As a resident of the both terminally hip and poverty-stricken London borough of Shoreditch, I was amazed to see this announcement in The Register recently; my neighbours have been watching me stumble home drunkenly (although, I hasten to add, never criminally so, and never on a school night)! It seems, you see, that a pilot program(me) has been running in the area, whereby users of a governement sponsored broadband scheme would be able to access channels showing them (at a low resolution) the views from various CCTV cameras around the area. Ironically, the viewing figures for the CCTV and associated programming rivalled both Big Brother and Eastenders; life imitating art?

It got me thinking about whether this crowd-sourcing of surveillance was really effective, and what the social implications might be. 

 Eric S Raymonds maxim that 'given enough eyeballs, any bug is shallow' has always been upheld as one of the core reasons the Free & Open Source software has been so successful; does it apply in this case? Given that the reported figures were a 600% rise in reports of graffiti and a 200% rise in reports of vandalism, it would seem that this makes at least the anti-social behaviour bugs shallower. They take a little time, so are more likely to be caught by a viewer, as well as being static, again making them more likely to be seen. More complex or serious crimes, it would seem, tend to take place indoors, as a number of discrete events over a long period of time, or on a drug-fuelled rampage through the city. It's very difficult for the viewer to reconcile disparate events into one timeline through a TV; especially as the system had the resolution dialled down to make identification of individuals harder. 

  Further to this, bystander paralysis may be exacerbated  by the massively parallel nature of the Shoreditch system; surely if the 38 neighbours of Kitty Genovese were unable to bring themselves to act as she was stabbed, then East enders slumped on their sofa's, safe in the knowledge that thousands of others were watching, would be even less likely to report the incident?

  Minor incidents, though, when you see vandalism on your walk to work, or graffiti on your local shop, will likely be reported as they impact the individuals watching in specific ways; it may sound glib, but if Kittty had called out a neighbours name, perhaps a horrid outcome could have been averted.

  Also, we have to hope that viewers are not so incensed as to take justice into their own hands. Trained police may be able to dispassionately watch crimes being committed on monitors, but someone invested in the crime in some way may not (and I imagine a few people had cars or shops they were able to watch over the system).

  So, all in all, it seems like a system that skews the polices resources towards minor crimes, has little or no effect on serious or white collar crime and fails to have any of the positive social effects of, say, Neighbourhood Watch schemes. I shall be writing to my MP to inquire (oh, and to get on some of this cheap broadband...though casual voyeurism is not really for me)

 (See a post on this on OurKingdom(and Jon, no Big Brother reference. That's just the way I roll)