Dog Dare No 5. Authored by Dave Ronalds. Originally sent on Aug 14th 2007 to Lawrence Molloy. Passed to Jon Slight September 1st, 2007

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"CAUSE CONSTERNATION AND CONFUSION TO SOMEONE WHO WORKS IN TELEVISION"

CCTV: The UK has the most surveillance cameras of any country in the world. Leeds city centre has over 150 cameras and these are just for recording on the streets, many more exist inside shops and public buildings all over the city. Everyday your image will be recorded by many different cameras as you go about your daily life in the city. You have a right to access these images wherever they are produced, under the provisions of the data protection act.

To do so you must contact the data controller responsible for CCTV at the relevant institution and make a written request, usually within one calendar one of the incident occurring. You will typically be asked to submit details of the date, time and location where the images were recorded. Together with a description of your appearance, a photo to enable recognition and a small fee to cover admin costs (usually no more than £10).

I thought about doing some data requests, to get images of myself doing something odd on camera etc. But I’ve tried that before with varying degrees of success. The one time I actually got a positive result I paid Leeds City Council to process my request, hoping to receive some footage, only to get a letter reporting that the data request had been processed but no images of me were spotted, £10 not well spent.

I decided that more activity was required if I was to cause confusion for the CCTV data controllers in Leeds. If more people know about the request process then maybe the cities surveillance cameras can get some creative use. It might even lead to the sort of activities regularly practiced by the Surveillance Camera Players (see, www.notbored.org)

I resolved to inform Leeds about the possibilities of the CCTV cameras on its streets, and how to go about getting hold of images, through data requests. So I printed a leaflet containing such information, together with a map of the cameras in the city centre and contact details for the data controllers at Leeds City Council and West Yorkshire Police.

The leaflets have been distributed at various public information points around Leeds city centre. A copy of the leaflet is attached…