Hidden Cameras. Joe Plomin

      G20 injured protestor and police

      The conflict seemed preordained and almost rehearsed from previous protests. The police had said they would not tolerate anarchy or violence, and the protestors had said they would be peaceful. Journalists were seeking to record and judge who was right. They had been seeking out black-hooded anarchists planning to attend and who were allegedly intent on violence.

      It was the high-water mark for secret recording both by the state and by journalists. I suspect that never again will so many undercover cameras be in use by paid professionals in one place. However, despite that massive effort on both sides, they all missed the main confrontation.

      The abiding image of that conflict is of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor trying to make his way home through the edge of those protests when he was pushed and struck – causing his death. Tomlinson had not been involved with the protests. He was just trying to get home.

An American banker, a portfolio manager named Christopher La Jaunie, happened to be on that side street where Tomlinson was attacked and happened to have a compact digital camera.2 Mr La Jaunie filmed those iconic images of Mr Tomlinson being struck, using that camera at a distance, unseen.

The omnipresent camera in everyone’s mobile or cellular phones, at the ready in every pocket – or in this case, a tourist camera – could turn anyone, even a passing banker at an anti-banker protest, into a citizen journalist. La Jaunie’s recording changed the face of the G20 riots. That footage forced the Metropolitan Police to respond properly to the tragic death. The police officer who pushed over Mr Tomlinson was acquitted of manslaughter but sacked for gross misconduct. The Met made a formal apology to the family and paid an out-of-court settlement.3

      The tectonic plates that govern who films who shifted at that moment. The basic assumptions about how secret filming is done truly changed. It became much clearer to me than ever before that, in future, professionals like myself would no longer be doing most of the covert work and surveillance that appeared on television and in films. We had handed over that responsibility to a new generation: citizen journalists.

      Journalists were all following what they thought was the ‘big story’ – that is, the main bulk of protestors and particularly the anarchists in black with bandanas hiding their faces. The police were focused on the same group, trying to identify the ringleaders. All those professional cameras were clumped together, pointing where everyone expected the main action to occur. In other words, none of the professionals – the police, the investigators, the journalists – were on the little side street where Ian Tomlinson died.

      It is generally a fact that members of the public employ surveillance either more indiscriminately (outside their homes, in their cars or on their bikes, for example) or else more reactively (seeing something bad and switching their phone on) than professionals. That means they can react and record in places where professionals are nowhere to be seen. Real people are able to record important evidence that journalists could not even dream of getting close enough to capture.

This chapter sets out a condensed history of some of the reasons we have arrived at this position. It is just a brief and selective history, more of a flavour than a definitive guide.4

      The short summary would be that in the second half of the nineteenth century covert cameras were invented and followed by hidden audio recorders. After the first proper secret filming took place, undercover television was invented. Then citizen journalists, social activists and others took up video cameras. And now the public is using ‘proper’ secret cameras.

      THE BIRTH OF SECRETLY RECORDED IMAGES

      The history of hidden cameras and covert recording is driven by the story of ordinary filming – that is, open recording with normal cameras. The two things run in tandem. As long as there has been a way to record things, someone somewhere has been thinking about using that same technology to capture secret footage without the subject realising.

      This truth goes right back to the beginning: it was not that long after the photographic stills camera was invented that someone started thinking about how to make a secret stills camera.

      The result was the ‘Lancaster’, a covert camera pocket watch. This was a palm-sized fob watch – obviously not something on one’s wrist back in Victorian days.