Said surveillance is available at a moment's notice and without a warrant. Just because they can't do the show "24" level of surveillance doesn't mean it's not bad, real bad, out there for someone who just want's to live their life relatively unscrutinized. Can't really believe anyone on HN is standing up for 24 hour surveillance with cameras.
Private individuals and organisations are not obliged to give their surveillance footage to the police without a warrant. There's no centralized system, so the data is not in any way available 'at a moment's notice'.
>Can't really believe anyone on HN is standing up for 24 hour surveillance with cameras.
As explained in the guidelines, there's a broad range of opinion on HN. However, I wouldn't say I'm 'standing up for' it. I'm fairly ambivalent about CCTV. I don't think it makes a large amount of difference, either positively or negatively. I do, however, think it's important to be accurate about how (un)sophisticated and (in)effective the surveillance apparatus actually is.
I have to say this discussion is getting a little frustrating.
First of all, information regarding the US is obviously irrelevant in the context of UK surveillance. Why even bring it up?
Second, every time you reply, you keep broadening out the terms of the discussion further and further, rather than addressing any of the specific factual claims in my posts. I have not taken any strong stance for or against surveillance in general. I'm only concerned to address inaccurate claims about the extent of CCTV surveillance in the UK.
The police can easily get warrants to look at lots of things that might be relevant to solving a crime. Maybe that is a problem. If so, that's an issue that's only tangentially related to CCTV surveillance in the UK.
All I am doing is correcting the claim that the police in the UK can force private individuals to hand over CCTV footage without a warrant. If you have a problem with warrants per se, then that's probably a discussion to be had elsewhere.
> First of all, information regarding the US is obviously irrelevant in the context of UK surveillance. Why even bring it up?
Barring evidence otherwise, I believe it's reasonable to conclude the situation in the UK is similar, or at minimum, that we don't know that warrants in the UK are an adequate protection. Unfortunately I don't know of information about this that is specific to the UK.
> you keep broadening out the terms of the discussion further and further, rather than addressing any of the specific factual claims in my posts.
I apologize. I did and do concede that referring to the proliferation of mostly (mostly) private CCTV in the UK as "government spying" is incorrect. I did not address the other claims you made because I agree with or believe them or think they're likely true and didn't bother investigating (such as a warrant requirement to take private CCTV footage, and that the police rarely bother to request CCTV footage). I see how that can create a frustrating feeling of getting nowhere.
But while I don't dispute the latter two facts (in fact I think we agree on all factual issues so far), I disagree with the implication that this diminishes the surveillance state, or that the problem is limited to how warrants are issued.
While the police/government may only rarely request CCTV footage, the possibility is there, which is enough to establish chilling effects, especially for groups that may fear selective enforcement, where more resources are expended to suppress them than what is afforded to regular crime.
This is how the US government defended their illegal bulk surveillance PRISM program - that while they collected data on everyone, they had strict (so they say) limits on who humans working there looked at, and that only what humans look at counts as a "search".
And while I do have a problem with how liberally warrants are granted, that would not be such an issue if there was less data for the warrants to request in the first place. Recent history has shown that once the infrastructure for surveillance is built, purely legal means are rarely effective in restricting its use.
