- London is considered the most spied-on city in the world, courtesy of its ubiquitous CCTV cameras, purportedly there to reduce crime. But according to a recent report, there's been little or no change in London's crime rates since they were more widely installed in the mid 1980s.
Privacy activists are worried that Britain will become the bleak totalitarian society George Orwell painted in his classic novel “1984,” where citizens were spied on and personal freedom sacrificed for the benefit of an all-powerful state.
“We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where we’re watched from control rooms by anonymous people, says Emma Carr of the BBW. “The worrying thing is that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are out there."
Remember, London is the example cited by Shortshanks as his inspiration for sticking cameras all over the place. London is years, maybe even a decade ahead of Chicago in terms of deploying camera technology, and it has had exactly ZERO effect on crime.
But hey, it' must be "for the children" or something, right? Because what could actually justify spending millions, maybe a few billion when it's all over, on something that doesn't affect crime and has never actually arrested a criminal in the history of the world.
But hey, it' must be "for the children" or something, right? Because what could actually justify spending millions, maybe a few billion when it's all over, on something that doesn't affect crime and has never actually arrested a criminal in the history of the world.