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Just me or is it a bit creepy that not only do they have a city-wide CCTV system, but they apparently used it to track specific vehicles? Perhaps it's just the

Just me or is it a bit creepy that not only do they have a city-wide CCTV system, but they apparently used it to track specific vehicles? Perhaps it's just the US mentality of tremendous respect for civil liberties[1], but what they did is actually appalling to me. [1]: Please, let's not make this a discussion of how civil liberties aren't uniformly enforced in the US. I think we can agree that things like the Bill of Rights affirm more individual liberties in the US than many other countries.

rsanchez1 14y ago
I also find it creepy, but I wonder if the CCTV and traffic light network can be hacked to help you arrive somewhere on time, or even to have a rival arrive late to make them look bad.
- cubicle67 14y ago
  or aid your getaway? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/
- arethuza 14y ago
  Market forces should be applied - each set of traffic lights should take bids from the waiting vehicles. Whoever bids the highest gets to go through.
_delirium 14y ago
Vaguely, but it sounds like it was a fairly 'manual' sort of tracking: they attached GPS devices to the vehicles, so watching them on CCTV just meant switching to feeds based on the GPS location, rather than some kind of automated vehicle-following algorithm.
- mryan 14y ago
  The UK has a scarily-advanced automatic number plate recognition system in place throughout many parts of the UK, particularly London and the south east. The police can, and do, track vehicles in real time using this system. This is particularly true in London, where this is used to enforce the congestion charge. Although the collection of the congestion charge is automated, this system can be used to alert police to the location of a vehicle in real time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK
nknight 14y ago
Of course it's creepy, but it's not new, either. The UK went Big Brother long before even 9/11, their CCTV obsession has been making international news since the 90s.
- d503 14y ago
  At least they don't try to hide it. Remember these lovely posters from 2002? http://www.flickr.com/photos/24992147@N03/2644171457/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/24992147@N03/2644171457/ Now available in mug and t-shirt form. http://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/search.html?SearchTerm=watchful+eyes http://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/search.html?SearchTerm=watchfu...
  - Jimmie 14y ago
    That poster looks like it's advertising a cheesy sci-fi movie. It creeps me out.
  - gaelian 14y ago
    That poster could have come straight out of Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta". England prevails!
  - slavak 14y ago
    Wow! That is in fact creepy as fuck.
- ticks 14y ago
  I think what outsiders don't realise (due to this hype) is that most of the CCTV isn't linked together. The majority of it is privately run by local businesses and households - it is used after a crime is committed to provide evidence of said crime.
  - mibbitier 14y ago
    It's a lost cause trying to explain this to people who don't live in the UK IMHO. The liberal agenda prevalent on Reddit etc simply refuses to believe that there isn't a huge conspiracy theory, where all those private CCTV systems installed in corner shops, all those local council run CCTV schemes, are all linked together and tunneled into the government so they can spy on people. But just for the hell of it: Most CCTV in the UK was installed in the 70s and 80s, when the hardware became cheap. Independent Shop owners installed it so they could catch and prosecute shop lifters. It typically goes straight to a VHS tape which is cycled through and taped over after a few days. Also for example, you have CCTV in petrol stations to catch people not paying. For some reason this type of thing doesn't seem to exist in the US...
jefftchan 14y ago
I feel that it's mostly the American mentality of civil liberties. CCTV's are ubiquitous not just in UK but also in Japan, China, Taiwan, etc
- rkudeshi 14y ago
  Really? I did not know that! Are they as ubiquitous as London's system? (ie. literally every street and corner in the city is covered by a camera) The only use of cameras in the US that I know of is for red-light cameras, and even those are hotly debated.
  - georgespencer 14y ago
    > (ie. literally every street and corner in the city is covered by a camera) Many street corners have CCTV cameras. The vast majority of them are run by businesses rather than the government and are decentralised, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread. It is possible for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain footage from the CCTV stations with warrants if they physically go to the businesses and ask for it. You are perpetuating a half-truth. (Context: I am from London. I do not give a shit about CCTV cameras OR the Olympics.)
  - mibbitier 14y ago
    Perhaps that's why the US has such a massively high crime rate compared to London. Given a choice between being knifed/shot/mugged etc, and having a camera watch me, I'd choose the latter.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - darklajid 14y ago
