Electronic surveillance 

The integration of mass surveillance and new digital technologies is unnerving

Sitting here in Hong Kong, our assumption would naturally be that China leads the world in street-level surveillance. Indeed, China today is thought to deploy about 172 million surveillance cameras – about three times as many as are operating in the United States – accounting for 43 per cent of a global US$47 billion business. But on a per capita basis, the US and the UK are understood to be the most densely covered. London and the UK in many ways lead the world, with extensive street surveillance systems introduced in the early 1990s after two massive IRA truck bombings in the city’s financial district. Today, thousands of automatic number plate recognition cameras along the UK’s road network catch speeding motorists, identify expired licences and track stolen cars.

Whether these comprehensive surveillance infrastructures are a good or bad thing is moot. At the time of the London bombings, the British government won broad public support for comprehensive monitoring, using the rhetoric: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Going back a decade, Chicago’s Mayor Daley was similarly supportive: “What cameras do is prevent crime – to tell criminals, ‘Yes, you are gonna be focused on’. There’s nothing wrong with that – to have the good citizens use our sidewalks and our parks, have our children go safely to and from school, have our families go to and from church and feel comfortable. We’re not spying on anybody. This is the public way. We’re not spying or identifying or racial profiling anyone.”