Mark Espiner is a writer for the Guardian as well as a playwrite/director. He has had a new gig since last autumn, though, writing for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Obviously, comparison between the two great European capitals which that new position causes him to move between (by which I mean Berlin and London, where the Guardian is headquartered) is what his columns are expected to be about and, as a writer on the dramatic arts, it’s only natural that he has devoted most of his attention to cultural issues.

But not exclusively so. One difference between the two cities that leaps out him he describes in his latest piece, The eyes lying in ambush of the CCTV. He remembers back to his first visit to Berlin, a little over a year ago: what accounted for that strange feeling of freedom, of exaltation even, that he felt then while walking through the streets of the city center? Well, you already know the answer from his piece’s title. It was actually the absence of something that inspired such enthusiasm, the absence there of the closed-circuit TV cameras that, as he puts it, “bristle on every corner” in London.

To be sure, Espiner had previously rather perversely made use of his special journalist’s access to aggravate this hang-up of his: he managed to visit a monitoring center in London (a “dingy room, deep below the streets”), where he witnessed officials there using the cameras to zoom in – to a “scary” level of detail – on anyone who seemed “suspicious,” or else interesting to take a close look at for any other reason. Therefore, although coming back to Berlin he does observe a few more Video Überwachung signs than he noticed before, the apparent forebearance on the part of the Berlin authorities to spy on their own citizens is still quite refreshing.

The reason for all that is not hard to grasp: after all, as he does point out, some of those Berlin city authorities not so long ago lived under a Stasi regime, which itself followed a Nazi regime. Still, Espiner warns against any complacency – not necessarily in the face of officialdom suddenly changing its mind and deciding to bring in the cameras, but rather in the form of new private shopping centers and “gated communities” being built, which inevitably bring with them an associated bunch of such cameras, to provide “protection” and “security.”

Anyway, it turns out that you can check out his argument for yourself, as Der Tagesspiegel has taken to posting parallel versions of his columns in English. (No doubt the original English that Espiner wrote them in, of course; this one is called CCTV: Invasion of privacy.) I reveal that to you as a public service, even as it is an unwelcome development since you’ll no longer need the assistance of your neighborhood EuroSavant to read these particular columns from Der Tagesspiegel.

UPDATE: Please also be sure to see this: Spy Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer, from a renowned security expert, and including up-to-the-minute insights on the topic from the recent very professional assassination of that Hamas official in Dubai.

We all know about surveillance cameras (a.k.a. CCTV, or closed-circuit television). They’re supposed to protect us against crime, but they have a big problem: no one is really watching them, most of the time. That means that, at best, such cameras may have value after-the-fact in providing recorded video evidence (for submission to a trial, say), but do little to alert people when a crime is being committed or to send immediate help – or indeed, some reports say, even to deter crime.

All this notwithstanding, the UK is the world’s CCTV paradise, with by some accounts 1.5 million cameras in operation in various public spaces there. The problem remains of monitoring all those cameras sufficiently to be able to fully draw on the technology’s supposed benefits. Doing that with computers is one technique that is coming along, one that supposedly is not the answer yet, although doubtless it will be soon. In the meantime, articles in both Le Monde (Yoyeurism rewarded in Great Britain) and in the Nouvel Observateur (One society proposes to reward informants) have now drawn their respective readerships’ attention to a new private initiative in the UK called Internet Eyes (“Catch a criminal online”; “Become a Viewer for FREE”), where the essential idea is to get volunteers to watch these cameras, through the Internet, in the hopes of spotting crime as it happens and alerting the authorities for a cash reward. Go on and click through to check out the site: just like that girl you see there, you could soon be sitting back in the evening on your coach, relaxing with your laptop as you scan for criminals! Note in particular that, listed just below the heading “Typical event notifications include:” is “Anti social [sic] behavior” – defined by whom?

Anyway, any of you who are interested can simply head to this piece in the (London) Times to read a more lengthy treatment, in English of course, with many more details (including the assertion in the picture-caption up top that Britain in fact has 4.2 million CCTV cameras operational). The French input to all this is simply that those two publications from the Continent tipped me off to this story to begin with. Indeed, I’m otherwise rather disappointed in them for what is really in both cases a spare, “just the facts” treatment of Internet Eyes – the only hint of opinion comes in each article’s title – when you really would expect more contemplation of what this all means from the mainstream press of such a philosophically-inclined and intellectual land.

(Gee, you’re right: I’m more-or-less guilty of the same offense, including saving my most intense opinionating for this post’s title. I can only respond that I still don’t know what to think about it all. I do really hate the CCTV cameras, but then again, examination of that Wikipedia page about them started me contemplating the 1993 murder of that two-year-old Liverpool boy by two ten-year-olds, a crime that leaned heavily on CCTV footage for its solution.)