The Law Exposed

The policing of the G20 protests in London earlier this month has dominated the headlines over the past couple of weeks, with accusations of officers being heavy-handed towards protesters. More than 180 complaints stemming from the protests have been received by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. It has launched three investigations into allegations of assault, including one minutes before the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson. Much of the public concern has been based on images of the policing operation including Ian Tomlinson being assaulted and, according to a second autopsy, dying of internal haemorrhaging. The initial Police statement said he had no contact with the Police and died of a heart attack. Public concern has also been fuelled by pictures of officers covering their ID numbers and refusing to allow themselves to be identified, in breach of regulations.

However despite the Police relying on CCTV and extensive videoing of protestors themselves the law in the UK has been changed so you and I could be committing an offence by photographing the Police or even, for instance, Police Officers cars which are habitually illegally parked around New Scotland Yard in Westminster, in areas where you and I would be fined and clamped.

From 16th February 2009 anyone taking a photograph of a police officer could be deemed to have committed a criminal offence. That is because of a new law - Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act - which has come into force. It permits the arrest of anyone found "eliciting, publishing or communicating information" relating to members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers, which is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism". That means anyone taking a picture of one of those people could face a fine or a prison sentence of up to 10 years, if a link to terrorism is proved.


NUJ protest - New Scotland Yard

The law has angered photographers, both professional and amateur, who fear it could exacerbate the harassment they already sometimes face and a group gathered outside New Scotland Yard for a "mass picture-taking session" in protest. The event was organised by the National Union of Journalists. It insisted the right to take pictures in public places is "a precious freedom" that must be safeguarded. NUJ organiser John Toner said: "Police officers are in news pictures at all sorts of events - football matches, carnivals, state processions - so the union wants to make it clear that taking their pictures is not the act of a criminal."

Despite the usual assurances given by the Home Secretary, Whacky Jacqui Smith, at the time there is already evidence of the law being abused. Consider the case of an Austrian visitor who fell foul of the Plods in Walthamstow, London, where suspicious photography ranks high on policing priorities! Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism. Matzka, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

In a letter to the Guardian, Matzka wrote: "I understand the need for some sensitivity in an era of terrorism, but isn't it naive to think terrorism can be prevented by terrorising tourists?" The Metropolitan police said it was investigating the allegations. In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matzka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries." He described his horror as he and his 15-year-old son were forced to delete all transport-related pictures on their cameras, including images of Vauxhall underground station.

"Google Street View is allowed to show any details of our cities on the World Wide Web," he said. "But a father and his son are not allowed to take pictures of famous London landmarks."


Klaus Matzka and his son Loris

The British Journal of Photography recently reported an incident involving a photographer in Cleveland who was stopped by a police officer while taking pictures of ships. He was asked if he was connected to terrorism, which he wasn't, and told his details would be kept on file. A Cleveland police spokeswoman told the journal that "in order to verify a person's actions as being entirely innocent," anyone in "suspicious circumstances" could be asked to explain themselves.

Photojournalist Marc Vallée is among those angry at the law. He specialises in covering protests and fears for the implications of Section 76. "Alarm bells really are ringing," he told the BBC News website. "I know some of it sounds a bit funny. Train spotters being stopped for taking pictures, that sort of thing, but I've spoken to people who've been on their own, at night and they're surrounded by several officers. It can be intimidating.

"It may be that officers are just doing their best with a bad law, but if that's the case, they need guidance to tell them, 'Stop harassing photographers.'" Mr Vallée also pointed out that members of the Royal Family were part of the Armed Forces. "Are we going to be stopped from photographing them?" he said.

The NUJ said some police officers wrongly believed they had the right to delete photographers' images. Other critics, meanwhile, fear the new law could inhibit their right to peaceful, democratic protest. Leo Murray is a spokesman for climate change campaign group Plane Stupid. His members film any direct action they take. "It's outrageous," he told the BBC News website. "It's yet another in a long line of measures designed to erode people's civil liberties. "Being able to film the police has completely changed the way they are able to police our protests. It's made us much, much safer and the risks of a violent confrontation have almost disappeared. If we couldn't film they could act with impunity, they could just mete out violence with the confidence that nobody would find out. There's absolutely no way we are going to observe this ban. If they try to bring charges against us we will fight them in the courts."


The rather wonderful Vauxhall Bus Station

In a statement, Number 10 said that while there were no legal restrictions on taking pictures in public places, "the law applies to photographers as it does to anybody else. So there may be situations in which the taking of photographs may cause or lead to public order situations, inflame an already tense situation, or raise security considerations," it said. Photographers could therefore be asked to "move on" for the safety of themselves or others. "Each situation will be different and it would be an operational matter for the police officer concerned as to what action should be taken," the statement added.