      Or perhaps not. Other countries in western Europe are fine without it, and with a low(er) crime rate to boot. You believe in a connection between surveillance and crimes. Exactly that assumption is the part that seems debatable - even if we ignore the whole privacy argument.
ktizo 14y ago
Not just specific vehicles, the London camera system is setup to try and automatically track all numberplates of all vehicles moving in the city, which is how the congestion tax is implemented. It is run by IBM and Seimens, so they presumably have gathered a lot of valuable data there between them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Operations_and_technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Operat...
rtkwe 14y ago
They had planned the IOC's route through the city and had GPS in the cars with them so I doubt the tracking was automated. And England seems semifamous for it's intense use of CCTV systems, on the traffic side larger US cities with advanced traffic control systems have cameras at most (major) intersections.
sneak 14y ago
The reason I moved out of NYC (and out of the country) was because the NYPD put up cameras on my local (135th Street 1/2/3) subway entrance. If you think the billions of USD of antiterrorism money is somehow not funding purchase of facial recognition software, you're foolin' yourself. Collect enough uniquely-identified John Does and you can link them statistically to MetroCard swipes, and then you've got names from the credit cards used to purchase them... Ride the subway enough times with (a) friend(s), and then they've got part of your social graph, too.
- zht 14y ago
  there are large swaths of the country without such video surveillance. did you consider staying within the country?
  - sneak 14y ago
    There aren't large swaths of the country without the USA PATRIOT Act. From http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/realtime/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/realtime/ : "Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows." There's no hope for privacy or civil liberties in that country. The only nonviolent solution is to leave forever.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Where are you now?
- felipemnoa 14y ago
  Anecdotally speaking, I know people in NYC that live in communities with high crime rates that are happy knowing that their neighborhood is being monitored by the police 24/7. Whether in the long term this is actually a good or a bad thing to have cameras in the streets, I just don't know. Devil's advocate here, there are countries that have had no such instant surveillance and still managed to oppress their people quite effectively. I don't want to start a flame war so I won't name a country. And many times all it took for you to get arrested was for somebody to accuse you that you were a traitor or that you were badmouthing the government.
nextparadigms 14y ago
Well UK is the country that has just passed a porn ban, and wants to pass a new law to monitor all Internet communications in the country. That puts things into perspective for what we used to think about this "modern western country". US is actually not that far behind from doing this and more - Constitution or not. They'll just pass the laws and deal with it 10-20 years later. After all US still has the Patriot Act, and that never seemed too constitutional to me. What's funny is that the Eastern Europe countries are probably the least likely to go this path anytime soon, and that's because it wasn't that long ago when they had revolutions over this kind of thing. But UK and US hasn't really done that in a long time, so neither the Governments nor the people there really get what it means to have mass-surveillance and have the Government know everything you did or want to do, and how bad of a thing that truly is.
- ScottMFisher 14y ago
  >Well UK is the country that has just passed a porn ban Excuse me?
  - ktizo 14y ago
    I tried searching for a reference on google, but given the keywords got sidetracked by, well, you know...
  - corin_ 14y ago
    He's thinking of http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/02272218799/uk-govt-considering-requiring-porn-license-if-you-want-to-look-porn-online.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/02272218799/uk-gov... But yeah... we're not banning porn. We're not even actually going to start using an opt-in / opt-out system, either.
    - ljf 14y ago
      As of yesterday TalkTalk (ISP) are now setting all new accounts to 'blocked' by default, users will have to opt in. It's not /law/ yet, but once all the ISPs fall in line, it won't need to be law. http://www.techdigest.tv/2012/05/talktalk_turn_o.html http://www.techdigest.tv/2012/05/talktalk_turn_o.html
nodata 14y ago
> Perhaps it's just the US mentality of tremendous respect for civil liberties .. Please, let's not make this a discussion of how civil liberties aren't uniformly enforced in the US Then don't write flamebait.
gouranga 14y ago
The number plate recognition is 100% ineffective. People use fake plates all the time.
- aes256 14y ago
