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Surveillance drone used to
spy on concert attendees
Heather Brooke
London
Times
Tuesday Sept 4, 2007
Two weekends ago at the V Festival, revellers were surprised
to see a remote-controlled surveillance drone flying and filming
overhead. Little to nothing was known beforehand about the drone’s
use, and news reports after the fact shed little light on why
or how its use was approved.
I put in a Freedom of Information Act request and discovered
that the drone was part of a sales demo by a company called MW
Power at the invitation of Staffordshire Police. What about the
legality of the drone, I asked the police? They wondered why I
was asking. Was I a competitor? Did I want to sell them a drone?
It was unbelievable to the police, I suppose, that a citizen might
be concerned about her privacy.
MW Power told me that more than half of Britain’s police
forces have asked for a drone demo and many are finalising packages
to buy the £30,000 kit – this without any public discussion
about whether it is a useful way of combating crime.
(Article continues below)
Overarching surveillance infringes our privacy. So, for such
an infringement to be justified, the police ought to have evidence
to show its effectiveness. Instead, the police grab at invasive
technologies without regard to the cost in terms of individual
privacy or community trust. The police claim that drones will
prevent thefts, but they can’t provide any proof. Shouldn’t
such proof exist before the police throw taxpayer’s money
into the sky?
Cops with helmet cameras, the DNA database, automatic numberplate
recognition, CCTV – all these technologies have been slyly
introduced: imagined future benefits are played up while the very
tangible, immediate costs of lost privacy are airily discounted.
The Crown Prosecution Service, for example, has no figures on
the success of CCTV in prosecuting crime. As for prevention, violent
crime has doubled in the ten years since CCTV came to blanket
the country. And yet Simon Byrne, the Assistant Chief Constable
of Merseyside, still says: “People clamour for the feeling
of safety which cameras give.”
I don’t. Far better to rely on real eyes in real human
heads with real police officers backing them up.
But I’m told by Merseyside Police – the first force
to buy a drone – that the flying spy has been “a great
success and people feel they’ve reclaimed their parks”.
Has the drone’s footage been used as evidence to prosecute
or arrest anyone? No. Not much of a success then.
If police forces were directly accountable to the people they
serve, it’s doubtful that we would have agreed to such costly
blanket surveillance – whether drones in the sky or cameras
on every street corner – without the solid facts to persuade
us of its necessity. But when the only person that the police
have to please is the Home Secretary, then citizens’ rights
are irrelevant.
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