Eyes Everywhere

The Global Growth of Camera Surveillance

Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert, David Lyon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415668644
• eBook ISBN: 9781136496981
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In many countries camera surveillance has become commonplace, and ordinary citizens and consumers are increasingly aware that they are under surveillance in everyday life. Camera surveillance is typically perceived as the archetype of contemporary surveillance technologies and processes.

While there is sometimes fierce debate about their introduction, many others take the cameras for granted or even applaud their deployment. Yet what the presence of surveillance cameras actually achieves is still very much in question. International evidence shows that they have very little effect in deterring crime and in 'making people feel safer', but they do serve to place certain groups under greater official scrutiny and to extend the reach of today's 'surveillance society'.

Eyes Everywhere provides the first international perspective on the development of camera surveillance. It scrutinizes the quiet but massive expansion of camera surveillance around the world in recent years, focusing especially on Canada, the UK and the USA but also including less-debated but important contexts such as Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey. Containing both broad overviews and illuminating case-studies, including cameras in taxi-cabs and at mega-events such as the Olympics, the book offers a valuable oversight on the status of camera surveillance in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

The book will be fascinating reading for students and scholars of camera surveillance as well as policy makers and practitioners from the police, chambers of commerce, private security firms and privacy- and data-protection agencies.

Introduction

David Lyon, Aaron Doyle and Randy Lippert

DOI: 10.4324/9780203141625-1

Today there are eyes everywhere, and it took just one generation. In thirty years camera surveillance grew from an unknown, non-issue to a frequently taken-forgranted ‘necessity’ on the street, in shopping malls, office buildings and factories, in transit stations and airports. Indeed, as Stephen Graham once suggested, public open-street video cameras may be considered as akin to a ‘fifth utility’ (Graham 1999). And while such public cameras receive much of the attention, privately owned and operated cameras are even more ubiquitous. Just how densely those cameras are distributed is a matter of some debate, of course.

Take the United Kingdom (UK), for example, often considered a leading site for camera surveillance. While earlier research projected the presence of over 4 million cameras in the UK, a more recent analysis suggests there may be ‘only’ 1.85 million (Gerrard and Thompson 2011). Both figures were arrived at through considerable extrapolation, but the point that the total number of cameras in the UK is in the millions is not in dispute. Even so, the UK’s role as world surveillance camera leader may not last for long. While cameras have sprouted in streets, stations and stores across Europe and North America, they are also being sold as ‘security solutions’ in many other countries around the globe. The rationales for their adoption, and public and official opinions about their efficacy, may vary from place to place, but their widespread adoption across the globe does not appear to be slowing. Cameras have appeared on the streets and in the stores of Accra, Ghana; Kathmandu, Nepal; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Kabul, Afghanistan; and (perhaps not inappropriately) Montevideo, Uruguay: these examples suggest there appear to be no geographical or economic limits to their use.

Meanwhile, camera surveillance also continues to multiply, intensify and evolve in the countries like the UK in which it was already well established: surveillance cameras appear in diverse new contexts such as taxi cabs (Doyle and Walby, this volume), new forms proliferate such as Automated Number Plate Recognition (Derby, this volume), and new means of co-ordinating camera surveillance emerge, such as the MOBESE system in Istanbul (Çavlin Bozbeyoğlu, this volume), even as the move to digital technology may revolutionize the capabilities of surveillance camera systems (Ferenbok and Clement, this volume).

All that said, we need to be cautious about simply assuming a continued unidirectional march to global ubiquity of the cameras, as Gavin Smith points out in his contribution to this collection. Smith spotlights how the cost and effectiveness of CCTV schemes in the UK is increasingly coming into question, and receiving negative media attention, and some CCTV operations in that country are even closing down. Smith thus speculates about the emergence of a ‘politics of retraction’. From time to time one also sees publicly expressed doubts, relating to actual analysis of the evidence, about the effectiveness of camera surveillance. Recent examples in Paris, France and Los Angeles, California, are cases in point.¹

