Big bother: how a million surveillance cameras in London are proving George Orwell wrong.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie

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Islington is a fashionable neighborhood in North London, a gentrified residential area described, if only by real estate agents, as the new Notting Hill. In 1944, however, many of its characteristic four-story eighteenth-century townhouses had been broken into flats for working-class families, and it was into one of those, on the top floor of 27 Canonbury Square, overlooking a small preserve of green, that George Orwell moved with his wife and son after a V-2 rocket demolished their previous home. The space was drab, drafty, and leaky, but proved, in its way, inspiring. Descriptions in his next novel of an apartment, where "the plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and wails, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow," and of its occupant's wearying climb up the staircase, which he took "slowly, resting several times on the way," show that 1984, the visionary novel about life in an all-seeing totalitarian state, began taking shape in those rooms. It is no small irony that today, across the square from Orwell's home, two traffic cameras operate all day; and that the rear windows of his building are in the frame of security cameras set outside a conference center; and that there's a camera at a car dealership by Orwell's pub, and three more at the local grocery. All told, there are thirty-two closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) running twenty-four hours a day within 200 yards of the place where the chilly thought of the perpetually watching Big Brother had its incubation.

Ironic to find so many, but not unexpected; you could have picked any Briton from Shakespeare to Sid Vicious, and odds would favor finding cameras near his stomping grounds. For the last quarter century, under Conservative and Labor governments alike, the United Kingdom has conducted a living experiment on the use of cameras to conduct domestic surveillance that would have made Stasi-operatives green with envy. There are roughly 4-3 million cameras in the UK--a million of them in the city of London alone, according to the Metropolitan Police Service. They are operated by the Metropolitan Police and by the London Underground, by private security firms and local governments, by schools and hospitals and parking lots and chip shops. They survey busy intersections, Tube platforms, and significant buildings, but also the entrances to pubs, apartment buildings, and health clubs. In some parts of London, they are literally everywhere. Walk in any direction in Westminster, for example, where Parliament and the government buildings are collected, and you'll see cameras prominently poking out from the sides of most buildings, large, gray, boxy sentinels forming part of the so-called Ring of Steel that monitors all traffic in and out of the most iconic, target-rich part of London. At Canary Wharf, the sprawling, shiny, pulsating business complex on the south bank of the Thames, the cameras are smaller, subtler, architecturally integrated into the design but nonetheless visible, reassuringly present but not so obvious as to disrupt the money making. But in poorer East London, you have to look long and hard to see more than the humble traffic cam. And one's reactions vary with the coverage: in the face of a massive deployment of cameras in a bustling, prosperous part of town, one feels slightly crimped by the awareness of being watched. But when one is a stranger in a strange place where the environment is a bit seedy and there are no cameras, one feels just a little bit more alone.

And one thing is sure: more are coming. Right now there is one camera for every fourteen people in the UK, and if they keep being installed as fast as they have been, they will one day outnumber people. The trend has also caught on in the United States, with growing numbers of CCTV cameras popping up in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago. The proliferation of CCTV and other surveillance tools strikes many as sinister. "Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society," said British Information Commissioner Richard Thomas in 2006. "Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us."

There are indeed emerging surveillance technologies worth worrying about--from "data mining" systems employed by the Bush Pentagon to a host of security measures advocated by Britain's Labor government, such as mandatory tracking devices on all cars. But when it comes to CCTV, the great Orwellian fears haven't come close to being realized. The cameras have not become appendages of an all-seeing, all-powerful government. Perhaps because bureaucracies in the UK are mighty forces for inefficiency and inaction, perhaps because abuses have been reined in by good English common sense, the cameras have been deployed in a largely benign way. And despite the fact that the most extensive study of the cameras'...