Who remembers this little tale? Of course you do! Cos it was only a couple of days back that I was rumbling on about it.
About how our local Council plans on spending shedloads of public money on a snooping system for use outside schools in the area. In the hope of catching motorists parking illegally who thereby, so the Council claims, endanger the lives of the schoolkids.
(It’s always and inevitably the motorists’ fault of course. When I was a kid I was taught how to behave safely near roads. But that’s another matter entirely. And best I don’t get started on all the other things kids were taught in those days… that no-one seems to have heard about nowadays.)
I picked the story up from one of the local freebie papers, interest aroused by its relevance to a favourite soapbox topic of mine: the increasing surveillance of joe public by various “official” bodies.
I touched upon three general areas of concern about this particular instance. You can read the whole thing for yourself of course as it’s all in the immediately preceding post, but to briefly recap:
- The cost of the scheme, suggesting that this may not be the best or most sensible use of local taxpayers’ money in these difficult economic times
- The possibility of abuse of the system given it entails cameras being deployed in the vicinity of children
- The worrying trend of surveillance creeping into ever more areas of our lives and being regarded as acceptable
Now it could be that my concerns re the second point were misplaced, for it seems there’s a possibility that the kit the Council proposes to deploy may not function as I originally thought, but focus solely upon car registration plates. Maybe. Or maybe not. It’s not at all clear from that first report. And all this new-fangled technology confuses the hell out of me anyway.
Doesn’t change the fact though that whilst joe public’s accepting of various “official” bodies bringing ever-increasing numbers of different types of cameras into play, ordinary innocent photographers are still getting loads of harassment… often by those same “official” bodies.
Well, seems this little yarn has now been picked up by the second of our local freebies, the Bedfordshire on Sunday (of which the pic at the start of this post). And they have been obliging enough to publish the full article on-line as well (unlike the other freebie).
And provided some rather different figures to chew over. Like, for example, quoting an initial cost of £98,250. With an additional cost of £42,800 per year to run the damn system! Hmm.
Moreover, it seems I’m not the only one to be a tad concerned about this little project. Apparently Big Brother Watch has picked up on it too, and sums the whole thing up rather neatly in the following way:
Bedford’s bureaucrats have put more plainly than most their intent to use surveillance to force drivers to stop using their cars. Social engineering via snooping
Yes. Quite so.
(Also published at yet another blog)