For the most part though, it is fair to say the spread of the cameras continues largely unchecked. Perhaps most significantly in terms of proliferation, camera surveillance has caught on in the largest countries such as China and India, where economic growth rates are high and modernization and urbanization processes are proceeding at a dizzying pace. For instance, the Shanghai Daily reports that the number of public space cameras is to double, in that city, to over 50,000 between 2011 and 2016, with the rationale of boosting police investigation of criminals and to track suspects.² China’s video surveillance market was estimated to be worth over US$1.4 billion in 2009 and is likely to grow at 20 per cent per annum, reaching $3.5 billion in 2014. While camera surveillance equipment sales in China represented 17 per cent of the world market in 2009, to the US’s 29 per cent, by 2014 it is estimated that 70 per cent of world video camera shipments will be to China, compared with 12 per cent in the US and 18 per cent in the rest of the world.³

The paradox is that for all the millions of cameras and billions spent, there is a lack of convincing evidence that they ‘work’. The conundrum of the continued spread of cameras in the absence of such evidence has intrigued and puzzled social researchers, policy analysts and legal experts. It was a major theme of a January 2010 international research workshop of SCAN (Surveillance Camera Awareness Network) at the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada (and of a report published by SCAN in 2009⁴). The workshop featured numerous scholars from the social sciences and from information and computer studies as well as policy and legal experts, and most of the chapters in this book were originally presented there.

As we discussed at length at the workshop, what the presence of surveillance cameras actually achieves is still very much in doubt. A variety of purposes is trumpeted for the cameras – deterrence, retroactive prosecution of criminals, making people feel safer – but the evidence seen throughout this volume does not support arguments that they achieve any of these purposes very effectively. In fact, international evidence in general is that they have very little effect in deterring crime (several contributors, e.g. Lizar and Potter, this volume, report that there is frequently no signage marking cameras’ presence, undercutting a possible deterrent effect). Surveillance camera footage is rarely used for prosecutions, and any possible impact in making people safer is debatable at best, and also raises questions about the ethics of a measure that may make people feel safer but has no effect in practice. Critics charge that the cameras may serve to place certain groups under greater official scrutiny and to extend the reach of today’s ‘surveillance societies’, although their general failure to achieve deterrence or prosecution of offenders suggests that, as Hier (2010) notes, the panoptic effect of the cameras may currently be more dream than reality. Yet surveillance camera technologies are rapidly evolving and we must also consider their potential future functions and effectiveness, for good or ill.

The absence of evidence that the cameras ‘work’ immediately prompts the question: why do they continue to spread? And this is where the social sciences come in, with their attempts to understand not only a general and very rapid growth of camera surveillance, but also the particular conditions that give rise to specific developments as well as shaping responses to them in different regions and countries of the world. For example, in North America and Western Europe, growing camera surveillance is typically associated with the perception of rising crime problems (despite generally declining crime rates), increased police use of technology in general, traffic control, and of course post-9/11 preoccupations with security (Norris, McCahill and Wood 2004). In Latin American cities, arguably, urban violence is at the top of the agenda when decisions are made about installing video surveillance, while post-9/11 fears are hardly relevant (Arteaga 2009; Arteaga this volume).

Even within these regional generalizations, of course, large variations exist. There are many different countries in Latin America or Europe and even the term ‘North America’ covers three different countries: Canada, the US and Mexico. In the first, Canada, from which this collection originated, the situation is marked by a relative lack of cameras. While, as Sean Hier says, ‘Canadian cities have not been impervious to global trends in establishing public-area CCTV surveillance systems,’ he goes on, ‘Canada is notable, however, for the number of cities where streetscape CCTV surveillance systems have been rejected – whether based on public and government discussion and debate, the mobilization of formal protest groups, informal networks of community resistance, short- and long-term funding concerns, or the enactment and execution of privacy laws and policy frameworks’ (Hier 2010: 28). This is a reminder that the contrasting rationales must also be placed next to diverse responses to efforts to deploy camera surveillance, which may also slow growth and which also vary from place to place.

