It didn’t seem reasonable to go to London to write about CCTV, and not make a pilgrimage to quiet Islington in North London, where, at 27B Canonbury Square, George Orwell wrote 1984. Today, within 200 yards of the building, 32 CCTV cameras are in unblinking operation. The building, by the way, is for sale. I didn’t get the price, but an educated guess put it at 1.5 million pounds. Later in the afternoon, I had a most helpful telephone interview with Daniel Neyland, a professor at the University of Lancaster, who has studied not CCTV but the government’s more recent efforts to establish a national identity card. He had a lot of information about the practical problems establishing an ID card program that actually works.
