As we mentioned earlier, there's a good piece in the Sun today on CCTV in Scotland, a Scot is recorded up to 300 times a day – and another £4 million has just been spent on even more CCTV.

The piece carries a quote from yours truly. When the headshot of me they've used in the piece is blown up to the size they've used on the page, an unsightly spot emerges on my chin… another reason to dislike surveillance!!

As I hope I've made clear in my posts here in the past, we're not rabid about this issue – technology certainly has a part to play in law enforcement. The point is that there's a balance to be struck, that we've gone far too far down this road, and are unique in the extent to which we've done so. 

To that end, the Sun piece uses one of the statistics I think is most telling in the debate about CCTV -

Shetland Islands Council, one of Scotland's smallest local authorities, have 30 more CCTV devices than San Francisco 

The piece coincides with the news that, last year alone, the police in South Yorkshire spied on over 500 people using their surveillance powers. Those aren't people caught on CCTV by accident, mind – that's 500 people specifically named as "persons of interest" and monitored deliberately.

"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" people (sometimes even very smart people) often say – do you feel the same if you are one of those Scots watched 300 times a day, or one of the South Yorkshiremen monitored by the police without your knowledge?

By Alex Deane

Over at the Weston Mercury, there's a report about a grandfather badly beaten on a train station (warning: graphic photograph of injuries).  The area should have been covered by CCTV, but it seems that it wasn't on.

This seems very like the situation in Malden reported earlier this week - where the CCTV wasn't working for most of the summer. 

The point is that we become reliant on CCTV, thinking it makes us safe, when it doesn't, and we fail to make provision for alternative security measures when we need them.

Human error and system malfunctions are just a couple of the many reasons that we shouldn't be so dependent upon CCTV.  So often, as I know from my time at the criminal Bar, the quality of the footage is not high enough to be of any use in court even when there is no operator or equipment failure.

The irony is that the story about the attack on the station, where CCTV failed to deter the attackers or assist the police in their capture, appeared today in the Weston Mercury – because only a week ago, the same newspaper ran an extended and thoughtful piece on the merits and drawbacks of CCTV (the author of the piece is pictured here, captured on CCTV in the area that obviously was working).

I wonder if he or his readers have changed their minds at all now.

By Alex Deane

Please send us any of your local stories about the Big Brother state, or about the failure of all this state intrusion and surveillance to actually protect us 

Back from conference and will be posting more regularly from now on.

Given the way that civil liberties and surveillance are going in this country, it's all too easy to focus on the negative.  Big Brother Watch is keen to highlight good developments in the to and fro of the surveillance state struggle, too.

So – praise be to Pangbourne, where West Berkshire Council stuck up a whopping CCTV mast in the middle of a little village, listened to the urging of residents and realised that it was entirely inappropriate, and promptly took it back down again. Instead, that highly complex bit of kit, a light, will be there to provide a little more security.

It's a useful little demonstration of the fact that there are alternatives (often cheaper, often more effective) to the CCTV upon which our law enforcement has become so reliant.

By Alex Deane