To return to the area in which camera surveillance is fastest growing, China, it appears that public responses to camera surveillance may well be muted because of the ways that dissenters may be treated. After all, one rationale among many for their deployment in China (as in some other countries) is to keep tabs on any who might question the system. But it is clear that many – especially but not only – urban Chinese have become acutely aware of the rapid deployment of public space camera systems in recent years. A 2006 international public opinion survey found a surprising 60 per cent of respondents in China claimed they were knowledgeable about surveillance cameras; Chinese focus group participants for the same study uniquely (among nine countries involved) raised the question of camera surveillance without being prompted (Dawson, this volume; Zureik et al. 2010; see also Liang and Huili 2007).

In addition to some of the ‘standard’ rationales for installing public space cameras, then, in some sensitive areas in China more general social order and control motifs appear, along with the monitoring of dissent and disorder. Automated Number Plate Recognition (see Derby, this volume) is in use in China, along with direct recording, such as recording the faces of those using Internet cafes. In Urumqi, where ethnic riots broke out between Han and Uighur in 2009, over 47,000 cameras have been installed (Wines 2010) and the number is set to rise to 60,000 in 2011.⁵ Meanwhile in Xining, on China’s remote Tibetan plateau, 4,000 cameras⁶ sold by China Telecom to authorities as ‘global eyes’ hang over ethnically mixed areas containing high proportions of Tibetans, in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2008 monk-led riots there (MacKinnon 2010). Human rights activists are concerned about the targeted use of cameras in ethnically Uighur and Tibetan neighbourhoods as well as against political dissidents.

Across the country, the Ministry of Public Security says that 2.75 million cameras have already been installed in urban China,⁷ although after riots in Urumqi and elsewhere, security officials also placed cameras inside mosques, monasteries and hotels (Wines 2010). At the same time, there are no national laws limiting the use of public video surveillance, although some local regulations do exist in certain places.⁸ Of course, with little or no in-depth research being carried out on public space camera surveillance in that country, it is difficult to tell exactly what is happening and how it matches or contrasts with experiences elsewhere. Nonetheless, the burgeoning Chinese use of camera surveillance and the appearance in all Chinese major urban areas and ‘trouble spots’ of overhead camera installations is unlikely to make no impact at all.

From work in many other countries, a selection of which appears in this book, researchers have become aware of numerous issues driving and accompanying the spread of camera surveillance, but even these must be placed in context if they are to be understood. Camera surveillance is highly significant in today’s world, but has to be seen against the backdrop of a more general increase in practices of organizational surveillance. Indeed, one could argue that in information-intensive environments, organizations have become dependent on surveillance. Gathering and processing personal data – of which camera images are but one kind – is now organizationally central for management of all kinds (Lyon 2007; Haggerty 2009). And especially as camera surveillance shifts from the use of celluloid film and analogue techniques towards digitized images and electronic modes of processing, storing and sharing data (see Ferenbok and Clement, this volume), so the resonances between different surveillance practices become stronger. For instance, it is only a few years since ‘facial recognition’ referred primarily to what the human eye could see in filmed images. Now this is thought of as something that machines can accomplish.

But not only is there an immediate context of camera surveillance as an aspect of the general growth of surveillance, the growth of modern surveillance is itself dependent on some significant ways of experiencing the world. Cameras may be thought to have some natural affinity with surveillance just because the word itself – from the French, surveiller: to watch over – has a visual referent at its core. Thus, especially in the Western world, one finds strong cultural emphases on the importance of visible evidence, of privileging the eye as the most accurate sense, and following from this, a belief in objective knowledge as a criterion of truth. More mundanely, as Jonathan Finn (this volume) suggests, ‘seeing surveillantly’ is an increasingly generalized cultural phenomenon. Yet in the same Western tradition one also finds vision denigrated and other senses elevated to a superior position (see e.g. Jay 1994). All of which suggests some profound ambiguities in the ways that vision and, by extension, surveillance may be understood (Brighenti 2010). Camera surveillance, which uses visual images but at the same time, paradoxically, reduces them to digital data, is subject to similar ambiguities.

