Security

This morning, I was walking down a corridor in my university building and I noticed something really quite unusual. There were no cameras watching me. This may be a bizarre thing to notice at 10:15 on a Bank Holiday Monday, but I did just that. And it triggered alarm within me. I don't know why I felt panic as I walked down that long passage towards the media library (which was shut - Bank Holidays, I loathe thee), but it made me think of how reliant we have become on camera security.

People criticise our nanny state for ruining our green and pleasant land, as if before CCTV our country was all Sunday newspapers, high tea and bucolic bliss. The only bad thing about the addition of security cameras is that police officers can't get away with beating people up any more. I really have no qualms with security cameras. A lot of people, people who read the Daily Mail, say that it is biting into our personal lives. They wouldn't be saying that if it was their family member who had disappeared from home without telling anyone, would they? How foolish to dismiss something that is now so vital as an invasion of our rights.

You may take the last paragraph and think me as some Orwellian sociopath, but in my personal experience, I have never felt my space intruded by security. I have lived in the presence of close circuit television for all of my nineteen years and, guess what? I haven't been micro-chipped or brainwashed. I know that they are there to make sure I'm not breaking the law. I'm not an idiot. Their primary priority is to make sure I'm keeping in the boundaries of their defined box. But, it doesn't bother me. The only people it should bother are people who are criminals, fetishists or those who can't live with their actions.

So as I walked down that corridor this morning, I wondered as to how many people had walked in my place, without knowledge that they weren't being watched. I wondered then if they had, did they also feel the encroaching fear of uncertainty that had swathed me, knowing that I was under the radar; being in full knowledge that no one knew where I was for those 30-odd seconds of my life.