This discretion, however, is what some feel is the key problem with the law. Critics fear the new law could stop them photographing legitimate protests Neil Turner, vice chairman of the British Press Photographers' Association, said he believed there was no intention among senior ranks of the police to prevent legitimate photography. "The problems that we can see arising are with junior officers using the legislation to overcome situations that they find uncomfortable or where they make judgements about photography and don't know how to apply the legislation on the ground," he said.

"We firmly expect that there will be inappropriate uses of the act and that someone will end up in front of a judge before there is some clarity and before the purpose of the act is properly defined." The Metropolitan Police insisted the law was intended to protect counter-terrorism officers and any prosecution would have to be in the public interest. "For the offence to be committed, the information would have to raise a reasonable suspicion that it was intended to be used to provide practical assistance to terrorists," it said. "Taking photographs of police officers would not, except in very exceptional circumstances, be caught by this offence."

Austin Mitchell MP tabled a motion in the Commons that has drawn on cross-party support from 150 other MPs, calling on the Home Office and the police to educate officers about photographers' rights. Mr Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, was challenged twice, once by a lock-keeper while photographing a barge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal and once on the beach at Cleethorpes. "There's a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this."

Photographers have every right to take photos in a public place, he says, and it's crazy for officials to challenge them when there are so many security cameras around and so many people now have cameras on phones. But it's usually inexperienced officers responsible. "If a decision is made to crack down on photographers, it should be made at the top. It's a general officiousness and a desire to interfere with people going about their legitimate business."

But in Britain this sort of attitude is new. So what is the law? "If you are a normal person going about your business and you see something you want to take a picture of, then you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private," says Hanna Basha, partner at solicitors Carter-Ruck. "But if it's the London Marathon or something, you're fine." There are also restrictions around some public buildings, like those involved in national defence. And under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without reasonable suspicion, providing the area has been designated a likely target for an attack.


Police Poster

Child protection has been an issue for years, says Stewart Gibson of the Bureau of Freelance Photographers, but what's happened recently is a rather odd interpretation of privacy and heightened fears about terrorism. "They [police, park wardens, security guards] seem to think you can't take pictures of people in public places. It's reached a point where everyone in the photographic world has become so concerned we're mounting campaigns and trying to publicise this." It seems to be increasing, he says. "There's a great deal of paranoia around but the police are on alert for anything that vaguely resembles terrorism. It's difficult because the more professional a photographer, paradoxically, the more likely they are to be stopped or questioned. "If people were using photos for terrorism purposes they would be using the smallest camera possible."

In May last year, Thames Valley Police overturned a caution issued to photographer Andy Handley of the MK News in Milton Keynes, after he took pictures at the scene of a road accident. Guidelines agreed between senior police and the media were adopted by all forces in England and Wales last year. They state that police have no power to prevent the media taking photos.

They state that "once images are recorded, [the police] have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if [the police] think they contain damaging or useful evidence."

So, if Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris ever return to London there is no restriction on their taking photos in public places or indeed of the Transport System. London Underground freely allows portable photography on its system provided you do not use a flash. Whilst some find this curious, flashes can trigger fits in epileptics, set off automatic fire alarms and interfere with cameras which are used for security and by the drivers opening and closing doors. However policies are not consistent with for instance Glasgow’s Underground forbidding photography on its system but curiously there is no legal basis for them to do so as even the bylaws have not been amended.

So there you have it in the Great Britain of 2009. How smug we used to feel when tourists were arrested for photographing decrepit Soviet barracks in Eastern Europe in the 1980s or English plane spotters were arrested in Greece in 2001. Serves them right for travelling to dodgy countries, we used to say, because it could not happen here in the Land of the Free!

Surveillance Britain

It seems the CCTV chickens have come home to roost in surveillance obsessed Britain as a senior police officer has rubbished the impact of CCTV on crime prevention, a not too minor criticism in a country which is estimated to spend in excess of £1.1 Billon annually on installing and running CCTV systems making the inhabitants of Britain the most observed people in the world, to little practical effect it seems.

Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV. Mr Neville, who heads the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) unit, told the Security Document World Conference that the use of CCTV images as evidence in court has been very poor.

“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court,” he told the conference. “It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

The aim of the Viido unit is to improve the way that CCTV footage is processed, turning it into a third forensic specialism alongside DNA analysis and fingerprinting. Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe. But Mr Neville is reported in The Guardian as saying that more training was needed for officers who often avoided trawling through CCTV images “because it’s hard work”.


Viido had launched a series of initiatives including a new database of images that will be used to track and identify offenders using software developed for the advertising industry. This works by following distinctive brand logos on the clothing of unidentified suspects. By backtracking through images officers have often found earlier pictures of suspects where they have not been hiding their features. Mr Neville said that Viido would be publishing pictures of suspects in mugging, rape and robbery cases on the internet from next month and building a national CCTV database that will hold images of convicted criminals and unidentified suspects.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said: “We would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are used only for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained.”

