A different kind of ‘Big Brother’ seems to be emerging today. This one is not your average 12 to 14 contestants being watched over a period of three months. This one is bigger. Immense. This one is everywhere. Behind you, in front of you, above you and below you, watching a number of over 60 million Britons going about their everyday lives. It started in the 1960s and has increased over the years becoming more and moe powerful. Yet we are only now beginning to realise it exists. So what is it?

It is the enormous number of CCTV cameras operating around the country. According to the RAE’s (Royal Academy of Engineering) 62- page report by Professor Nigel Gilbert, Britain has over 4 million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people, making it the country with the largest video surveillance than anywhere else in the world. They are becoming impossible to avoid what 96 cameras at Heathrow airport, 6000 on the London underground, 1800 in train stations, 260 around parliament, 6000 covering Britain’s roads and dozens everywhere else. Almost every business from your local newsagents or kebab shop to large department stores such as Harrods and Selfridges has its own private surveillance system.

So what is all the fuss about? It looks like Britain is on the verge of being gripped in the clutches of a new form of ‘paranoia’. What with crazy anti terror laws and now the latest extreme of the need for 300,000 new security cameras fitted every year I feel obliged to use the old cliché of ‘what is the world coming to today?’.

Due to the history of attacks by the Irish Republican Army and now the threat of terrorism internationally since the September 11 attacks, the surveillance network has grown at an increasingly fast rate. But the big question is has CCTV become a terror threat within itself? Claims are being made, that most of the information being captured by CCTV could easily be exploited by criminals or terrorists. And its not just security cameras. Information stored in computer data banks is also vulnerable to exploitation.

Professor Gilbert claims there are sites where anybody with sinister motives could log in and watch ordinary people going about their everyday business. Terrorists could spend hours watching footage from cameras trying to work out which would be the best location to set a bomb and criminals could work in the privacy of their own home trying to find weaknesses in a business’s security system.

Big Britain is watching us every hour, every minute, every second. Big Britain knows what we buy, knows where we go, knows what we eat, and knows what we wear. It knows us right down to the size of our underwear. From the minute we step out of our front doors we are being watched. Congestion cameras film us as we drive to work. Mobile phones and cash machines give away our location. Supermarket cards disclose what we buy. Sites are monitored when we use the net and information is gathered by the IT department as we check our mails. Switch on Sky at home and the Sky Box notes what we are watching. Londoners alone are captured on camera an average of 300 times a day. There is no room for privacy. We are being invaded. So, the next time you have that prickly sensation of being watched, it may not be just your imagination.

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