  Number plate cloning is a problem, but many of the people who do it aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. You would have to clone a number plate from an almost identical car (same make, model, colour, etc.) in order not to raise any suspicions. In many areas of the country there are police forces with ANPR on their patrol cars, and you can bet they'll pull over a car over a mismatch. Most probably quite aggressively, on the presumption that other criminality is involved (e.g. the car is stolen, has been used in bilking of petrol, etc.)
  - cturner 14y ago
    With sufficient processing power, they could hamper this by tracking the region that each number is. If a plate pops up over the other side of town too quickly, or fails to pass through intermediate sectors, it could raise a flag.
alan_cx 14y ago
We British are such scum we cant be trusted with freedom. And then we have....... immigrants. OMG, they are taking over, we are over run... Yeah, I do like to poke at the US, but the UK is equally fecked up. I think the one real thing we in the UK and US have in common is the notion that we the people are now seen as the enemy of the state. Trouble is, Im yet to find a suitable country, with the same good stuff the UK has, which is not also equally fecked up. I can imagine Americans like me might think the same thing. Frankly, I do not know of a country where one can live good and not feel like the enemy of that country. What I want to know is when will the people, yes us privileged westerners, stand up and say we have had enough. Maybe in Greece and France it has already begun.
ljf 14y ago
Not only that, but number plate recognition means that ANYONE is and can be tracked as you drive around the 'city' of the London - once you enter certain zones your plates are checked to see if you have committed and crimes etc. It's done by a system alongside the CCTV, but doesn't need someone to visually track the car, the system does that automatically. It part of the same system that charges people for entering the congestion charging zone, and those that drive in bus lanes. http://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/CityPolice/Advice/TrafficTravel/numberplate.htm http://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/CityPolice/Advice/TrafficT...
- aes256 14y ago
  > Not only that, but number plate recognition means that ANYONE is and can be tracked as you drive around the 'city' of the London - once you enter certain zones your plates are checked to see if you have committed and crimes etc. It's done by a system alongside the CCTV, but doesn't need someone to visually track the car, the system does that automatically. It's an impressive system, and despite being an ardent supporter of civil liberties, I don't have any problem with it myself. Vehicles are only stopped if the police have good reason to do so, i.e. they have reason to believe the driver is committing a categorical offence (e.g. the car has no insurance or tax), or if the vehicle/owner has previously been involved in serious crime (e.g. there is a marker on the vehicle linking it to drugs or firearms)...
  - ljf 14y ago
    Similarly, I have no issue with it, in fact I like it, a few years ago someone stole parts from a friends car - I was able to get the plate as they escaped. It was great knowing every time they went through London they were likely to be stopped.
willyt 14y ago
Civil liberties covers more than just tracking. The UK police are a lot more likely to automatically fine you for speeding or for forgetting to pay you vehicle tax. But on the plus side, they are a lot less likely to shoot you if they come to arrest you for it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966187 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966187 The focus should be on having a healthy criminal justice system which is completely free of political interference and effective in enforcing sanctions on the police when they behave unjustly and neither Britain or the US can claim that at the moment.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
> I think we can agree that things like the Bill of Rights affirm more individual liberties in the US than many other countries. The Bill of Rights is so 18th century. I think you'll find that most industrialized liberal democracies have constitutional guarantees of freedom that are more modern and comprehensive than the US version. The UK is something of an anomaly in that it still relies on common law and tradition rather than an explicit bill or charter of rights. The honour system works fine and tends to be self-correcting over the longer term, as long as the government is willing to play along nicely.
shabble 14y ago
I think a good chunk of it was probably installed as a consequence of terrorist attacks during The Troubles[1], which led to the "Ring of Steel"[2], a fortified security/surveillance cordon around the financial districts. If you compare those measures to the US response to Sept 11th and others, I think you'll find a lot in common. I think at the time the measures were widely welcomed by the public too, although I'm not certain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_%28London%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_%28London%29

