Note to anyone planning a major heist in the UK: Before your team enters the area and begins the operation, be sure to hire some babes with exceptional posteriors to wear something inappropriately tight and then jiggle through the area to draw the surveillance away from your target.

There was a vid on LiveLeak taken by a surveillance helicopter a couple years ago in Iraq that was of a couple getting it on in what looked like a convertible sports car. It was from the FLIR camera so not too detailed but man, you could tell they were really gettin’ into it! A second chopper was called in to get a peek and the audio of their conversation was part of the video (your tax dollars at work; worth every penny from a comedy perspective). Anyhow, it was around 20 minutes long, and I wonder how many IED’s were planted while it was being shot?

- Hot Fuzz

I’m pretty sure that would piss off Circuit City. That CCTV contract must be pretty lucrative.

“… all I can say is ‘if the writer finds this unbelievable, he is either naive or profoundly unobservant.’”

The article was written by a woman. I’m not sure how observant he is, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

It’s the people who allowed him back on the job who should be hanging from the gibbet.

I just think public CCTV is a non-issue compared to, for example: ID cards, 42 days, national DNA database, extraordinary rendition, stop & search, restriction of protest around parliament…

But why should we separate cctv from those other things? There is room for us to protest all of these things, why make cctv a non-issue? How is cctv any less dangerous than the dna/biometrics database? In the not too distant future, cctv will be fitted out with auto-facial-recognition and will have the ability to track anyone in a reasonably built up location. Is that acceptable?

“efforts to pimp [cameras] to 2.0 status continue”

I can’t bring myself to read any further.

I realise I’m in the minority on this site, but I live in the UK, and I really don’t give a shit about CCTV cameras in public places.

I realise there’s a potential for abuse, but I don’t think anyone’s that interested in where I spend my time in town; and if they were, they could find out easily enough with or without CCTV.

In my experience, most UK nationals aren’t really bothered about CCTV; Germans and Americans seem much more concerned.

Auto-facial recognition is irrelevant unless there’s a database of faces to be recognised; I don’t care if a camera tracks me around town, if I’m just ‘person X’ to it.

As I said earlier, if the authorities are interested enough to track me personally, they could do that easily enough with or without cameras.

Maybe I have a low expectation of privacy. I grew up in a small village, as the child of a public figure. Everyone in the village knew who I was and where I’d been.

What do you think I’ve given up?

And who watches these watchers? There should be a way for the public to observe these unelected surveillance people and see what they’re observing. Perhaps via community TV channels, with a camera perched behind the CCTV operator chair so the public can see what they are monitoring, and a tagline identifying the operator.

I see anywhere from 10 – 50 cops each morning standing around making sure there are no terrorists in the train stations. But those chances are insignificant. And their resources are being wasted just to make it appear we are safe.

The reality is that these mostly men are being normal men and they are instinctually sizing up women for breeding to keep .. okay, they’re doing a lot of ass staring. But all that ass staring is less the cops fault and more those higher up who have the cops just standing around doing not much other than telling tourists where the closest Starbuck’s is.

They say 500,000 people walk through Grand Central every weekday. That’s alot of beautiful asses.

I’m not complacent, I just think public CCTV is a non-issue compared to, for example: ID cards, 42 days, national DNA database, extraordinary rendition, stop & search, restriction of protest around parliament…

This kind of thing is just the short end of the stick…tawdry abuse of a terrifying system by stupid little men. When it is inhereted by a more malicious power, as it more than likely will be, then we’re frankly doomed.

People believe too much in progress and the constance of the status quo. We’ve been trained from an early age that history is teleological and we’re simply passing from strength to strength.

Any short glimpse at history will, of course, utterly disprove this…but what the hey? Historians are a boring, useless bunch aren’t they?

It only takes one crisis to top everything and shunt a country to the right. Crises seem to be ever increasingly popular in the world.

I’m moving to…um…err…um…

Mars? Apparantly the soil’s good for asparagus.

I like asparagus.

I’m sure that you react with perfect equanimity when guys stare at your crotch, eh?