Good post – and spot on. This might make it more acceptable for police to hassle members of the public on the flimsiest premises, but it won’t make us any safer or stop in terrorists.

I would imagine some terrorists, seeking max publicity, might seek a location covered with CCTV to detonate a bomb.

Guaranteed news coverage.

After what the ASA have let the Christian Party get away with, I have absolutely no faith in their commitment to keeping lies out of these campaigns.

Yep, that poster is definitely bad enough to report to the ASA. Glad it’s being done.

Never thought I would agree with anyone calling themselves ‘councilhousetory’ but I was just going to make that same point.

The most ‘memorable’ pics of the 7/7 attacks were of the bus, above ground, not the subway trains.

‘Terror’ is a media event and feeds on imagery.

The person ‘studying the CCTV camera’ was the advertising agency photographer taking the picture used in this advertisment.

I would like to see another poster. It would contain a picture of a gallows, hanging from which are the bodies of the people responsible for this advert, and all the others pushing for the war on civil liberties. The text underneath it would read, “This country won’t become a police state, because years before, all the people who wanted to destroy liberty were hanged.”

Terrorist attacks on the UK mainland have I would guess on average killed an average of about 10 people a year in the last 40 years. With 60 million people in Britain, you’re likely to be killed by terrorists once every 6 million years! I think that’s a price well worth paying for the continuance of civil liberties in our country.

Threatening death on the advertisers seems a rather intemperate and illiberal response. Even if someone did report you to the police for showing too much interest in a CCTV camera this wouldn’t as such count as an infringement of your liberty. If the State threw you in jail simply for photographing or looking intently at a camera I think it would.

If the police really want to find themselves inundated by reports of people in the street spending too long staring at various items of street furniture they are welcome to promote this kind of behaviour in the public. It will waste police time considerably.

I suggest we organise regular CCTV studying days then. All this Gestapo bullshit is just getting on my nerves, we should not be encouraged to shop our neighbours to the police just because we are afraid through their propoganda.

“If the police really want to find themselves inundated by reports of people in the street spending too long staring at various items of street furniture they are welcome to promote this kind of behaviour in the public. It will waste police time considerably.”

Simple fact: Those that have employed this tactic in the past didn’t have the resources to deal with the potential outcome either, but then the effect that they desired wasn’t for people to *actually* report everything they suspected…only to ensure everyone knew that they were being watched by someone.

That’s what this is about, it’s not really because any terrorists will be caught, but because it is another factor in controlling how the public act in general through fear.

Averting your eyes from the cameras is suspicious too.

People wouldn’t stare at cameras if they were hidden and I suspect that’s the next ‘logical’ step for this government.

We’re living in a Panopticon.

I’d try and bring Jacqui Smith before the ASA for claiming ID cards will do anything to prevent terrorism either, but she’s been on record enough times unable to point out how they would have made a difference to any past cases, so I probably can’t sue. Same point, though.

CCTV studying?

Could former train spotters now take this up as a substitute for staring at locomotives and noting down their numbers?

Yes, I can see contests to appear on the most number of cameras in a day taking off! I’m loving it already!