When we think of security cameras, normally one thing comes to mind. The large square box cameras that stare down on the public from posts at traffic intersections, a “Big Brother” presence viewed by unknown officials at an unknown place.But these days the term refers to much more than that. For many years there has been a thriving market for much smaller, more flexible cameras available to the public. Different shapes and sizes have different abilities and uses, from the tiniest of pinhole cameras to the outdoor all-weather property cameras.
Cameras appear on our computers; most of the notebooks manufactured in the last five years have cameras, some of which come with installed software that turns them into sophisticated security devices capable of detecting movement and storing the pictures and video they record onto the internet.
Cameras appear in innocuous places. Embedded in books or fire alarms, to monitor the activity of visitors to our houses, such as babysitters or cleaners. These cameras safeguard our possessions – including the most precious of them all, our children – from unwanted attention from others.
They can be static or have movement ability. Static cameras, such as the ones found in laptops, books or fire alarms point in one direction. More expensive cameras, particularly IP cameras have the ability to pan, tilt and zoom in by remote control, often through a web page created by the cameras internal software but viewable from any web browser.
They can see in total darkness. Many cameras either already have small infra-red LEDs built in that provide a light source invisible to the human eye but with the same power to a camera as a large flashlight.
They can be used to lower costs and prove cases in court. Dashboard mounted cameras are being fitted already to public service vehicles such as buses, which have crash sensors built into them and are constantly recording and discarding footage. When the crash sensor is triggered, the camera stores the ten seconds before and the ten seconds after the crash on a solid state card, and this can be retrieved and used to prove who caused the accident.
Already from this small set of examples, we can see that the term “security camera” is much more flexible than it once was, and all of the mentioned types of camera are available to the public; no longer is surveillance solely the domain of the government or of spies, now we all have access to sophisticated recording equipment usable for a myriad of different tasks.
The internet has added a whole new dimension to surveillance. Now we can browse government installed cameras, such as traffic cameras overlooking highways (and many local TV stations have such a feed running twenty four hours a day, to be up to date on accidents they need to report). We can browse our own cameras; IP (internet Presence) cameras can be hooked up to a home broadband network, and provide a webpage interface that we can access from another computer anywhere in the world at any point in time.
As they have become more prevalent, so they have eased their way into our lives even so far as spawning the popular summer TV show “Big Brother ” that airs in many different countries every summer and allows viewers to gaze upon the contestants lives within the house in unparalleled detail as the contestants compete for huge sums of money in an elimination reality television series.
Other “fly on the wall” television series’ follow the work of public servants; police officers, fire and ambulance crews, customs officials, border service agents and airport staff, all of whom either wear small cameras on their clothing or are followed by professional camera crews as they perform their daily work tasks.
According to the New Statesman magazine, in the United Kingdom members of the public are observed by security cameras up to several hundred times every day. Sophisticated camera systems are employed that read car license plates and compare them with lists held of required documentation, sounding an alarm if a vehicle passes that is lacking one or more mandatory documents such as insurance or vehicle taxation.
For just a few hundreds of dollars nowadays we can all become “Big Brother”. The allure can be fascinating, with more than one person placing their entire lives online through use of a number of networked cameras that switch between one another using motion sensing software to determine in which room the person being observed is. Even amateur websites of this nature are no longer prohibitively expensive, and the voyeur in us all finds an almost magnetic attraction to watching – and frequently criticizing – others lives. No longer is this exclusively the domain of television soap operas.
Once we start to dive into the world of home surveillance, it uncovers a vast array of options for observing every aspect of life. From the tiniest to the largest cameras, we can place nearly every aspect of our lives under the unblinking eye of this fascinating technology