RoelA charming Austrian filmmaker tells us about how she used the law to create her film; a story shot using only footage from CCTV cameras. Her story is confronting us with the seamingly controlled and watched society of the United Kingdom, where I lived for five months. As a London citizen, you agree with being observed by CCTV cameras, when you set foot in public space. I knew this and I didn't really mind, but I was shocked to discover that the amount of CCTV cameras installed in the UK is about 4.2 million(!).
Manu Luksch
According to the UK Data Protection Act (DPA), a company or institute is obliged to provide a citizen with the captured footage of that particular person (subject) if they have that in storage. When researching on this particular way of retrieving footage, I must state that this act is quite entertaining. For example, when requested, a company should provide the subject at least with an answer within 40 days.
Unfortunately, due to other privacy legislations, the provider is also obliged to anonimize the footage, before submitting such a request. So every person, every face on this footage has to be blurred out, or replaced with a black dot (actually, it is up to the providers' creativity, since he is allowed to solve this according to his own meaning). You can imagine this process is ridiculously expensive. Manu shows us a picture of a box of printed frames she received once, where apperantly the faces of others where removed with nail scissors.
Think about it, someone has to dig into the video archive, find the right video this ignorant person is requesting, make a copy, anonimize it and finally sending it. The law states, that the provider is allowed to request a fee for this favour, at a maximum of 10 pounds!
Faceless
The result of all this, is Manu's film Faceless, a science fiction story in a society under the reformed 'Real-Time' calendar, without history nor future, where everyone is faceless.
View the trailer (this trailer is originally published by Ambienttv.net), or have a peek at the excerpt below:
As a filmmaker, Manu decided to create a project following the Manifesto for CCTV filmmakers, which meant that she could only use footage made by CCTV cameras and that no other camera devices were allowed for filming in that area. So she started collecting footage of herself, over a period of five years. This was not an easy project; she had to contact numerous companies and institutes, wait for a reaction, learn if the content was available or not (sometimes a CCTV system wasn't even operational) and decide if the footage was suitable for her film. For example, one of the companies she contacted replied:
"I can confirm there are no such recordings of yourself from that date, our recording system was not working on that time." (11/2003)
Which again is really peculiar, because the DPA is obligating the CCTV operator to keep their system running. It is thus really obvious, that many companies never even heard of the DPA. Not really shocking, but also not really good. The DPA is not the only set of rules companies have to follow considering CCTV and privacy, there is also the CCTV Code of Practice, which is explaining why they find it necessary to install CCTV, but also examples of good practice and explanations on how to keep such systems running.
I really enjoyed Manu's talk, she made me wonder where all this is heading. If a society such as the United Kingdom is trying to observe every corner of the street (one CCTV camera for every 15 UK citizens) and experimenting with speaking camera's, RFID tracking on public transport and Remote-controlled UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) scanning the city for anti-social behavior, when will we start recognizing Big Brother? It is a comforting feeling that somebody is watching me in public space, but when do I actually loose my privacy?
This 'panopticon' may not be complete yet, but I wonder if we really should proceed building such a concept, since we cannot really say if this one-way observation really assures our idea of 'security'...