Such matters have entered debates over camera surveillance in many countries in Europe and North America, where what was called Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) was first developed. We should note at this point that the shift towards digital images that can be circulated through the Internet and towards networked and wireless cameras means that neither ‘closed circuit’ nor ‘television’ are terms that any longer capture much of what is occurring today (see Ferenbok and Clement, this volume). As Laura Huey points out in her chapter, the Royal Academy of Engineers (2007) has argued the term ‘CCTV’ is increasingly no longer applicable, given the increasing number of systems using networked digital cameras, which have much greater flexibility in terms of storing, transmitting and searching for images. She quotes the Royal Academy: ‘The continued use of the term is an indicator of a general lack of awareness of the nature of contemporary surveillance, and disguises the kinds of purposes, dangers and possibilities of current technologies’ (Royal Academy of Engineers 2007: 33).

As camera surveillance arrives in new settings, often culturally as well as geographically remote from those sites familiar to analyses centred in the Global North, further questions arise. In countries where camera surveillance has become taken for granted, TV news use of surveillance footage may be a signal that the event ‘really happened’ (see Finn, this volume), but would this be true elsewhere? Equally, in countries (like Turkey) where ‘privacy’ is popularly thought to refer exclusively to the domestic realm, it would seem to make no sense to appeal to ‘privacy’ as something that ought to be protected in ‘public’ places (see Çavlin Bozbeyoğlu, this volume).

The approach taken here is that several important issues raised by camera surveillance now require analysis that is not only comparative between the countries of Europe and North America, but increasingly between countries in quite different and varied parts of the world. The chapters that follow explore patterns and variations across countries along the following themes: cultural, legal and political contexts of the emergence of the cameras and how these drive or inhibit their spread; ‘trigger events’ such as highly mediatized crimes that create a heated political climate that makes reasoned opposition to the cameras difficult; installation of cameras as a key part of security for temporary ‘mega-events’ such as the Olympics, with the cameras then remaining as a permanent ‘legacy’; the ever-evolving technologies and systems involving the cameras, leading to new functions and uses that were not originally contemplated; the role of private business and public–private partnerships in selling and promoting the cameras and using them to attempt to secure commerce and ‘safe shopping’ in a broader era of globalized neo-liberalism; the role of various levels of government, police and media in promoting surveillance cameras and various factors that contribute to a ‘democratic deficit’ and lack of meaningful evaluation, accountability and regulation; all tied up with the central conundrum of the continued spread of the cameras in the absence of evidence of their effectiveness.

So while this book makes progress in discussing some questions that have engaged and sometimes perplexed researchers in the Global North, it also pushes the envelope to suggest that our studies are incomplete without some sense of what is happening elsewhere. The shifting tilt of the world’s population, power and cultural axes may also be seen, illuminatingly, through the lens of surveillance cameras.

Situating camera surveillance growth

What are the contexts for the global growth of camera surveillance? In the first chapter, Clive Norris, one of the world’s leading CCTV researchers, offers some critical reflections on its global growth. Norris says we should be careful not to treat camera surveillance as a homogenous phenomenon, but rather as continually evolving and featuring considerable variations in how it is socially organized in particular contexts. For example: is the footage simply being recorded for potential later review, or is it being monitored so events are viewed in real time? Who staffs the control room and how responsive will police be to them? Can those in the control room speak through a microphone to those being viewed? Broad variation in the socio-technical arrangements of camera surveillance also complicate generalizations about its effectiveness or lack of same.

Reviewing the history of CCTV expansion in Britain, Norris spotlights the massive publicity around the surveillance camera images from the abduction and murder of two-year-old Jamie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction—David Lyon, Aaron Doyle and Randy Lippert
• PART I Situating camera surveillance growth
• PART II International growth of camera surveillance
• PART III Evolving forms and uses of camera surveillance
• PART IV Public support, media visions and the politics of representation
• PART V Regulating camera surveillance
• Index