As already featured, Leeds University academic Dr David Churchill is one of the few to write about in a scholarly way the modern development of the private security industry and its technology – before the electronic era, locks. He’s holding a free to attend seminar at London Metropolitan Archives on Friday, September 16, an appropriate venue as Corps Security and lockmakers Chubb have their archives kept there. Professional Security Magazine editor Mark Rowe is among the invited speakers in the afternoon session to consider, ‘what next for security heritage’. Here he rehearses some ideas.
For a look into the future, where better to start than the TV series The Prisoner? Aired in 1967, it starred Patrick McGoohan as Number Six, held in ‘The Village’ and who has to work out where he is and why, and escape. It’s become a classic because so many of its themes are universal, and were before their time – self-identity, the individual against the unknown and state power; and surveillance.
It’s easy enough on Youtube to view episode ten, ‘Hammer into Anvil’. You get to see the control room where the authorities in charge of The Village monitor surveillance cameras, covering the surreal streets and estuary (in real life, Portmeirion in north Wales, pictured). To the critical viewer now, The Prisoner didn’t get it right. Each surveillance camera has its own human viewer. Control rooms aren’t like that; a human operator typically stares at a bank of many screens and can call up many more cameras, even.
The point however is that in 1967, the CCTV control room had not been invented. The first uses of closed circuit television were in London by the Metropolitan Police from 1960 onwards, for crime prevention on the street; and crowd control, typically of protests and marches – two quite separate uses. Those earliest experimental deployments were of one or a few cameras, and the operator would sit at a single monitor and by walkie-talkie radio (still quite novel) speak to an officer on the ground to direct him to the suspicious incident. The outcomes were at best mediocre, either in terms of results or in comparison with what officers could have done minus the tech.
McGoohan, whose creation The Prisoner was (after he starred in the less well known Danger Man), worked from what he knew – television. The control room operators do look like TV cameramen in a studio, places McGoohan would have been familiar with. Another point, then, is that surveillance (which admittedly is not the same as private security, although private firms provided the products and could respond to the crime and non-crime incidents) did not develop in a vacuum; it fed off how other industries were developing.
Relevant here is a recent seminar about the history of policing held by the think-tank the Police Foundation, where Dr David Churchill was among the invited speakers. What is the use of the past in a practical, emergency-response field like the 999 services; or private security, where the extra imperative may be to work to a budget and show a profit?
The Police Foundation’s speakers showed that if you don’t have an accurate sense of your past, you only have myths instead, which can lead to the wool pulled over our eyes. And without knowing what your organisation has done before, you may be more likely to repeat the same mistakes. To return to 1960s CCTV, the police kept using it even though the products weren’t really good enough – the monochrome cameras couldn’t give clear pictures after dark, when much crime happens. Yet they persisted. A parallel now is with police use of automatic face recognition; only in the 2020s, a more vocal civil liberties movement keeps police up to the mark to comply with data protection law (something else not yet invented in the 1960s).
Also relevant is the Bristol University classics Prof Genevieve Liveley, featured in the May print edition of Professional Security, for her secondment to the UK official National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). It might sound an unlikely connection; but she is at work on how past times have regarded the future (our near past, or present). Her argument is that typically people of the past didn’t do a very good job of predicting what their future would look like. Why does that matter? It evidently does to the NCSC, if it’s advising on security of infrastructure that may be around decades hence; far better to spot security vulnerabilities now before they emerge in the future.
That Patrick McGooghan example, I would argue, shows that people of the past kind of imagine the future; they may be on the right lines, but don’t get it right, almost by definition – if they guessed the future correctly, it would become the present?! We haven’t got flying cars, that some dreamed of in past times, but we got drones and helicopters, which are just not mass market (yet?) as people of the past thought it would be. We can kind of imagine where society is going with tech; more of the same, that will require securing, whether by technical patches or education of people to be better aware of scams and fakes.
That leaves what becomes of the actual products – the Science Museum in South Kensington has among its exhibits a very early Apple computer, so old the keyboard’s made of wood. Old tech has some fascination – as on display at Bletchley Park. But who wants to keep (let alone pay to view) a rusted, busted 50-year-old CCTV camera or intruder alarm?! The knowledge – the site instructions and standard operating procedures, and security worker and manager recollections – may be more interesting, but there’s next to no such private security literature published, compared with memoirs by coppers and histories of constabularies. Whether that literature and heritage will follow in the wake of the still booming private security sector remains to be seen.
A final thought; Portmeirion, now a famed and busy tourist attraction, has some surveillance cameras in the car park but next to none inside – unless they’re covert? Yet many of the paying visitors are – possibly seeing the irony – taking pictures of themselves and others on their phones. Be seeing you ….