rsanchez1 14y ago

I also find it creepy, but I wonder if the CCTV and traffic light network can be hacked to help you arrive somewhere on time, or even to have a rival arrive late to make them look bad.

cubicle67 14y ago
or aid your getaway? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/
arethuza 14y ago
Market forces should be applied - each set of traffic lights should take bids from the waiting vehicles. Whoever bids the highest gets to go through.

_delirium 14y ago

Vaguely, but it sounds like it was a fairly 'manual' sort of tracking: they attached GPS devices to the vehicles, so watching them on CCTV just meant switching to feeds based on the GPS location, rather than some kind of automated vehicle-following algorithm.

mryan 14y ago
The UK has a scarily-advanced automatic number plate recognition system in place throughout many parts of the UK, particularly London and the south east. The police can, and do, track vehicles in real time using this system. This is particularly true in London, where this is used to enforce the congestion charge. Although the collection of the congestion charge is automated, this system can be used to alert police to the location of a vehicle in real time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK

nknight 14y ago

Of course it's creepy, but it's not new, either. The UK went Big Brother long before even 9/11, their CCTV obsession has been making international news since the 90s.

d503 14y ago
At least they don't try to hide it. Remember these lovely posters from 2002? http://www.flickr.com/photos/24992147@N03/2644171457/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/24992147@N03/2644171457/ Now available in mug and t-shirt form. http://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/search.html?SearchTerm=watchful+eyes http://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/search.html?SearchTerm=watchfu...
- Jimmie 14y ago
  That poster looks like it's advertising a cheesy sci-fi movie. It creeps me out.
- gaelian 14y ago
  That poster could have come straight out of Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta". England prevails!
- slavak 14y ago
  Wow! That is in fact creepy as fuck.
ticks 14y ago
I think what outsiders don't realise (due to this hype) is that most of the CCTV isn't linked together. The majority of it is privately run by local businesses and households - it is used after a crime is committed to provide evidence of said crime.
- mibbitier 14y ago
  It's a lost cause trying to explain this to people who don't live in the UK IMHO. The liberal agenda prevalent on Reddit etc simply refuses to believe that there isn't a huge conspiracy theory, where all those private CCTV systems installed in corner shops, all those local council run CCTV schemes, are all linked together and tunneled into the government so they can spy on people. But just for the hell of it: Most CCTV in the UK was installed in the 70s and 80s, when the hardware became cheap. Independent Shop owners installed it so they could catch and prosecute shop lifters. It typically goes straight to a VHS tape which is cycled through and taped over after a few days. Also for example, you have CCTV in petrol stations to catch people not paying. For some reason this type of thing doesn't seem to exist in the US...

jefftchan 14y ago

I feel that it's mostly the American mentality of civil liberties. CCTV's are ubiquitous not just in UK but also in Japan, China, Taiwan, etc

rkudeshi 14y ago
Really? I did not know that! Are they as ubiquitous as London's system? (ie. literally every street and corner in the city is covered by a camera) The only use of cameras in the US that I know of is for red-light cameras, and even those are hotly debated.
- georgespencer 14y ago
  > (ie. literally every street and corner in the city is covered by a camera) Many street corners have CCTV cameras. The vast majority of them are run by businesses rather than the government and are decentralised, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread. It is possible for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain footage from the CCTV stations with warrants if they physically go to the businesses and ask for it. You are perpetuating a half-truth. (Context: I am from London. I do not give a shit about CCTV cameras OR the Olympics.)
- mibbitier 14y ago
  Perhaps that's why the US has such a massively high crime rate compared to London. Given a choice between being knifed/shot/mugged etc, and having a camera watch me, I'd choose the latter.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - darklajid 14y ago
    Or perhaps not. Other countries in western Europe are fine without it, and with a low(er) crime rate to boot. You believe in a connection between surveillance and crimes. Exactly that assumption is the part that seems debatable - even if we ignore the whole privacy argument.

