The Maximum Surveillance Society

The Rise of CCTV

Gary Armstrong, Clive Norris

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323924
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia britannica moderna

The use of Closed-Circuit Television, or CCTV, has dramatically increased over the past decade, but its presence is often so subtle as to go unnoticed. Should we unthinkingly accept that increased surveillance is in the public's best interests, or does this mean that 'Big Brother' is finally watching us? This book asks provocative questions about the rise of the maximum surveillance society. Is crime control the principal motivation behind increased surveillance or are the reasons more complex? Does surveillance violate peoples' right of privacy? Who gets surveilled and why? What are its implications for social control? Does surveillance actually reduce crime? What will developments in technology mean for the future of surveillance? What rights do individuals under surveillance have? How is the information gathered through CCTV used by the authorities?Based on extensive fieldwork on automated surveillance in Britain over a two-year period, this book not only attempts to answer these vexing questions, but also provides a wealth of detailed information about the reasoning behind and effects of social control.

Part I
Images of Social Control

–1–
Introduction: Visions of Surveillance

This is a book about watching people. It examines the rise of camera-based surveillance that is embodied in the proliferation of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV). In Britain it is now virtually impossible to move through public (and increasingly private) space without being photographed and recorded. Whatever our role as we pass through the urban landscape we are subject to the presence of the cameras. As consumers we are monitored by the routine use of cameras in retail outlets; whether in the supermarket, department store or comer shop. When we leave the store our image, in all probability, will be captured by high street, town centre and shopping mall camera systems. On our journey home, traffic cameras will monitor our compliance with speed and red light restrictions and, if we travel by rail, cameras at stations and along platforms will ensure a record of our presence. In other roles, whether it be as workers on the factory floor or at the office, as students, from kindergarten to university, as hospital patients, football fans or even customers at a local restaurant, cameras are probably watching over us. Put simply, in urban Britain, at the cusp of the millennium, in almost every area to which the public have access we are under surveillance from CCTV.

The book has three aims: to provided a critical account of the recent exponential growth of camera-based surveillance in Britain; to document the actual practice of CCTV surveillance as it is carried out in the high streets and town centres of British cities; and to anticipate the future direction of this technology of social control. Before outlining the organisation of this book in more detail this introduction will briefly explore how surveillance has been conceptualised in both popular and academic discourse.

Throughout the twentieth century the idea of surveillance has become inscribed in mass consciousness, not primarily through the learned tomes of academics, but through its artistic treatment in popular culture. In the English-speaking world, at least, the most enduring, and often haunting images are to be found in films such as Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Francis Ford Cappola’s The Conversation (1974) or Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Popular song has also taken up the theme of surveillance (see Marx 1995) the most memorable being the Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ (1983). In literature, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) still feature as essential reading on many school curricula.

What unites these classics of popular culture is their tragic and dystopian portrayal of the personal and political impact of surveillance. In The Conversation which is about aural rather than visual surveillance, the main character played by Gene Hackman is ‘a painfully lonely, cynical, paranoid and alienated man whose work has driven him to guard his own privacy zealously, although there is precious little to protect’ (Monaco, Pallot and Baseline 1993: 159). In Peeping Tom it is the pathological voyeurism of a photographer which provides the film’s dominant motif but which simultaneously ‘accuses the audience of sharing the central character’s sickness … [and produces) … one of the most disturbing films ever made’ (ibid.: 662). So disturbing that Powell, until then a highly regarded film-maker, was vilified by the British press who labelled it as a completely repugnant film, and effectively ended his career. The pathological nature of surveillance is also reflected in the Police’s hit ‘Every Breath You Take’, with its central refrain of:

every breath you take

every move you make

every bond you break

every single day

I’ll be watching you.

The song is, according to its writer Sting, about ‘the obsessiveness of ex-lovers, their manical possessiveness’ (cited in Marx 1995: 113) and while it does not mention technological supports such as cameras ‘for this omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance, it is easy to connect it with contemporary tools’ (ibid.: 114) such as the motion detector and video recorder.

In literature, the most enduring image of surveillance is to be found in Orwell’s futuristic vision of Britain in nineteen-eighty-four, where the totalitarian rule of the Party is maintained by permanent and omnipresent televisual monitoring. The inhabitants are constantly reminded of the power of the state to monitor them by posters declaring ‘Big Brother is Watching You’. And for Huxley, the Brave New World of the future is one dominated by a scientific totalitarianism where the socialisation of genetically engineered human clones is managed through permanent surveillance in the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms and the continued happiness and compliance of the workers is preserved by the administration of psychotropic drugs.

