National Geographic

48 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • FEBRUARY 2018deserts of northern Iraq. And thanks to numer-ous space probes, scientists have proof that theworld’s climate is dramatically changing.Could the great Orwell’s imagination havefailed? Could Big Brother save humanity, ratherthan enslave it? Or might both scenarios be trueat the same time?## ‘THERE IS AN APPETITE in the U.K. for sur-veillance that I haven’t seen anywhereelse in the world,” said Tony Porter, theworld’s only known surveillance cameracommissioner, as we sat in the cafete-ria of a London government office withCCTV cameras peering at us from thecorners. A former police officer andcounterterrorism specialist, Porter wasrecruited four years ago by Her Majesty’s HomeOffice, responsible for the security of the realm,to lend a semblance of oversight to the country’sever growing surveillance state. With a paltry an-nual budget of $320,000, Porter and three staffersspend their workdays persistently urging, withsome success, government and commercial us-ers of surveillance cameras to comply with therelevant codes and guidelines. But beyond men-tioning the names of the noncompliant in areport to Parliament, Porter’s office has no pow-ers of enforcement.Nonetheless, his appraisal of the U.K. as themost receptive country in the world to surveil-lance technology is widely shared. London’s net-work of surveillance cameras was first conceivedin the early nineties, in the wake of two bombingsby the Irish Republican Army in the city’s finan-cial district. What followed was a fevered spreadof monitoring technology. As William Webster,a professor of public policy at the University ofStirling in Scotland and an expert on surveil-lance, recalls, “The rhetoric about public safetyat the time was, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide,you’ve got nothing to fear.’ In hindsight, you cantrace that slogan back to Nazi Germany. But thephrase was commonly used, and it crushed anysentiment against CCTVs.”The city’s original security infrastructure,known as the “ring of steel,” was later expandedand augmented by ANPR technology on majorthoroughfares. Now spread throughout the coun-try are 9,000 such cameras, which photographand store 30 million to 40 million images dailyof every single passing license tag, not merelythose of speeders or known criminals. As formerScotland police counterterrorism coordinator Al-lan Burnett observes, “It would be very difficulttoday to go through Scotland and not be seen byan ANPR camera.”“I’m pretty sure we now have more CCTVs percapita than any other city on the planet,” the for-mer U.K. deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, toldme as he sat in his London office, watched by acamera across the street trained directly on hisback. “And basically, it’s happened without anymeaningful public or political debate whatsoever.Partly it’s because we don’t have the history of fas-cism and nondemocratic regimes, which in othercountries have instilled profound suspicion of thestate. Here it feels benign. And as we know fromhistory, it’s benign until it isn’t.”Elements of fear and romance help explain theprofusion of surveillance in the U.K. This, afterall, is a country saved by espionage: The museumcommemorating the legendary World War II codebreakers at Bletchley Park, 40 miles northwest ofLondon, is today a much visited site. So, for thatmatter, is the London Film Museum’s permanentexhibit on the dashing spy James Bond, a creationof the writer and former British naval intelligenceofficer Ian Fleming. Agent 007 is bound up in thenation’s postwar self-appraisal, but so is the joltingreality that the U.K. was one of the first coun-tries to face the constant fear of terrorist attacks.When it comes to protecting its people, the Brit-ish government is viewed in a more appreciativelight than perhaps those of other free societies.Even after the revelations by former U.S. Nation-al Security Agency contract employee EdwardSnowden that American and British intelligenceagencies had been collecting bulk data from theirown citizens—a disclosure that triggered callsfor reform by both political parties in the U.S.—Parliament essentially enshrined those powers inlate 2016 by passing the Investigatory Powers Actwith scant public outcry.