Connected@telegraph.co.uk (10 Sept 1998)
For the next five years, the Home Office will oversee the construction of the world's biggest road and vehicle surveillance system. When completed, it will identify and track the movements of nearly all vehicles in Britain.
Thousands of number-plate recognition cameras will be installed on motorways, main roads, key junctions and tunnels, as well as at all ports and airports, nationwide. The cameras will communicate in real time via microwave links and the phone system to the newly expanded Police National Computer in Hendon.
The initial purpose of the system will be to identify stolen cars, though it can be equally useful for detecting vehicles with no tax or insurance, and even to track the movements of drivers and vehicle owners who are "of interest" to the authorities.
Ten years ago such a plan would have been a political minefield. Now, it is a technological problem. The architects of the network are preoccupied not with securing political support, but with the technical challenge of integrating the cameras into the emerging telecommunications networks.
At some point over the past decade, the popular view of surveillance cameras changed radically. Once viewed as a blunt tool of surveillance, closed-circuit television (CCTV) is now seen as an integral part of the urban environment.
Some observers believe this phenomenon is dramatically changing the nature of cities. Stephen Graham, a lecturer in urban planning at Newcastle University, describes visual surveillance as the "fifth utility". He says CCTV is being integrated into the urban environment in much the same way as the electricity supply and telephone networks in the first half of the century.
The fact that cameras have been placed into buses, trains, lifts and even phone booths has become quite ordinary. Many people now expect to be filmed routinely from the moment they leave the front gate.
Some cities are so enthusiastic about the technology that they are even demanding that companies install CCTV as a condition of their licence to operate. In Brighton, for example, police require cameras as a condition of the granting of a licence for a pub or club.
As we find more and more uses for the technology, the old rules and limitations are being discarded. Hidden cameras - once frowned on - are now being installed unhindered in cinemas, red-light districts, changing rooms and housing estates. Scotland Yard says police will now use covert cameras to detect crime - a policy that is being followed by councils, private investigators, government agencies and hospitals. Several police, forces are considering fitting mini-cams in police helmets and clothing.
According to Graham, visual surveillance is becoming a fixed component in the design of modern urban centres, new housing areas, public buildings and even the road system. Soon, he says, people will expect spy technology to be engineered into all forms of architecture and design: "It will become a means of obtaining information, enhancing personal security and more effectively controlling public spaces. Images will be viewed as just one more type of necessary data, and CCTV will be a tool kit" to obtain it.
Architects and urban planners are already incorporating visual surveillance in the core design of new towns and buildings. Modern city centres have clean, straight lines to accommodate the line of vision of cameras. The building of the future is not simply something that will respond intelligently to human need; it will also have cameras that will identify faces, understand body movements and respond to facial expression.
Alan Reeve, a lecturer at the Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University, believes CCTV is an integral part of the reshaping of cities into "attractive and seductive consumer spaces", He says CCTV is a design and management tool being used to turn town centres into orderly, harmonised, spending areas with little or no community life.
Camera surveillance is becoming a popular subject for academics in social science and urban planning. A book published this month - Surveillance, Closed Circuit Television and Social Control - argues that CCTV is profoundly changing the nature of the urban environment. Many of the book's authors conclude that CCTV is now an important part of the core management of cities.
In the fifth-utility vision, cameras will merge with telecommunications networks - particularly the Internet. This is already happening, though not without some resistance. When in February a student at University College London installed a camera in the computer science common room and fed the images to the Internet, the uproar forced UCL to issue an official statement affirming that staff, students and visitors "have the right to be free from audio and video monitoring".
None the less, Graham's vision appears to be on track. The network utilities that we now all take for granted - gas, electricity, water and telecommunications - originated in 19th-century cities through similar processes of development. The electricity and telephone networks are single, national integrated systems, but this was not always so. In the 19th century, utilities first emerged as small, specialised networks geared towards a myriad of uses, utilising a wide range of technologies, and covering only small parts of cities.
These networks sprang up through both public and private entrepreneurship. Industries started their own electricity and water networks; town gas networks were built by ambitious municipalities for lighting their streets; and the first phone and telegraph networks were used mainly by large businesses and emergency service providers. The utilities, of course, have long since merged to become technologically standardised, nationally regulated operations, with almost universal coverage.
The process is set to repeat itself in the next 20 years with visual surveillance. Digital compression techniques and the development of the Internet and broadband cable networks will provide the infrastructure for people and organisations simply to plug in and rent their camera networks, much as we use phones or leased lines today. Microcameras, automated tracking, and image database and facial recognition techniques will enhance the cost-effectiveness of CCTV.
According to Graham, the areas covered by CCTV will rise exponentially. Areas that have been excluded from CCTV coverage residential zones, villages, rural areas and so on - will increasingly demand the technology. There will, he says, be a "rush to ubiquity" that will result in the creation of a national CCTV network. Many large cities have already started to integrate camera systems in smaller surrounding towns.
Once a national grid is in place, the movements of individuals across the country could, at least in theory, be merged with crime incident reporting to determine likely suspects.