Big Brother Britain: Wireless CCTV Can Be Hidden Inside Clothing

Mick Meaney
RNIF
Thursday June 21, 2007

Ongoing negotiations between “802 Global” and an unnamed Premier League football club could see Britain’s soccer terraces become a surveillance playground as live pictures can be beamed to a control room where the images will be scanned.

The miniature cameras can be hidden in lapels and hats and are already in widespread use throughout the UK, mainly to protect VIPs and used by security vans supplying cash to banks.

Tim Close, the director of sales and marketing at 802 Global, the company who make the cameras, says: “It’s adding an extra layer of security to the blanket. We see this as an overlay technology to enhance and build on traditional CCTV surveillance.

“For example, if the camera is in a helmet, it’s going to be trained straight at the face of the suspect during a robbery, which makes identification much easier — it’s more effective than ordinary CCTV” explained Tim Close.

However, this is just the latest step of the growing surveillance society, which now makes up one fifth of all worldwide surveillance and claims

• over 4 million CCTV cameras
  
• talking CCTV cameras
  
• the trailing of listening CCTV cameras
  
• CCTV cameras in bathrooms
  
• fingerprinting in schools without guidelines, regulations or parental consent
  
• the DNA database
  
• the introduction of ID cards
  
• the use of remote-controlled spy drones
  
• biometric passports
  
• Passport Offices aka “interrogation centres”

and the list goes on.