This brief and selective glimpse of the portrayal of surveillance in popular culture reflects a profound unease with the practice and technology of surveillance. However, as Marx points out in both religious hymns and popular song there is another refrain to be heard: surveillance not as threatening but as offering the promise of the protection and care of a benevolent guardian. Thus, while we would argue that the dominant cultural theme is tragic, either for those engaged in surveillance or subject to its gaze, there is also an ambivalence which recognises that ‘Surveillance has two faces.’ (Lyon 1994: 201). This ambivalence is reflected in the academic literature on surveillance. It is seen not only as both protective and enabling but also as deeply implicated in the structure of totalitarian rule.

Surveillance is recognised as an elementary building block of all human societies since the act of socialisation would be unthinkable without the surveillance of adults. How else could children be fabricated into cultural competent members of a society? At the more complex level surveillance is also recognised as one of the central mechanisms through which the modern state achieves the routine administrative functions of providing welfare, health, education and security for its population (Rule 1973; Dandeker 1990). This bureaucratic surveillance has largely been achieved through the creation and maintenance of paper and, more recently, electronic records on individuals and the development of systems of storage and retrieval. The modern state would be inconceivable without such systems. How else would taxes be collected, entitlement to welfare benefits be adjudicated, the spread of infectious diseases controlled, law enforced and punishment delivered?

The tragic dystopian concerns of popular culture are also reflected in academic discourse. It has recognised surveillance as essentially a form of power, one which has been dramatically enhanced by the development of sophisticated technology, and whose reach therefore seems to extend further and further across the entire social fabric. In particular, academic discourse on surveillance and especially CCTV surveillance, has been dominated by the extent to which it represents an extension of the Panopticon.

The Panopticon was a revolutionary design for a prison developed by the British philosopher Bentham in the nineteenth century. As Smart has noted, Bentham’s design:

constituted a programme for the efficient exercise of power through the spatial arrangement of subjects according to a diagram of visibility so as to ensure that at each moment any subject might be exposed to ‘invisible’ observation. The Panopticon was to function as an apparatus of power by virtue of the field of visibility in which individuals were located each in their respective places … for a centralized observer. In this schema subjects were to be individualised in their own spaces, to be visible and conscious of their potentially constant visibility. Given that those illuminated by power were unable to see their observer(s) the consciousness of being … watched effectively ensured an automatic functioning of power. (1985: 88)

For 150 years interest in Bentham’s designs remained limited to prison administrators and penal reformers. However, in 1975 the French philosopher Michael Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison in which he drew heavily on Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon to argue that the crystallisation of the power of vision embodied in this architectural form had spread from the prison to a host of other social institutions: hospitals, schools, military barracks and factories all came to resemble the prison.

For Foucault, panoptic surveillance represents a new mode of power: one that is not based on punishing the body through the infliction of pain or deprivation but through training and correction. Panopticonisation facilitates the power of the watchers over the watched not only by enabling swift intervention to displays of non-confonnity but also through the promotion of habituated anticipatory confonnity. It is hardly surprising, then, given the parallels that can be drawn with CCTV, that many theorists have been drawn to both Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon and his analysis of its disciplinary potential (cf. Bannister et al. 1998; Reeve 1998).

While we would not dispute the importance of Foucault in signalling the emergence of a new form of power and the centrality of surveillance to that power, we sound a note of caution about the automatic applicability of these concepts to the rise of CCTV. The disciplinary potential of Foucault’s Panopticon or Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ is only maximised when surveillance is coupled with techniques of behaviour modification, indoctrination and socialisation. While Giddens has argued that ‘Totalitarianism is, first of all, an extreme focusing on surveillance’ (1985: 303), the crucial observation is ‘first of all’, because it relies on coupling surveillance to other disciplinary mechanisms. Therefore, while it is not inappropriate to signal the panoptic potential of surveillance gaze, it is an empirical matter as to the extent to which it is linked with other disciplinary techniques to effect complete panoptic power. We need to be cautious about merely equating the power to watch with the disciplinary power implied in Foucault’s concept of panoptic surveillance. Similarly, the spread of cameras should not automatically be assumed to herald the arrival of a totalitarian ‘Big Brother’ state. It is useful here to draw on the work of James Rule who, in his book Private Lives Public Surveillance, outlined the essential features of a ‘total surveillance’ society:

