National Geographic

THEY ARE WATCHING YOU 51As David Omand, the former director of theGovernment Communications Headquarters—one of the British intelligence agencies shown bySnowden to be collecting bulk data—put it to me:“On the whole we see our government as efficientand benign. It runs the National Health Service,public education, and social security. And thankGod, we haven’t been through the experience ofthe man in the brown leather trench coat knock-ing on the door at four in the morning. So whenwe talk about government surveillance, the reso-nance is different here.”That’s not by any means to say that a coun-try like the United States, with its more skepticalview of big government, is wholly immune to sur-veillance creep. Most of its police departmentsare now using or considering using body cam-eras—a development that, thus far at least, hasbeen cheered by civil liberties groups as a meansof curbing law enforcement abuses. ANPR cam-eras are in many major American cities as trafficand parking enforcement tools. In the wake of theSeptember 11 attacks, New York City ramped upits CCTV network and today has roughly 20,000officially run cameras in Manhattan alone. Mean-while, Chicago has invested heavily in its net-work of 32,000 CCTV devices to help combat themurder epidemic in its inner city.But other U.S. cities with no history of terror-ist attacks and relatively low violent crime ratesalso have embraced surveillance technology. Ichecked out the CCTV network that has quietlyspread throughout downtown Houston, Texas.As recently as 2005, the city didn’t have a singlesuch camera. But then Dennis Storemski, the di-rector of the Mayor’s Office of Public Safety andHomeland Security, began touring other cities.“Basically, it was what I saw in London that gotme interested in the technology,” he recalls. To-day, thanks to federal grants, Houston has 900CCTV cameras, with access to an additional 400.As in London, officials don’t monitor every cam-era every minute—and as such, Storemski says,“it’s not surveillance per se. We’ve wanted to takeaway the expectation that people are watching.”Perhaps for that reason, Houston’s CCTV reachwill soon expand well beyond downtown, but—ina state hardly known as trusting of government—without the slightest drama.Similarly, the acquiescence among the Britishto the proliferation of cameras is as striking asany sound of silence could possibly be. CCTVand ANPR cameras—and the signs announcingthem (though by no means all of them)—blendin as drab companions to the rest of the city’sinfrastructure. During three weeks in London, Istrolled through the quiet neighborhoods whereOrwell and Huxley once resided. Orwell’s house,on Canonbury Square in Islington, is within viewof several CCTV and ANPR cameras and is a merefour-minute walk from the borough’s controlroom. For its part, the former Huxley residencea few miles away is under constant watch in animpregnable steel-reinforced control room.Outside of the city in the county of South York-shire, I visited Barnsley Hospital, where somesecurity personnel are equipped with body cam-eras to discourage unruly behavior by patients orvisitors. Similar cameras, it was reported duringmy stay, were being tested for use by school-teachers. Given that an estimated 150,000 Britishpolice officers are already equipped with such de-vices, perhaps it’s an effortless next step to con-template them on other authority figures, suchas educators and nurses. From there, however,who’s next? Flight attendants? Postal workers?Psychologists? Human resource directors?“Some local authorities are seeking to com-pel taxi drivers to use surveillance,” Porter, thesurveillance camera commissioner, told me.“Considering that, and the use of body camerasin hospitals and schools, the question I’d put for-ward is: What kind of society do we want to livein? Is it acceptable for all of us to go around legiti-mately filming each other, just in case somebodycommits a wrong against us?”I thought about this last question during my fi-nal days ambling along the well-scrubbed streetsof London, my eyes now keenly attuned to thecyclops-like glares from corners and lampposts. Asmy path inevitably led me to the famed Westmin-ster Bridge over the River Thames, I found myselfengulfed by tourists of various nationalities hold-ing up smartphones in an attempt to produce the