Richard Bilton investigates the surveillance state.Photograph:Anna Gordon

London has the most CCTV cameras per square mile in the world, while Oyster cards maintain a detailed record of Londoners’ journeys. Richard Bilton's new documentary “Who’s watching you?” looks at how Britain has become one of the most watched places in the world. The London File spoke to the journalist who told us that the technology behind surveillance is moving ahead much faster than the regulatory system that is in place to protect our privacy.

The London File: How secretive is the world of surveillance?

Richard Bilton: The people we talked to were always quite happy to talk, but there were whole areas that were less easy to talk about. I don’t think there is this secret community or anything like that but I do think that it is technology that drives the change, and things change very quickly. An example is the ANPR (Automatic number plate recognition) camera system which looks at licence plates and tries to detect criminality. The police think it is a fantastic tool but technology has raced ahead so it is now operating ahead of the regulatory framework.

What we found was that people don’t know about new surveillance techniques because they are changing rapidly. I also think that people don’t care that much because in the United Kingdom, we imagine we are being watched by a benign state so we think that it is fine.

LF: In the documentary it seemed that even government officials don’t know what controls are put in place to regulate the surveillance system.

RB: Yeah. The government will just point to the Information Commissioner, who looks after data protection. He would say that he does not have enough power or enough people. I don’t think that there is any kind of collusion.

Of course it is in the interest of the security services to keep quiet about what they are doing. You don’t want them to go around saying what they were and weren’t capable of. Beyond that, I thought the government themselves were not completely on top of all the things that were happening because they change so quickly.

LF: Are there MPs or people in government trying to push legislation providing greater protection? 

RB: We didn’t find any but we didn’t look for them either. What we did find was an insufficient number of data protection investigators. The people we met were working as hard as they could. There were four or five of them and they had a whole industry to combat. They were saying we need more powers. The Information Commissioner is about to change and his guidance to the new guy coming in is: “you need more powers” and I think that was the big change. There is a lack of awareness which is likely to change. People don’t like the idea of the RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) legislation being able to step into their lives.

LF: One of the issues that you raise in the next episode is the government’s view that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Do people that have nothing to hide have something to fear?

RB: I think that this is a very simplistic view.  On one level, it is true. But how much of your life do you want to leave open? Once you accept that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear then would you be prepared to wear cameras that showed where you were all the time? There has to be a line drawn somewhere.

We interviewed Ken Macdonald, the former director of the Crown Prosecution Service and former Director of Public Prosecutions. On the one hand, he said that we need to have surveillance to protect us from people who may wish us harm. But the view of freedom in this country is that if someone can watch you whenever they like, you lose a bit of your freedom.

Another version of freedom would be to be free from terrorist attacks. But in my personal view, it is a two dimensional argument to say that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear because in a sense, being watched is something to be feared from in itself. Who has the right to watch you? Who is behind the camera and what are they doing with that information? It’s reasonable to ask these questions and unreasonable to give up those rights.

 
The next and final episode of “Who’s watching you?” is on BBC 2 on Monday 8 June at 21:00.