There would be but a single system of surveillance and control, and its clientele would consist of everyone. The system would work to enforce compliance with a uniform set of norms governing every aspect of everyone’s behaviour. Every action of every client would be scrutinised, recorded, evaluated both at the moment of occurrence and for ever afterwards. The system would collate all information at a single point, making it impossible for anyone to evade responsibility for his past by fleeing from the scene of earlier behaviour. Nor would the single master agency compartmentalise information which it collected, keeping data for use only in certain kinds of decision. Instead it would bring the whole fund of its information to bear on every decision it made about everyone. Any sign of disobedience – present or anticipated – would result in corrective action. The fact that the system kept everyone under constant monitoring would mean that in the event of misbehaviour, apprehension and sanctioning would occur immediately. By making detection and retaliation inevitable such a system would make disobedience unthinkable. (Rule 1973: 37)

Dandeker identifies four components contained within this description which provide a reference point for determining the extent to which a total surveillance system is approximated (Dandeker 1990: 40–1):

The size and scope of the files in relation to the subjected population. This relates to the extent to which the records are held on the entire population or only a subsection of them and the level of detail contained within those files. Thus; for the cameras to be truly integrated as part of a total surveillance system, the images of individuals they record must be linked not only to one another but to a named dossier which contains all other relevant biographical information.

The centralisation of those files. Where files are centrally collected and managed, there is the potential for information gathered at one point of the system to be available for reference at another point. The system becomes totalising in that it is impossible to escape ones own biographical record merely by moving to a different point in space, such as another town.

The speed of information flow. While the totalising vision is enhanced by centralisation, its utility for the purposes of control is determined by the speed at which information is collected and disseminated across the system, for instance where pictures can be disseminated electronically via the Internet, rather than physically in the form of a photograph or on videotape.

The number of points of contact between the system and its subject population. In the case of CCTV, this relates not only to the coverage of the cameras in terms of their pervasiveness and their technological capacity to ‘zoom in’ on the minutiae of everyday life but also to the extent to which this camera surveillance triggers an authoritative reaction to non-conformity.

The extent to which the reality of CCTV surveillance approximates the ideal type outlined in Rule’s schema is essentially an empirical matter and one that is the heart of this book. However there is one central qualification: CCTV has been implemented not as one pervasive system but as a series of discrete, localised schemes run by a myriad of different organisations rather than a single state monolith. There is no single ‘Big Brother’ who is watching over us but lots of little brothers each with their own agendas. This is where Foucault’s conception of the dispersal of discipline is especially apposite.

For Foucault, the power of disciplinary social control lay not with its centralisation in a totalitarian state regime but in its dispersal from its idealised form in the prison throughout the myriad of public and private institutions that make up the social fabric. Thus, the deployment of CCTV is not to enable the enforcement of some singular disciplinary norms, but the situational norms relevant to particular sectional interests. As Armstrong and Giulianotti (1998) note, in football stadia, CCTV surveillance is directed not just at the more obvious manifestations of disorder but at even slight gestures or lip movements which are considered out of place and can be subject to disciplinary power. In contrast, in the workplace, McCahill and Norris (1999) have described how CCTV is used in part to ensure compliance with health and safety regulations and restrictions on smoking. And more often than not the deployment of CCTV in city centres is driven by commercial concerns of business wanting to create an environment conducive to attracting the right sort of consumer (Reeve 1998). There is clearly a tension between the panoptic and totalitarian conception of surveillance. For us, one key difference between the maximum surveillance society and Rule’s model of a total surveillance system is that the former does not imply a single omniscient repository of power. However, nor does it rule it out for, as we shall see, in the age of the digital superhighway and software developments allowing the integration of discrete databases, it is possible to have both existing simultaneously.

So far we have considered the key elements of surveillance and located its wider significance in debates over the nature and extent of social control. Therefore we want to conclude this introduction with a brief consideration of how recent writers, particularly social geographers, have seen CCTV as implicated in major structural transformations occurring across the urban landscape.

Two American writers, Flusty (1994) and Davis (1990), have, through their case studies ...