...	The Canadian Press Privacy commissioner George Radwanski speaks to a news conference in June in Ottawa over his decision to take the RCMP to court for video surveillance of streets in Kelowna, B.C.

By Kevin Ward / The Canadian Press

London - It's a familiar image on the evening news in Britain, the final steps of a murder victim or a child who has been abducted caught on a video surveillance camera.

Britons have become impervious to the publicly and privately operated cameras recording their movements on street corners and in subway stations, buses, supermarkets and corner shops.

After all, Britain is the world's leader in video surveillance with 1.5 million cameras covering public spaces across the country, says the human rights group Privacy International.

Media estimates indicate the average person living in a city is likely to be caught on camera eight times a day, but depending on where you live and your daily movements you could be videotaped as many as 300 times a day.

It's a chilling Big Brother image that, in part, caused Privacy International to recently conclude an "anti-privacy pathology" exists within the British government.

In its annual report released last month, the human rights group singled out Britain for its reliance on surveillance of all kinds, a trend that it believes has become more acute since last year's terrorist attacks on the United States. "The U.K. demonstrates a pathology of antagonism toward privacy," says Simon Davies, the group's director.

"The rate of growth of video surveillance, communications surveillance and information collection has exceeded the growth rate in such countries as Singapore and Israel."

The condemnation of Britain's surveillance culture was levelled despite legislation aimed at limiting access to private data, laws that Davies calls "almost useless in limiting the growth of surveillance."

The argument over video surveillance is in its infancy in Canada with Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski forcing the debate by filing a lawsuit against the RCMP over the use of five cameras in Kelowna, B.C.

"Video surveillance by police in cities and towns is becoming something of a fad," Radwanski told a news conference when he announced the legal challenge in B.C. Supreme Court.

The first street cameras in Britain went up in the south coast town of Bournemouth in 1985, but was quickly followed by others.

Police regard the closed-circuit cameras - known as CCTV- as a bulwark in their fight against crime with the systems accounting for 78 per cent of the Home Office's crime prevention budget between 1994 and 1997.

Yet for every report available showing that video surveillance cuts crime, there is likely another with statistics proving the cameras have little or no impact.

As far as the police and the government in Britain are concerned, the cameras work.

"It is absurd to suggest that this does not help reduce crime," Lord Falconer, the minister responsible for criminal justice, said in June as he opened a new surveillance control centre in Manchester.

The cameras have been a mainstay of crime prevention strategies for governments on the right and left, with the current Labour administration embracing the technology as enthusiastically as its Conservative predecessor.

The use of video surveillance has risen with little public fuss, partly because it has been credited with high profile successes, especially in battling IRA terrorist attacks and in catching the two boys who murdered toddler Jamie Bulger in Liverpool in 1993.

The grainy images of the little boy being led away from a shopping mall to his death on a railway track appeared repeatedly on television and in newspapers.

But recent studies of the devices indicate that police faith in the systems may be misplaced.

A charitable group that lobbies on crime reduction warned the government this summer not to focus its budgets on video surveillance at the expense of proven crime-fighting measures, such as better street lighting.

The National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders concluded that the impact of the cameras on crime is often overstated and "without the constant oxygen of publicity" the systems lose their effectiveness.

In Canada, Radwanski said as privacy commissioner he felt he had to go to the courts to argue the cameras in Kelowna infringe on people's constitutional rights because police in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Halifax have also expressed an interest in the systems. "If we are moving toward a society where law-abiding citizens can't walk about the public streets of the city without being under the systematic surveillance or observation of agents of the state, we have lost a very fundamental part of our freedoms," he argued when the case was announced in June.