CCTV in schools is often a cause of controversy and debate.

Apparently a UK school CCTV system inadvertently recorded footage of school children getting changed, which prompted this new statement from the Information Commissioner’s Office today:

6 November 2009

CCTV in schools

Jonathan Bamford, Assistant Information Commissioner, said:

“CCTV should only be used for a pressing need. It is perfectly reasonable for a school to use CCTV to help secure its premises, but it shouldn’t be left switched on capturing images of school children changing during the day. When a school is staffed and children are on the premises, cameras will not generally be required for security purposes. Organisations that do capture images using CCTV are required by law to adhere to the Principles of the Data Protection Act. Guidance for organisations using CCTV is available from http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/topic_specific_guides/cctv.aspx”

The statement is published in the Press Release section of the ICO website – here.

Now I am sure that all statements from the ICO are carefully considered and worded so that there can be no ambiguity of meaning, but I’m not entirely sure that they meant what they seem to be saying in that middle sentence:

When a school is staffed and children are on the premises, cameras will not generally be required for security purposes.

Switch the CCTV off during the normal school day???

Comments below please …

PS – check the website of the newspaper local to the school – the Manchester Evening News – lots of comments from concerned parents …

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Greenpeace used some smart technology to intercept video signals from a Kent Police helicopter and have now (2 years later) used the video clips in this promotional video.

As reported in The Times Online:

A team of Greenpeace activists hacked in to and intercepted live CCTV footage from a police helicopter during a protest at a power station, to use in a documentary released this week.

Police are investigating how the activists managed to obtain footage beamed from their helicopter to officers on the ground during an invasion of the coal-fired Kingsnorth power station near Rochester in Kent, by Greenpeace members in 2007.

The footage has come to light only this week with the release of the documentary — made free of charge by Nick Broomfield, the Bafta award-winning film-maker — which uses parts of the helicopter footage to show the activists at the top of the 200-metre power station chimney.

Tim Hewke, who co-ordinated the 2007 protest, was reluctant to reveal exactly how Greenpeace intercepted it and said: “Someone, somewhere has a piece of kit that’s used from time to time.”

There’s obviously a hole in their transmission security and Kent Police are looking into it

Full twenty minute Greenpeace video via this link – A Time Comes.

We’re gonna leave any further comments on this one open to you, below …

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The new Pentax Varifocal Plus megapixel CCTV lens as captured in action at IFSEC 2009:

Pentax are well known for the quality of their CCTV lenses, but they have taken a long time to produce and launch their first megapixel CCTV lens. However, it seems that the wait may have been worthwhile as judging by the pre-production model demonstrated at IFSEC they’ve built in a new feature which might well see them take the lead in this sector.

Firstly, let’s explain what a vari-focal CCTV lens is – it is simply a lens which allows you to manually adust the field of view being monitored by the camera to exactly that which you wish your surveillance to cover.

Once upon a time we only had fixed focal length lenses available to us e.g. 4mm, 8mm,12mm, etc. These lenses provided a certain field of view, perhaps a horizontal viewing angle of 60° and that was what you got i.e. the view could not be adjusted. A set focal length lens provides a fixed field of view (horizontal and vertical viewing angle).

With the advent of the varifocal CCTV lens we were able to adjust the scene covered / field of view at the point of commissioning, so that only the area which we wished to cover was ’seen’ by the camera. This allowed us to concentrate all of the camera’s available resolution onto the important area. For this reason vari-focal lenses are now used in the vast majority of all new CCTV installations.

With all of the currently available vari-focal lenses, as the field of view is adjusted, you then need to re-focus the lens at each scene setting. With their new ‘Varifocal Plus’ lens Pentax have developed technology which allows the lens to stay in focus as you manually zoom.

The guys on the stand weren’t revealing too much about how Pentax had achieved this first, they simply said that it utilised technology transfer from their lenses for the Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera market.

Precise focusing of CCTV camera lens combinations is something which many end-users struggle with, so this new lens from Pentax should bring great benefit to many end-users and field engineers.

It’s a 1.3 megapixel lens and should be available Q3 2009 for a price in the region of just £99!

Click the image to the right to visit the new page in our webshop and to download the datasheet from there for further information.

NB This lens will only work with cameras which have a lens connection socket and can be back-focused with an adjuster ring at the front of the camera (if you need any further help or information then give us a call on 01304 827 609).

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Amazing CCTV clip found over at the Telegraph website:

In the dramatic footage, a train slammed into a flatbed lorry as it was crossing train tracks in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin on Feb 25.

Propelled sideways, the lorry then swept over Cem Tokac, who was standing beside the tracks.

But while the footage, released on Wednesday by Dogan news agency, showed Mr Tokac after the accident, lying motionless on the ground, incredibly the 32-year-old suffered only minor injuries.

“I can’t remember anything about the accident,” Mr Tokac said. “I thought I was asleep. But when I woke up, I was not in my bed. I was on the ground.”

Mr Tokac, who plans to marry in April, said Feb 25 is his new birthday.

“Life is really beautiful,” he said.

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CCTV camera statistics are often quoted to illustrate how we are all watched by 300 cameras a day, and how many millions of security cameras there are in the UK.

We’ve commented on these ‘facts’ previously and pointed out that they never seem to increase since we first quoted them over five years ago, and wonderment at how these numbers of installed surveillance cameras were ever established?

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian yesterday by Paul Lewis, with many links to research and the original documents that first cited (in some cases made-up) these claims.

David Aaronovitch has been snooping on statistics. His mission: to get to the bottom of the dubious claim, often quoted as fact, that the average Briton is caught on 300 CCTV cameras a day.

The statistic is fiction. Or at least was written as such when it first appeared in 1999 in the book The Maximum Surveillance Society. The author, Sheffield University’s Professor Clive Norris stated clearly in the book that the “contrived account” of a day in the life of a man called Thomas Reams was “a fictional construction” designed to mirror the reality of routine surveillance. That important detail appears to have been lost when the estimate was referenced in a landmark study for the Office of the Information Commissioner.

The original detective work of chasing these stats was carried out by David Aaronovitch in an article in The Times:

The mystery stat was sitting on one of our Times blogs and read “the average Brit is caught on security cameras some 300 times a day” and, God knows why, I just decided to chase the number down and find out where it came from. The colleague responsible for the blog referred me to a couple of news stories, and to a document issued by the office of an important and newsworthy quango.

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