ktizo 14y ago

Not just specific vehicles, the London camera system is setup to try and automatically track all numberplates of all vehicles moving in the city, which is how the congestion tax is implemented. It is run by IBM and Seimens, so they presumably have gathered a lot of valuable data there between them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Operations_and_technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Operat...

rtkwe 14y ago

They had planned the IOC's route through the city and had GPS in the cars with them so I doubt the tracking was automated. And England seems semifamous for it's intense use of CCTV systems, on the traffic side larger US cities with advanced traffic control systems have cameras at most (major) intersections.

sneak 14y ago

The reason I moved out of NYC (and out of the country) was because the NYPD put up cameras on my local (135th Street 1/2/3) subway entrance. If you think the billions of USD of antiterrorism money is somehow not funding purchase of facial recognition software, you're foolin' yourself. Collect enough uniquely-identified John Does and you can link them statistically to MetroCard swipes, and then you've got names from the credit cards used to purchase them... Ride the subway enough times with (a) friend(s), and then they've got part of your social graph, too.

zht 14y ago
there are large swaths of the country without such video surveillance. did you consider staying within the country?
- sneak 14y ago
  There aren't large swaths of the country without the USA PATRIOT Act. From http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/realtime/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/realtime/ : "Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows." There's no hope for privacy or civil liberties in that country. The only nonviolent solution is to leave forever.
andrewflnr 14y ago
Where are you now?
felipemnoa 14y ago
Anecdotally speaking, I know people in NYC that live in communities with high crime rates that are happy knowing that their neighborhood is being monitored by the police 24/7. Whether in the long term this is actually a good or a bad thing to have cameras in the streets, I just don't know. Devil's advocate here, there are countries that have had no such instant surveillance and still managed to oppress their people quite effectively. I don't want to start a flame war so I won't name a country. And many times all it took for you to get arrested was for somebody to accuse you that you were a traitor or that you were badmouthing the government.

nextparadigms 14y ago

Well UK is the country that has just passed a porn ban, and wants to pass a new law to monitor all Internet communications in the country. That puts things into perspective for what we used to think about this "modern western country". US is actually not that far behind from doing this and more - Constitution or not. They'll just pass the laws and deal with it 10-20 years later. After all US still has the Patriot Act, and that never seemed too constitutional to me. What's funny is that the Eastern Europe countries are probably the least likely to go this path anytime soon, and that's because it wasn't that long ago when they had revolutions over this kind of thing. But UK and US hasn't really done that in a long time, so neither the Governments nor the people there really get what it means to have mass-surveillance and have the Government know everything you did or want to do, and how bad of a thing that truly is.

ScottMFisher 14y ago
>Well UK is the country that has just passed a porn ban Excuse me?
- ktizo 14y ago
  I tried searching for a reference on google, but given the keywords got sidetracked by, well, you know...
- corin_ 14y ago
  He's thinking of http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/02272218799/uk-govt-considering-requiring-porn-license-if-you-want-to-look-porn-online.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/02272218799/uk-gov... But yeah... we're not banning porn. We're not even actually going to start using an opt-in / opt-out system, either.
  - ljf 14y ago
    As of yesterday TalkTalk (ISP) are now setting all new accounts to 'blocked' by default, users will have to opt in. It's not /law/ yet, but once all the ISPs fall in line, it won't need to be law. http://www.techdigest.tv/2012/05/talktalk_turn_o.html http://www.techdigest.tv/2012/05/talktalk_turn_o.html

nodata 14y ago

> Perhaps it's just the US mentality of tremendous respect for civil liberties .. Please, let's not make this a discussion of how civil liberties aren't uniformly enforced in the US Then don't write flamebait.

gouranga 14y ago

The number plate recognition is 100% ineffective. People use fake plates all the time.

