The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV

Clive Norris & Gary Armstrong

In The Maximum Surveillance Society, Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong chronicle the growth of closed-circuit television surveillance of the British public in recent decades. The book is clearly written by academics, and its greatest shortcoming is its occasional density and ripeness with references to other academic books and articles. Those unfamiliar with British culture, geography and law may also find themselves somewhat lost at times.

In the opening chapter, the authors place the current trend in context by examining the subject of surveillance, and society’s impression of it, in a number of works, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 to The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” and from Hitchcock’s Rear Window to the idea of the Panopticon.

The Panopticon was the invention of 19th Century British thinker Jeremy Bantham. It was conceived of as a prison in which inmates are not prodded, beaten or even physically restricted from movement, but merely watched at all times from a central position. French philosopher Foucault argued in last century that the concept of the Panopticon has been moved from its original prison context to society itself, cementing new power dynamics between the watchers and the watched that the latter may not have even thought to question. Norris and Armstrong refer to the Panopticon and Foucault’s ideas on the importance of its implications for social dynamics throughout the book.

The authors, however, are not quick to present a case that “surveillance is wrong.” They note in the introduction to the book that surveillance has a dual visage. In some cases, the protection of the individual by the state is sought after, and it argued that some form of checking up on citizens (knowing their addresses, employers, incomes, health and similar pieces of information) is completely necessary for basic government functions that serve the citizens.

With this dichotomy in mind, Norris and Armstrong embark on a close look at the history of CCTV surveillance in Britain, and some careful looks at the technology in action. As individual systems covering disparate areas – banks, the Tube and other rail services, commercial areas, town centers and even somewhat in residential areas – became more and more ubiquitous, the authors argue that the subjects on the screens ceased to be viewed as citizens with rights, but more as either consumers or criminals. As noted in Chapter 6 (“The Watchers and the Watched: The Social Structuring of Surveillance”), the British public, surprisingly to their American counterparts, have no explicit right to privacy granted to them under the law. As such, perceived violations of privacy must be taken to court on other grounds, such as trespassing or breach of confidence. However, the authors are still disturbed by recent trends on two grounds: “First, the population is not already defined as a deviant, and second, the identity of those being surveilled is largely unknown (93),” and thus the implied long-term benefit to the public by way of improved law enforcement is negligible.

So why is the public being watched? In a telling look at the largely private sector watchers and their methods, reasons for suspecting an individual for tracking are broken up into four categories: Crime, Order (public drunkenness, nuisance, and the like), No Obvious Reason and Other (traffic violations, searching for a missing person and other miscellaneous reasons). Out of almost 1800 people being tracked in various settings in 3 separate regions, the single greatest cause of suspicion was No Obvious Reason, with 36% of cases. Further breakdowns of the data are equally uninspiring. When a subject is chosen for targeting, it most often a because of his or her perceived Categorization (34%), such as by clothing or race, than other concerns such as specific concerns given to the monitors by public or the police (31%) or the actual behavior of the suspect (24%). Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites (68% to 35%) to be singled out for No Obvious Reason. All in all, there appears to be little method to the monitoring. The individual biases of the monitors are clearly evident in the targeting, and most of these employees are just young people scraping by on a £4.60/ hour (about $8 U.S.) job.

In the summary chapter, the authors not only drive home the point that CCTV surveillance in Britain has not benefited the public in any way commensurate with its negative effects, but further warn of a future in which CCTV systems not only continue to proliferate, but also automate (face and license plate recognition) and share information with other systems. They argue Britain is already seeing unnerving situations arise because of this increased communication of poor data, such as in the case of two Welsh football fans who were put on a known hooligan list in error, and as such stopped by police, not in the U.K. but Belgium, and deported back home before the error was caught. Analogies to “no-fly” rules in the U.S. are quickly apparent. Norris and Armstrong end the book, showing their admirable and distinctly British level-headedness, not by calling for an end to CCTV monitoring, but by calling on the British public and their government (echoing surveillance expert David Lyon, oft quoted in the book) to “consider how the new technologies of mass surveillance can be harnessed to encourage participation rather than exclusion, strengthen personhood rather than diminish it, and be used for benevolent rather than malign purposes (205).” As an inspection of the effects of surveillance on British society, and a call to public awareness, The Maximum Surveillance Society succeeds on all levels.

Armstrong, Gary and Clive Norris. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV. Oxford, Berg Publishers: 1999.