Tony Porter, the surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales, said organisations and local authorities were meant to carry out annual reviews of their CCTV capacity but many failed to do so. He said when a West Midlands local authority held a review, it reduced the number of ineffective cameras and saved £250,000 in the process. "You can still maintain the balance of excellent surveillance but not have a propagation of surveillance that is actually useless," he said. "Surveillance can be an extremely good thing and run well, it's a useful tool for society. "But to quote a former information commissioner, 'we should not sleepwalk into a surveillance society'."
Rest of the story here.