Under Unblinking Eyes

In my mail on a day in May 2011 was a single-page flyer from the West Midlands Police, the city force of the United Kingdom’s second largest city, Birmingham. It announced that “overt” cameras on my street were going to be removed in the coming weeks. “Covert” cameras, reassured the flyer, had already been taken down. Both sets of cameras had gone up initially as part of a counter-terrorism operation code-named “Project Champion.” The effort, carried out under the rubric of crime reduction, was in fact paid for out of counter-terrorism funds and was designed to target specific Muslim communities, including suspects within these communities, through the cameras and automatic number plate recognition software. (The latter is capable of reading licence plates on vehicles and feeding this information into a database to track their movements, and was originally used in the UK against members of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.) The intention was to blanket these...