TALKING closed-circuit television cameras across England will soon bark orders at vandals, litterbugs and others being anti-social in communities.
The 20 speaking “big brother” cameras will cost about $1.2 million.
Critics say the cameras are a ridiculous example of excessive government intrusion into everyday life.
“Apart from being absurd, I think it’s rather sad that we should have faceless cameras barking at us,” opponent Steve Hill told the BBC.
“On orders from who? Who sets these cameras up?” Mr Hill asked.
Home Secretary John Reid, however, told the BBC the scheme was aimed at “the small minority” who “litter our streets, vandalise our communities and damage our properties”.
In a bizarre twist on the nanny state, some of the voices telling off the startled miscreants will belong to children.
Mr Reid said schools in many of the cameras’ areas were holding competitions to choose which children would be the voice of the cameras.
“By funding and supporting these local schemes, the Government is encouraging children to send this clear message to grown-ups: act anti-socially and you will face the shame of being publicly embarrassed,” he said.
“We all pay council tax so, in the end, we all pay when our communities are disrespected — both in our pockets as well as in our daily lives.”
The cameras are already being used in the northeast town of Middlesbrough where misbehavers risk copping an earful via a loudspeaker.
Staff in a control centre monitor 12 talking cameras and can communicate directly with people on the street.
Local councillor Barry Coppinger told the BBC the scheme had prevented fights and criminal damage, as well as reducing littering.
“Generally, I think it has raised awareness that the town centre is a safe place to visit and also that we are keeping an eye open to make sure it is safe,” Cr Coppinger said.
There are about 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain.
A recent study by the Government’s privacy watchdog — the Information Commissioner — warned that Britain was fast becoming a “surveillance society”.
8 responses so far ↓
imtheotherdave // April 5, 2007 at 8:30 am
It really isn’t a bad idea as long as they limit the cameras to town centres. The technology isn’t new, what is new is the way it is being used. I was shouted at by a camera for passing out on a church step in Manchester- it worked.
pjwalker911 // April 5, 2007 at 9:09 am
Oh! How wonderful and loving is Big Brother. Ummm, it’s sooooooo loving!
Moron! You are pathetic! Wake up! Stop being a stupid idiot. Read 1984 remembering that once upon a time all of this was viewed as the worst kind of sci-fi horror scenario of high-tech tryanny. Listen fool, they are going to put these damn things in your living room next, so get with the program and start resisting instead of worshipping.
imtheotherdave // April 5, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Wow, I have read 1984 thank you- very good read. Lets rationalise this for a second without throwing hurtful and meaningless insults at each other. A George Orwell book is only a theoretical work of postmodernism, it is a simplistic scenario. We are already tracked in our homes to some extent anyway, so if I was you I’d cancel the sky subscription, ISP and phone-line.
Anyway, in 1984 the “thought-police” stopped you from doing anything individual and unique at all, in the case they just want you to sleep in your bed and put litter in the designated bin. I am all for that.
If a surveillance system makes me feel safer and gives us a more pleasant city centre I am all for it. Tell me what harm it does. There are plenty of other surveillance issues that deserve your attention more.
Isn’t the wasr in Iraq similar to the war in 1984 though :s
Cry.
pjwalker911 // April 7, 2007 at 8:53 am
I recall reading Orwell’s 1984 when it was considered to be a scifi-horror tale and a warning about high-tech tyranny. But look at what has happened. Today, people are so focused on getting rich that they couldn’t care less about their own freedoms and privacy being trampled by an elite bent on enslaving them. The next generation of street-corner “smart cameras” will be able to see through your clothes, biometrically recognize your face, hand you off to other cameras in the vicinity, bark commands at you, listen to your conversations and supposedly predict your movements.
