Nick Garvan of the Thames Valley Police, London, is skeptical about the purported number of security cameras in the UK. He says that the often quoted number of more than four million was based on a single study in 2002 which took its numbers from a single London street and scaled them up. He has not given an alternative figure.

He and the ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) do, however, want to commandeer the existing cameras operated by local councils (around 30,000 of them). They also want to tie these together into cohesive network, coupled with a national facial recognition database. Garvan, somewhat ironically given his plans, said:

Any perception on the part of the public that there is some kind of Orwellian infrastructure sitting behind society where these cameras are terribly well integrated and joined up as part of the surveillance state is entirely wrong.

I guess that might soon change.

UK CCTV numbers 'may be over-stated' [The Register]

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