LONDON, March 2: Watch out, Big Brother is watching you all the way from home to office and back home. That is London.

Millions of people walk beneath the unblinking gaze of central London’s surveillance cameras that rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year.

Most are oblivious that deep under the pavements along which they are walking, beneath restaurant kitchens and sewage drains, their digital image is gliding across a wall of plasma screens.

Westminster Council’s CCTV control room, where a click and swivel of a joystick delivers panoramic views of any central London street, is seen by civil liberty campaigners as a symbol of the UK’s surveillance society.

According to a report in the Guardian on Monday, the cameras using the latest remote technology, rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year, providing a hi-tech version of what the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived as the “Panopticon” -- a space where people can be constantly monitored but never know when they are being watched. The Home Office, which funded the creation of the £1.25m facility seven years ago, believes it to be a “best-practice example” on which the future of the UK’s public surveillance system should be modelled.

So famed has central London’s surveillance network become that figures released on Sunday revealed that more than 6,000 officials from 30 countries had come to learn lessons from the centre.

The UK, whose police forces pioneered experiments with the technology in the 1960s, leads the world in surveillance of its people.

Exactly how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK is not known, although one study four years ago estimated 4.8m cameras had been installed.

What is rarely disputed is that the UK has more cameras per citizen than any other country in the world.

Visitors to Westminster’s control room from around the world have been arriving -- as the Guardian did -- through a maze of dank underground corridors beneath Piccadilly Circus.

The tunnels snake their way past empty boxes and used gas containers before arriving abruptly at two sets of locked doors. Behind the code-protected entrance, a wall of 48 CCTV monitors appears, offering a portal to a thousand snippets of London life. On separate screens a mother walked a pushchair in Belgravia, a chef emerged from a Chinatown basement clutching bin liners and a cyclist tapped the window of a Burger King restaurant.

All were being watched by one of the 160 fixed cameras connected to the control centre, or any of the dozens more “mobile” cameras with Wi-Fi connections attached to walls across the city. At the controls was Dan Brown, who supervises operators whose job it is to zoom into anything suspicious. “We’ve got cameras everywhere,” he said. “We can pretty much see everything.”

What they cannot see may be sent via instant radio message, from an army of police, shop workers and “red cap” street guides who alert the operators to any abnormal behaviour they encounter.

Brown’s computer screen showed a map of London peppered with red dots -- the cameras. With a click, he had control of a camera overlooking Trafalgar Square, then another near Soho.

“The majority of our cameras can zoom in to ID someone from a range of 75 metres,” he said.

As well as attempting to capture evidence of criminal activity, the operators are given galleries of faces -- suspected bank robbers or missing teenagers -- whom they look out for.

But for the most part, the job is to watch out for “suspicious” behaviour.

“You very quickly build up a pattern of what a drug deal looks like,” said Brown. “You’ll look for abnormal behaviour, body language, that sort of thing.”

A priority is to seek out potential terrorists on reconnaissance missions, and the operators repeatedly zoomed in to unsuspecting tourists snapping London sights.

Dean Ingledew, the council’s director of community protection, said that to safeguard privacy a team of amateur auditors regularly comes to the control room, unannounced, to inspect the tapes. Most images are stored for 31 days, although, he said, police ask for some to be stored for “a long time”. He declined to say which images, why or for how long.

Footage beamed into the control room has proved crucial to police investigations, he said, from a smash and grab robbery in Kensington two weeks ago to the lethal poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

The truth is the benefits of CCTV are still being debated.

A joint report by Home Office and police recently found that 80 per cent of CCTV pictures were of such poor quality they could not be used for detecting crime, and a police surveillance expert estimated last year that just 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV.
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