One thing about London, and two about Italy, that kind of creeped me out

[xiphias]

Of course, not everything in Europe was wonderful.

London: is there any square inch of London you can be in where you're NOT being taped by a closed-circuit television? MAN, that's creepy. How do y'all get USED to it? I really loved the city, but I couldn't live there, just for that reason alone. WAY too much surveillance. Just. . . creepy, man. Orwell was a Brit, after all. . .

Italy: um. Doors that need a key to unlock from the INSIDE. See, I guess it's just a cultural difference, but, here in the United States, we have this thing called "fire". . . sometimes we accidentally get "fire" on our buildings, and then we need to get out of the buildings. And so, we like to be able to get out of buildings pretty easily. So we do things like have doors that you lock and unlock with a key from the OUTSIDE, but, from the INSIDE, you just use a knob or something, so that you can get out easily.

Freaked me out some, it did.

The other thing that I didn't quite get was the caribinieri. There's something creepy about having your civilian policing done by your military. I just don't like it -- rubs me the wrong way. They seem like perfectly nice, competent people (and the impression I was getting is that they're among the ONLY competent authority figures around -- c.f. my story about the woman fainting on the train to get an idea about the competence of all non-caribinieri first responders in Rome. . . ), but still -- the military is the military and the civilian is the civilian and it seems kind of worrisome to have one group do both.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Here's a map of the CCTV cameras near Orwell's final home.

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

According to a friend of mine who lived in Italy for 16 years, putting the same locking mechanism on both sides of a door was half the cost of putting a different one on the inside. He also said that people in Italy feel much safer if they are able to lock themselves inside with a key instead of just a knob.

He also said that since most homes are made of cement and metal rather than wood, there's not as much panic about getting out of a burning house.

So, there are a couple of explanations as to why it's that way. It would have creeped me out, too.

[ailbhe]

Loads of places have locks that need keys from the inside - in England and Ireland, anyway. I disapprove.

CCTV - I don't think about it. Not sure why. There are thousands of other reasons I no longer live in London.

[arib.livejournal.com]

Italy: um. Doors that need a key to unlock from the INSIDE. See, I guess it's just a cultural difference, but, here in the United States, we have this thing called "fire". . . sometimes we accidentally get "fire" on our buildings, and then we need to get out of the buildings. And so, we like to be able to get out of buildings pretty easily. So we do things like have doors that you lock and unlock with a key from the OUTSIDE, but, from the INSIDE, you just use a knob or something, so that you can get out easily.

My dorm in Israel had the same thing, we just duplicated the key and left it in the "inside" lock all the time.

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

London : The Answer is no. All of London is under external surveillance, and they plan on expanding it in regards to internal public spaces and most commercial internal spaces. The really dumb thing is that that the camera system will never stop a terrorist or a crime, since they only pay attention to the data feeds after the fact.

And of course our government is envious of it and wants to one day do the same themselves in NYC and Washington DC and most major cities.

[sev]

most of the deadbolts in my house were like that when bought it. The exterior doors all have panes of glass; I think the theory is that it would be too easy to smash the glass and then reach through and unlock the door if there were knobs there.

In the end, I decided to err on the side of easy egress and replaced the inside locks with knobs.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

My front door deadbolt -- the pnly lock on that door -- needs a key on the inside. I just keep a spare in it at all times.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

My impression is that there's rather less CCTV coverage in strictly residential areas, with the possible exception of council estates. I don't particularly mind it on public transport; video would be a very inefficient method of tracking the movements of millions of people compared to, say, Oyster cards (this is one reason I buy a season ticket, and only touch in and touch out when I need to - many of the stations and times I travel it isn't necessary because the gates are open).

The data quality of cameras in private establishments such as department stores and office buildings is often so poor that nobody can be identified by it at all. At least one bicycle thief in Canary Wharf knows this.

It's been a while since I've been back to North America, so perhaps I can't comment, but the main difference to me seems to be that here there are lots of signs that say you are on CCTV, and cameras are placed quite obviously. This was not the case a few years ago, but there were still quite a few cameras. I think what's happening is that the government is trying to deter petty crime and violence by warning that people WILL be on camera, only it doesn't work too well because most repeat criminals know that the cameras are pretty much useless.

I'd be interested in walking around a few major cities in the US and counting the number of surveillance cameras there. I'm willing to bet there are more than most people notice, and possibly more given the generally lower population density. I don't see myself traveling to the US anytime in the near future, though.

Would I prefer to have fewer surveillance cameras? Maybe. I'm more concerned about things like biometric ID cards and the national ID register, the mental health register, and so on. I see these as much more threatening than a few crappy cameras.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

is there any square inch of London you can be in where you're NOT being taped by a closed-circuit television? MAN, that's creepy. How do y'all get USED to it?

I'm not even conscious of having had to get used to it, though clearly I have done, since the things were practically unheard of in the time and place where I grew up and, as you note, are now more or less ubiquitous in the centre of London. (They're less common outside the centre - where I live, for instance, only the high street and the street leading to the station have them, those being the ones with the banks and the pubs that attract the more loutish element.) At the moment, I think they do more good than harm; for instance, they made it harder for the police to cover up what happened to Menezes, the Brazilian who was mistakenly shot in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks. Obviously, that has the potential to change if our Government tips even further in the authoritarian direction than it already has, and particularly if it manages to take the police with it; but in that case I don't expect to last long anyway, cameras or no.

Smile!

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

And they're getting ready to deploy helmet cams on the cops. Wonder if there's some way to do a reverse SETI with all this video and blast it into space?

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

I'm very tinfoil hat and objected to the all-pervasive cameras, but once you realise that they don't, in fact, use them to read your sweet, delicious brainmeats, and actually have used them quite effectively to solve particularly horrid crimes, I (at least) loosened on the paranoia front a little and (scarily given my general outlook) feel marginally safer that if I disappeared somewhere, they'd jolly well find me (or catch an assailant, etc) by tracing back my last movements.

from a scientific angle: they don't have the man/computer-power to analyse the VAST quantity of footage they have, *except* when they know what they're looking for (when a crime occurs). they seem to use it quite pragmatically and justly.