Centre Management (TCM) and Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) has only encouraged the seemingly relentless march of the private security industry. Yet despite its growing importance, private security remains massively under-regulated and controlled mainly by voluntary codes of conduct in the usual business-first British manner. The ironies of this situation were exposed today with the resignation of the Head of the Security Licensing Authority (SLA) which supposedly overseas the vetting of private security schemes and operatives, because it was found that some if its own agency staff had not been approved.

It is time the British government took a long hard look at its encouragement of private security and the growing numbers of 'plastic police'. The more initiatives are introduced to monitor the public and check identity, the more than these undertrained, underregulated men in a profession which has often attracted the least educated, the most violent and frequently ex-criminal, will be more and more powerful. It's time the government paid more attention to virtues like accountability here. Whatever the faults of the police, they are ultimately accountable to us through the state. Private security are ultimately accountable only to the owner and shareholders of the companies.

Just some random thoughts at the moment.

I spent the night before last sitting up watching one of the most hopeful changes in the world happen in the USA (which may explain the randomness of my thoughts since!).

I cried. I cheered. And then I started to think about Britain.

Here we are at the mealy-mouthed, morally bankrupt, exhausted of any ideas fag-end of another previous dream in the UK - although of course Tony Blair was never Barack Obama. Britain has drifted more and more towards a militaristic cast of thinking, with Labour PMs backing the most neoconservative American president as if he was one of their own. Where can Labour leaders who've drifted that far from their own roots and from the majority opinion in Britain now go? Can they just change direction with a new inclusive, bridge-building, humanitarian American president?

I was also thinking what Obama might mean for security and surveillance policy in the USA. We will have to see who he appoints to Homeland Security (or indeed if Homeland Security, which was of course a Bush / PNAC invention, will even survive). At the very least one might think that a black guy with a name like Barack Hussein Obama, who has been accused of 'palling around with terrorists', or being a secret Muslim extremist or even a terrorist himself, might appreciate the perils of the categorical suspicion that has so infected crime and security issues.

Certainly, he will be given 'the talk' from the intelligence services that tends to daunt incoming Presidents and Prime Ministers, but he has the intelligence and education to judge these things for himself and not be overawed. It's also true that despite the claims of the continuity of thinking in the intelligence services, they do change too. It's well known that many are disaffected with the way Bush has taken things, as many were in the late 1960s and early 1970s when all the revelations about NSA and FBI wiretapping and watchlists broke out. I don't expect such a public bloodletting this time, Obama is too careful for that - hence the hints that he may keep on Richard Gates in Defense - but I do hope for, no, expect some serious shaking up of national security policy and structures over the period of his first term.