Hunted - Our surveillance nation

Our surveillance nation
CCTV / Surveillance cameras • Britain has one CCTV camera for every 11 people, a security industry report disclosed, as privacy campaigners criticised the growth of the “surveillance state” (The Telegraph, referencing a BSIA publication - 2013).   • The UK has more CCTV cameras per capita than any European country  • In 2011, police figures reported that the average person is caught on CCTV 70 times a day.     • Mannequins fitted with facial recognition software are tracking the age, sex and race of retail customers so that companies can rebrand and market their stores accordingly.  • There is a “burgeoning use of body-worn videos [BWV]”, not just by the police but by university security staff, housing and environmental health officers – and even supermarket workers.”    • It is generally acknowledged that the exact number of CCTV cameras in Britain is impossible to gauge, based on the fact that the vast majority is thought of be made up of privately operated CCTV, a significant amount of which cannot be accounted for. Some estimates say up to 6 million cameras in the UK • The Highways Agency currently operates an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) camera system with around 8,000 cameras. These cameras are spread across around 500 sites on motorways and trunk roads. The system presently records about 14million tags a day, and has the capacity for 50 million.  • On England’s major road network you are never more than fifteen miles away from an ANPR camera. Travelling at an average speed of 60mph on England’s major roads you will pass an ANPR camera every fifteen minutes. 
Phones • 35 million people have a smartphone in the UK (about 71% of people ), most of which transmit an exact GPS signal of where you are.    • UK police requests to access phone calls or emails are granted 93% of the time.  Requests are made every two minutes, and last year they peaked at just below 250,000.    • Between 2012 and 2014, 733,237 requests for Communications Data were made. The equivalent of 670 requests a day or 28 requests every hour.   
Passwords / Online privacy • In 2013 a team of hackers managed to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords - from a list of 16,449 – in less than one hour as part of a hacking experiment for a technology website.    • Out of 120,000 people in North London, 17,000 had the exact same password ‘Arsenal1’  • Once you’ve got a password for one account, you’ve probably got access to them all - 55% of people have same password for everything.   
Digital footprint • Data is collected about you every time you visit a website, shop online, engage in social sharing, enable location services or send digital messages and email. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ reportedly track your visits to any website with a displayed "Like," "Tweet" or "+1" icon, whether or not you even click one of those buttons.  • Privacy International carried out research a decade ago on the number of databases in which a typical person has their information held. In 2004, it was estimated to be around 70. In 2014, Privacy International founder Simon Davies estimates this number has increased tenfold to 700.      Surveillance • The notion of privacy law is relatively young in this country - only since 1998 have there been explicit laws in place to protect privacy.  • A large majority of Brits (71%) think the government should “prioritise reducing the threat posed by terrorists and serious criminals even if this erodes peoples’ right to privacy”. Only 29% agree that the right to privacy should get priority “even if this limits the effort to track down terrorists and serious criminals”. 
GCHQ  • Tempora is specifically the codename for the GCHQ operation that takes data from the fibre optic cables bringing the internet into the country. Data’s stored for up to 30 days, including data relating to phone calls, emails, Facebook and website access. • Snowden leaks have alleged that UK and US security services have the ability to install the equivalent of the ‘backdoor software’ remotely (which can be tailor made to give almost any capability – tracking, bugging, reading messages, turning mic and camera on remotely) – either by their access to communication cables, or by hacking into service providers/hardware manufacturers.