aes256 14y ago
Number plate cloning is a problem, but many of the people who do it aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. You would have to clone a number plate from an almost identical car (same make, model, colour, etc.) in order not to raise any suspicions. In many areas of the country there are police forces with ANPR on their patrol cars, and you can bet they'll pull over a car over a mismatch. Most probably quite aggressively, on the presumption that other criminality is involved (e.g. the car is stolen, has been used in bilking of petrol, etc.)
- cturner 14y ago
  With sufficient processing power, they could hamper this by tracking the region that each number is. If a plate pops up over the other side of town too quickly, or fails to pass through intermediate sectors, it could raise a flag.

alan_cx 14y ago

We British are such scum we cant be trusted with freedom. And then we have....... immigrants. OMG, they are taking over, we are over run... Yeah, I do like to poke at the US, but the UK is equally fecked up. I think the one real thing we in the UK and US have in common is the notion that we the people are now seen as the enemy of the state. Trouble is, Im yet to find a suitable country, with the same good stuff the UK has, which is not also equally fecked up. I can imagine Americans like me might think the same thing. Frankly, I do not know of a country where one can live good and not feel like the enemy of that country. What I want to know is when will the people, yes us privileged westerners, stand up and say we have had enough. Maybe in Greece and France it has already begun.

ljf 14y ago

Not only that, but number plate recognition means that ANYONE is and can be tracked as you drive around the 'city' of the London - once you enter certain zones your plates are checked to see if you have committed and crimes etc. It's done by a system alongside the CCTV, but doesn't need someone to visually track the car, the system does that automatically. It part of the same system that charges people for entering the congestion charging zone, and those that drive in bus lanes. http://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/CityPolice/Advice/TrafficTravel/numberplate.htm http://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/CityPolice/Advice/TrafficT...

aes256 14y ago
> Not only that, but number plate recognition means that ANYONE is and can be tracked as you drive around the 'city' of the London - once you enter certain zones your plates are checked to see if you have committed and crimes etc. It's done by a system alongside the CCTV, but doesn't need someone to visually track the car, the system does that automatically. It's an impressive system, and despite being an ardent supporter of civil liberties, I don't have any problem with it myself. Vehicles are only stopped if the police have good reason to do so, i.e. they have reason to believe the driver is committing a categorical offence (e.g. the car has no insurance or tax), or if the vehicle/owner has previously been involved in serious crime (e.g. there is a marker on the vehicle linking it to drugs or firearms)...
- ljf 14y ago
  Similarly, I have no issue with it, in fact I like it, a few years ago someone stole parts from a friends car - I was able to get the plate as they escaped. It was great knowing every time they went through London they were likely to be stopped.

willyt 14y ago

Civil liberties covers more than just tracking. The UK police are a lot more likely to automatically fine you for speeding or for forgetting to pay you vehicle tax. But on the plus side, they are a lot less likely to shoot you if they come to arrest you for it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966187 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966187 The focus should be on having a healthy criminal justice system which is completely free of political interference and effective in enforcing sanctions on the police when they behave unjustly and neither Britain or the US can claim that at the moment.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

> I think we can agree that things like the Bill of Rights affirm more individual liberties in the US than many other countries. The Bill of Rights is so 18th century. I think you'll find that most industrialized liberal democracies have constitutional guarantees of freedom that are more modern and comprehensive than the US version. The UK is something of an anomaly in that it still relies on common law and tradition rather than an explicit bill or charter of rights. The honour system works fine and tends to be self-correcting over the longer term, as long as the government is willing to play along nicely.

shabble 14y ago

I think a good chunk of it was probably installed as a consequence of terrorist attacks during The Troubles[1], which led to the "Ring of Steel"[2], a fortified security/surveillance cordon around the financial districts. If you compare those measures to the US response to Sept 11th and others, I think you'll find a lot in common. I think at the time the measures were widely welcomed by the public too, although I'm not certain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_%28London%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_%28London%29