And they are just getting started because there is a plan to put these cameras literally everywhere including inside of residences within a matter of one or two decades when they will monitor all your vital functions including your urination to track the drugs you are taking. Sorry, that’s the Discovery Channel if you don’t believe it. At the same time, they want to implant you with tracking chips that will contain all your private data and track you everywhere you go around the planet via satellite. Other chips will dispense drugs directly into your brain to keep you in a malleable frame of mind and you will have absolutely zero privacy. That’s the new freedom. And it is all funded by the same elites who are staging the major terror-attacks. If you don’t believe it, then first you need to watch the interview with filmaker Aaron Russo who describes his conversations with Nick Rockefeller who alluded to his prior knowledge of 9/11, how funny it would be to see soldiers looking for the perpetrators in Aghan caves and how terror would be used as a pretext to implement these very Orwellian technologies. This is one of the most damning pieces of evidence for elite-sponsored terror yet and I hope you will get it out to everyone you know. See:
Rockefeller Admitted Elite Goal Of Microchipped Population
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/01/31/rockefeller-admitted-elite-goal-of-microchipped-population/
Nick Rockefeller Revealed Elite Agenda to Aaron Russo During Friendship
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/nick-rockefeller-revealed-elite-agenda-to-aaron-russo-during-friendship/
Aaron Russo’s film suggests neo-cons planned 9/11, and to micro-chip all Americans
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/aaron-russos-film-suggests-neo-cons-planned-911-and-to-micro-chip-all-americans/
Now if you think any of this is about keeping you safe, you are a mealy-mouthed jelly-fish whose brain is just about half-baked and you are living in a dream world. I just do not understand how anyone can think any of this is good, but brain-dead idiots keep on saying how wonderful 24/7 surveillance is. I keep hearing these fools say that it’s all for our safety and to “stop being paranoid” and I am sick of it and I can’t take it anymore. I can only say that such limp-wristed brainwashed koolaid-drinkers need to grow some spine, get educated and wake the heck up if at all possible because, while you have surrendered your own freedom, you are standing in the way of my freedom and that of all humanity and you are contributing to the problem by supporting the the New World Order. So as long as you support it, I will blast you and attack you and I don’t give a damn what you think of it. You are on the wrong side of history and you better get on the right side of it.
PW
imtheotherdave // April 7, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Haha, I knew that you would be a believer of the New World Order. Let me guess, Bush and Blair are members of the skull and Bones and the spank each other naked in caves once a fortnight.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree fully with your ideology- I just think you are being sensationalist about it.
We shall leave it there.
pjwalker911 // April 7, 2007 at 6:55 pm
First of all, you can’t be for Big Brother cameras and then say you are against the New World Order, or just parts of it. You can’t say you like some heads of the hydra, but not others. The cameras, the biometrics, the microchips, the illegal wire-tapping, the spying on citizens, Total Information Awareness, the national (and global) ID cards, the GPS tracking, the restricting of free speech, the gun-banning, the treatment of minor social disturbances as crimes, the perpetural war, the globalizing of government, the secret treaties, the global-warming hoax, the the torture and all the rest of it all fits together into the same Orwellian control-grid system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite to give them inceasingly tighter control over the masses. So you cannot say you are for some of it and against other parts of it because they are all parts of the same beast. As far as the globalists are concerned, there is no left/right paradigm. They only use it to get us divided and confused over these very issues and to prevent us from connecting the dots.
And yes, as a matter of fact, Tony Bilder-Blair “channels the light” from the Mayan sacrificial temples and and Bush did whack-off in the coffin at Yale (Kerry too) and yes they do all go off to Bohemian Grove to partake in the ritual sacrifices and the male prostitutes, but those are side issues.
The real issue is that the elite have declared war on the common people. They hit us hard on 9/11 and they then go about using that event as a pretext for implementing all the aspects of their New World Order agenda. Now, if you don’t take this seriously, you have a real problem. We (freedom-lovers, constitutionalists, free-thinkers, libertarians, privacy-advocates, rights-activists and many others) are literally at war with the elite and if you don’t take this serious stance against them, you are basically saying it”s “okay, nothing to get excited about”. Well, when I and my freedoms come under attack, I damn well do get excited about it, especially when the perpetrators are literally getting away with mass murder. So here is the bottom line: either identify yourself as a freedom-fighter or as a minion of the New World Order. There is no safe-middle ground unless you can claim total ignorance of everything that is happening. But since now you know the truth, what comes with this knowledge is responsibility to resist and warn others of this catastrophe.
Naomi // May 3, 2007 at 7:41 am
Makes me shudder just reading through everything. Is freedom a thing of the past? I can live with home surveillance systems (they are for safety) but public surveillance? Do we really have to come to that? Can’t we do good by ourselves, without having faceless voices telling us to straighten our act?
pjwalker911 // May 3, 2007 at 4:55 pm
No we don’t have to surveil each other 24/7. We just need to wake up to the fact that the elite Bilderberg bloodliners and their minions out there are using false-flag terror to herd us into this Orwellian control grid matrix. But while many are falling under its spell, I think many more are beginning to wake up to it. It is a paradox that while the neofeudal elite have consolidated more power and control than ever in Earth’s history, the current generations of humanity have more potential toward true enlightenment and knowledge than ever before. For the first time in history, the masses have access to revelatory secrets that have been kept from them by design. For example, the revelations on JFK from E Howard Hunt and others, that LBJ was a cold-blooded murderer, the admissions that Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged and more and more are realizing 9/11 was an inside job. Nicholas Rockefeller admitted it to Aaron Russo and we won’t have to wait another 40 or 50 years for the truth to come out. It is coming out right now!
So the the answer is, wake up to false-flag terror first. See the linkage to Big Brother. Then understand that the cameras are not for your safety, but are just one among dozens of these tools of oppression. Eventually, they will be removed along with the perpetrators of state terror.