The surveillance society

[unixronin]

A white paper published by the UK Home Office on the UK's National CCTV Strategy (PDF) discusses in depth the use of closed-circuit TV cameras for surveillance of the public.  On page 13, it cites a "best estimate" that UK government bodies now employ 4.2 million CCTV cameras¹.

Wait a minute ... "best estimate"?  You mean they don't KNOW how many cameras they're operating?

[1]  That's approximately one camera for every fifteen people in the UK.  It's unclear whether that estimate includes ANPR cameras used for traffic monitoring.  There appears to be some overlap, as there is some implication that some regular crowd surveillance cameras are being extended to track vehicle license plates as well.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The thing is, the arrow of progress means we'll catch up with that data stream pretty soon...so all they have to do is archive it now, and eventually they'll be able to paw through it and extract patterns in near-real-time.

Assuming computers in 2015 still have DVD drives, that is...

BTW you should probably assume those cameras are running at 1 or 0.5Hz, not 15Hz; that seems to be typical from the feeds I've seen published. Some of this is accounted for in your obscene compression ratio, of course. ;)