Due to its heavy reliance on public surveillance cameras, growing public databases and intrusive government power over its citizens daily lives, Britain has become a poster nation for the modern “surveillance society”.

Britain was recently ranked as one of the five worst nations for its record on privacy and surveillance.

However the surveillance of citizen Jenny Paton, a mother of three, by local officials seems especially egregious.

When officials suspected Ms. Paton of lying about her residence to get her daughter enrolled in a neighborhood school, they started a secret surveillance of Ms Paton that included accessing her phone records.

In addition, a local education department official secretly followed Ms. Paton, recording her movements in a log that identified her and her kids as a “female and three children” and her car as the “target vehicle”.

Ms. Paton broke no laws and her daughter has been admitted into the school. However, the case is scheduled to be reviewed by a regulatory tribunal at her request.

The Poole Borough Council maintains that it has done nothing wrong.

A law enacted in 2000 that regulates surveillance by government departments states that it is lawful for local governments to follow citizens secretly. Local governments often use these surveillance powers without oversight from any judges or law enforcement officials to investigate people.

The law is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act ( RIPA ) and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies surveillance powers that were once reserved for only a few law enforcement and security organizations.

RIPA gives local governments and agencies the power to record people with hidden cameras, access communication information such as telephone calls and internet activity as well as using undercover investigators to spy on people.

Sir Christopher Rose, Britain’s chief surveillance commissioner, reported that local governments conducted 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” during the year ending in March 2009 and other public authorities conducted an additional 5,000 surveillance jobs.

Citizens like Ms. Paton wonder if privacy has any meaning in the Orwellian “Big Brother” system that has been created by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

One of the major criticisms of RIPA is that the people being spied on are usually not aware that they are being tracked and followed.

Indeed, Ms. Paton only discovered what had been done to her when local officials met with her to review her daughter’s school application and showed her the surveillance report and a copy of her telephone records.

Source: NY Times

Ali is a specially trained German shepherd that has eight years of experience sniffing out narcotics for law enforcement. He now works for a private company, sniffing around teenagers’ bedrooms for drugs.

Ali works for a New Jersey company called Sniff Dogs.

Sniff Dogs rents drug-sniffing dogs to parents for around $200 an hour. The company was started this year by Debra Stone, who says her five narcotics-sniffing canines can find heroin, cocaine, crystal meth and ecstasy in teens bedrooms.

The dogs’ sense of smell is so sensitive that they can detect a marijuana seed from as far as 15 feet away and marijuana residue on clothing from drugs smoked two nights before.

New Jersey parent Pat Winterstein was curious about Sniff Dogs and hired the company to search her teenagers’ rooms.

The dogs did not find any drugs in her teens’ rooms, but she says that she will keep doing the tests to ensure that her kids are staying away from drugs.

Some critics say this tactic could break down trust between parents and children, but Winterstein says it offers her peace of mind.

Parents are also using other creative ways to monitor teenagers’ activities. There are now Global Positioning System devices that can be sewn into kids clothing to monitor their driving speeds, and software that lets parents read their childrens’ text messages.

Some psychologists say these new surveillance tools can backfire, eroding chil-parent trust in the process.

Melinda Bennington said that she wishes that she would have had drug dogs to help her see the warnings signs before it was too late. Melinda’s son Tom died of a drug overdose two years ago.

As parents, Bennington and Winterstein agree that monitoring teens’ behavior is not only a parent’s right, but also a responsibility.

Source: ABC News

The U.K.’s Telegraph is reporting that the average British citizen is recorded around 3,000 times per week.

Every phone call, use of a card or computer, creates personal information that is being recorded and stored on British citizens.

The Sunday Telegraph is reporting on the vast amounts of personal data that is being recorded on people by the British Government, law enforcement and corporations daily.

The average person living in Britain has well over 3,000 pieces of personal information recorded and stored on them, most of this information is held in databases for years and sometimes indefinitely.