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said. As always in Britain with Government projects delivery has been somewhat late but the “Big Brother” Society predicted by George Orwell in 1984 has certainly arrived now in 2008! Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored. Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV. Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people. But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says. It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network, the report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner's Office. The office is an independent body established to promote access to official data and to protect personal details. The report's co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was "the most surveilled country". "We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection," he said. "We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us."

The report coincides with the publication by the human rights group Privacy International of figures that suggest Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy. The two worst countries in the 36-nation survey are Malaysia and China, and Britain is one of the bottom five with "endemic surveillance". Mr Thomas called for a debate about the risks if information gathered is wrong or falls into the wrong hands. The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) said there needed to be a balance between sharing information responsibly and respecting the citizen's rights. A spokesman said: "Massive social and technological advances have occurred in the last few decades and will continue in the years to come. "We must rise to the challenges and seize the opportunities it provides for individual citizens and society as a whole."



Graham Gerrard from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said there were safeguards against the abuse of surveillance by officers. "The police use of surveillance is probably the most regulated of any group in society," he told the BBC. "Richard Thomas was particularly concerned about unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance. Well, any of the police surveillance that is unseen is in fact controlled and has to be proportionate otherwise it would never get authorised”

Some of the myriad ways in which we can be watched are;

• 4.2m CCTV cameras
• 300 CCTV appearances a day
• Reg. plate recognition cameras
• Shop RFID tags
• Mobile phone triangulation
• Store loyalty cards
• Credit card transactions
• London Oyster cards
• Satellites
• Electoral roll
• NHS patient records
• Personal video recorders
• Phone-tapping
• Hidden cameras/bugs
• Worker call monitoring
• Worker clocking-in
• Mobile phone cameras
• Internet cookies
• Keystroke programmes

The great problem with surveillance is the contrast between the compulsive behaviour of those promoting and using it and the Public concern that sooner or later it will be abused and it is a poor substitute for on the ground policing by, whisper it, human police. Indeed as the CCTV craze has taken hold in Britain “real” police have largely disappeared from the streets of the UK. Instead you are more likely to see what are deprecatingly called “Plastic PCs”, Police Community Support Officers who don’t have the same training, pay or powers. Even when you do ring the Police your chances are now slim that you’ll actually meet a Police Officer. You will be put through to a centralised call centre where civilian staff will “prioritise” your call. Unless you become a “CAT A”, an emergency blue light response, as the control staff are incentivised to ditch as many calls as possible, your chances of saying "Hello Officer!" are slim. Mobile phone theft? I’ll take your details and give you a reference to claim from your insurance company. Car window broken? Unless you actually saw it happen you can’t assume it is a crime. And my favourite is that the Metropolitan Police don’t respond to burglaries unless the thief is still on the premises!

In fact only 3% of crimes are solved using CCTV and in many cases where it is available it is unusable or unfit for evidence because there are no national standards. Indeed often the Police simply do not have time to go through the amount of material available so it is simply not examined. So as a cynical public and police officers alike have pointed out CCTV may document crime but it rarely seems to prevent it. The public don’t want their mugging to be captured on high quality CCTV, they would much prefer if it didn’t happen in the first place!


The other issue is the widespread abuse of personal data and failure to comply with the Data Protection Act. Every CCTV camera trained on a public place should state in a prominent place on a notice specified in the Act why the images are being recorded, who is responsible and how they are to be contacted. It is little known that you can apply for this Data from the Data Controller of the company concerned as you can for any other data under the Data Protection act (DPA). But the law is widely flouted and the enforcement is totally ineffectual. Take one case of many I could give, the achingly hip St. Martin’s Lane Hotel in the Central London street of the same name, so hip it doesn’t even have a sign and the cheapest room is £230 a night. It describes itself thus;

“From its dazzling location at the hub of Covent Garden, West End theatres and Trafalgar Square, St Martins Lane is a dramatic and daring reinvention of the urban resort. Smart, witty and sophisticated, Philippe Starck’s design is a brilliant collision of influences - from the modern to the baroque - that suffuses the hotel with energy, vitality and magic.”

Well one influence it has little danger of colliding with is the DPA, for it has no less than 8 CCTV cameras trained on the busy public streets around the hotel but not a single notice as required under the DPA. Obviously too “Smart, witty and sophisticated” to comply with the law of the land.

Perhaps given the failure of CCTV to solve crime, the huge waste of resources in surveillance, the lack of control of the increasing much resented surveillance in our lives which is changing the very nature of society and the total failure to ensure effective data controls it is time to roll back “Big Brother” and get the police out of their strategy and liaison meetings and fighting something as boring as crime in real time instead of investing in more toys for the boys?

“It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”

George Orwell. 1984.