The security industry has gone through an impressive evolution from its most primitive form to the modern-day & video technology used for surveillance is the best example. While today it is estimated that the total number of security cameras worldwide has reached over 250 million (of which approximately 200 are located in China which boils down to one camera for 7 of its citizens), they’ve come a long way.
Many would argue that in 1949, George Orwell was pretty much the first novelist to popularize the concepts of video monitoring, but video surveillance technology was already used by Nazi Germany - first for the monitoring of rocket launches but probably already not with the best in mind for its citizens nor the rest of the world.
1951 the first video recorder in China already captured the first live images from a television camera while in 1966, NASA used CCTV with analogue signals to investigate the surface of the moon and in return send digital images back to investigators on earth. In the eighties, prone to theft and fraud, commercial businesses started to implement CCTV widely into their security strategy especially to snap shoplifters with people already familiar with ATMs all over the world being secured by installed cameras recording customer transactions.
The increasing presence of CCTV in public high-density areas during the 1970ies was largely due to terrorist movements and states desperately searching for means to prevent or at least reduce and later on investigate their attacks - not knowing that video records broadcasted by the media were exactly what terrorists were looking for.
By assuming a positive impact on ordinary street crime for example the ruling authorities in the United Kingdom more and more considered CCTV an efficient and modern tool to prevent crime and thus actively pushed the use of surveillance cameras in its public areas.
But the real technological breakthrough happened in 1996 when the first IP-based camera systems entered the market. First being considered an interesting, yet more playful technology for IT nerds and tech-savvy people, IP cameras and their advantages over analogue CCTV technologies were still far from being market-ready. Somewhere between 2012 and 2016, high-resolution CCTV became the new norm even for the mass consumer market, enabling users to see those critical details that often couldn’t be caught by analogue CCTV at all.
Nowadays, clear pictures and video footage have become the norm with even analogue cameras reaching resolutions of 4k. Although a mixture of analogue and digital CCTV in some cases might still make sense, one can rest assured that in the long term, future-proof digital solutions are the only way to go: Today’s latest CCTV technology is almost entirely IP-based and due to the worldwide increasing availability of high-speed broadband accessible from any place at any time.
The Age of Mass Surveillance - our right for privacy and the security state
While the evolution of surveillance technology hasn’t been a point of concern to most of us, within the last five years, we’ve seen it surpass the line of being highly useful for security purposes to increasingly scary in terms of privacy rights due to, e.g, governmental surveillance not only on enemies outside but citizens within their national borders as well.
With most people still arguing that if they got nothing to hide, they got nothing to fear, CCTV surveillance has reached levels considered scary for a reason. Security cameras that can be spotted by the subjects they’re meant to watch can then be avoided or even destroyed by them as well. Security cameras on aircraft however are not only protected from destruction due to their ground distance but are also capable of capturing huge areas thanks to wide-area motion imagery.
Face recognition - probably the scariest feature of next level CCTV?
Face recognition technology can be used to build social activity profiles of whole groups or populations, entering commercial facilities like supermarkets (and thereby potentially prevent “low-profile” individuals the access to food) and other use cases whose morality is up for debate not only in centralised China but also pretty much any EU country nowadays.
Intelligent identification of humans and objects combined with artificial intelligence might sound scary to you - and it is! If put into the wrong hands like totalitarian governments or criminal groups, our future CCTV technology could be used for great good and evil alike. Futuristic Netflix series such as Black Mirror and novelists such as Goerge Orwell (“1984”) and Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”) have sensitized us for the potential threat that mass surveillance with such highly evolved intelligence and capabilities could soon enough mean to free democracies and, even worse, potentially humanity as a whole.
So while there’re plenty of reasons for us to be sceptical about the way CCTV increasingly affects our everyday life and especially our privacy rights, one can’t deny the positive effects it offers by being used for our personal security whether in outdoor areas or our own four walls at home. As technology is here to stay and humanity most likely won’t evolve backwards anytime soon, it’s up to us to find the proper balance between use and miss-use!