Personal information that is recorded includes shopping data, cell phone use, emails, daily location information, travels and internet search data.

British information watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, is calling for stricter regulation of the amount of information that is recorded and stored on people and is warning the public to restrict the data they allow groups to keep on them.

Public security breaches and the loss of personal information by Government agencies has increased the concerns about the amount of personal data being recorded.

The average person in Britain makes three cell phone calls and sends at least two text messages.

Cell phone services log information about who was called and the caller’s geographic location and direction of travel, this is computed triangulation from cell phone towers.

People can also have their locations recorded even when they are not using their phones, since cell phones send out unique signals at regular intervals.

Internet service providers record information on customers whenever they use the internet, including name, address and IP address, as well as browser type and location information.

Internet service providers also record people’s email useage.

Store “loyalty” cards record shopping information on people who use them. They link people’s personal information to the stores used, the purchase times and the amount of money spent.

Banks also record large amounts of information on people.

They also provide personal data to credit agencies, debt collectors and fraud prevention departments.

Debit and credit card use can provide information on purchases and locations.

The largest amount of surveillance in Britain is through the network of CCTV surveillance cameras used in public. A person will appear on 300 CCTV cameras during an average day in Britain and those surveillance tapes are kept by many departments for an indefinite period of time.

Britain now has more public surveillance cameras than any other nation in the world. It is estimated that there are more than 4.2 million surveillance cameras in the U.K.

A new use for CCTV recordings is the use of automatic number plate recognition systems, which read number-plates and search databases for signs that a vehicle has been used in crime.

A national automatic number plate recognition system is maintained by the Association of Chief Police Officers. Every number plate recorded by the system is stored in a database with date, time and location for two years.

Travel passes also reveal large amounts of information about people. When they are registered to a person’s name, they record travel history, dates and time.

Companies are increasingly using radio frequency security passes for employees, providing them with information about when staff enter and leave the building.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Governments and businesses are using thousands of video surveillance cameras in an effort to monitor and deter terrorists and criminals, but innocent everyday citizens get caught on tape too.

However, a new type of privacy software for surveillance cameras may correct that problem, by blurring the faces of innocent people in the footage unless there’s an incident or an official investigation. Some of the same companies that made video surveillance so popular are now working to make the surveillance networks more privacy-friendly for innocent citizens.

Video-analysis company 3VR uses software to build databases of every vehicle, license plate and person its surveillance networks monitor and then triggers an alarm when a suspicious person or car is caught on camera.

3VR’s software engineers are now modifying their algorithms to blur out the faces and vehicles that don’t trip the software’s alarms.

A security guard or investigator would have the ability to later remove the blur from the faces, with the proper key (or a subpoena) if there is a legitimate reason to do so. The blurring software is simply a way to stop voyeuristic security guards from using surveillance cameras for their own personal entertainment.

Watch the YouTube video below to see an example of the blurring surveillance software.

Source: Wired News

Passenger airlines could be the next place where surveillance cameras are used to monitor people.

A new European surveillance system uses multiple cameras and software that tried to detect terrorists or other dangers caused by people on an aircraft.

The European Union’s Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment project uses a camera mounted on every passenger seat and six wide-angle surveillance cameras to monitor the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect possible terrorist activity or “air-rage” incidents, by recording people’s facial expressions.

The new surveillance system has reportedly performed well in tests last January that simulated terrorist and troublesome passenger behavior situations on a fake passenger plane.

The new surveillance software must deal with the challenging environment of a full plane cabin.

As people move around they often obscure one another, causing a risk the computer will lose track of some of the hundreds of people it must monitor on a plane. To work around this, the surveillance software constantly matches views of people from different cameras to track and monitor their activity.

Varying suspicious movements and behaviors and combinations of both can trigger the system.

Much of the software’s ability to recognize threats relies on sensitive information gathered from the intelligence community.

However, the new surveillance system will require thousands of tests on everyday people in different situations before it can be used reliably for detecting threats on passenger airlines.

Source: ABC News