FTTH, CCTV and a safer society go hand in hand

Brilliant article by The Register: Residents of Shoreditch in the UK got access to the footage of CCTV surveilance camera's through digital TV. The pictures were in a grainy resolution as to not allow people to identify individuals, so privacy was kind of protected. The results were: IT'S MORE POPULAR THAN BIG BROTHER! Better still, people wanted more of it and in a higher resolution. The focus group response was: "Focus group feedback indicates the CCTV is helping address fear of crime and... generating major new community vigilance resource."

Now imagine, FTTH everywhere and grannies are working from their home as CCTV camera operators. We'll get those nice, spiffy AXIS cams installed, that work in the daylight and nighttime and can deliver HDTV quality. You could install it as a scheme where those watching get a bonus for every crime they report, or as a new work from home scheme. Whole groups of inactives could be crowdsourced. Actually you could get two or three people watching the same scene independently. If they don't know the others who are watching it could be a great scheme to keep CCTV camera operators honest. If two are reporting something happening and number three isn't that person not doing his job.

At high def 5mbit/s or more this will require some nice FTTH or VDSL2 type of connections. (ofcourse there are ways of conserving bandwidth until such a moment when the operator feels it necessary to get a good luck) The traffic is therefore best kept locally, but that should be no problem, as locally there should be no lack of bandwidth in a VDSL2 world. (Note to the Brittish: this doesn't include you. BT keeps you at ADSL2+ which just isn't good enough to hook all those camera's up to at HDTV and most of you will not be able to watch it in HDTV, since you live too far from the exchange)

Combine it with Google maps and let people annotate the events. Even better, store all the information readily available and searchable for the public. Let them annotate it and they will make everything even more clear. Pretty soon you'll have a complete record of every car that drove by a road. A description of every person that ever glanced at the cam. Let them combine their own pictures and you'll have a transparant society! What the German Democratic Republic (commies) never achieved, we can achieve by using camera's and grannies!

Now just think of it, the possibilities are endless and the great thing is peoples curiosity/loneliness will bring Big Brother upon us, without as much as a complaint. Onwards to the Transparent Society and Big Brother be dammed. If you've got nothing to hide, you've go nothing against this idea! (/sarcasm)