| Invaluable CCTV | Fri 21st October 2005 |
The London bombings have caused immense publicity for UK CCTV. There are very few (if any) other cities in the World that could achieve what the Met Police were able to do in terms of quick retrieval of high quality CCTV surveillance footage from many systems, enabling them to identify the perpetrators in just a couple of days.
Fortunately, this is not the case in Britain. Digital CCTV systems are available from Tensor for private and public organisations to improve security and assist in access control.
The ripples from this capability and achievement have spread across the World, we see frequent news stories from America, Australia, South Africa, etc. reporting projects to upgrade their own systems in the wake of the events in London.
However, it is also interesting to note that the civil liberties argument remains a strong adversary; in Athens they have 1,000 cameras as a legacy from the Olympics, but the country's privacy watchdog will not allow them to 'turn them on the people' - they can now only be used for traffic monitoring.