One Nation Under CCTV

The footage showed that while officers had been asked to monitor protesters against the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, they showed particular interest in journalists.

An ITV news crew, a Sky News cameraman and several photographers were among members of the press placed under surveillance as they left the camp in August. Later in the day journalists were followed by another surveillance unit to a McDonald's restaurant where police filmed them.

Allyn Thomas, Kent's assistant chief constable who oversaw the operation, said the force "fully accept the right to protest as part of our democracy", but the force had received information that protesters intended to shut down the power station.

"As part of our operation overt filming of protesters was carried out as a means of identifying anyone who subsequently attempted to break into the power station. The situation on the ground was complex with more than 1,000 protesters, together with journalists and camera crews, in a confined area. We accept that police should not have filmed legitimate journalists or camera crews, however it was a difficult task in these circumstances to clearly identify them." All the journalists followed by the surveillance unit were carrying camera equipment and had produced press cards, the official identification of bona fide journalists.

But Thomas said there was "an issue" with officers who had failed to understand press cards, which are endorsed by national police bodies as the official identification for news gatherers.

"We acted on this and have incorporated training about this issue in our guidance for future operations," he said.

A woman is to challenge the Metropolitan police in the high court, claiming she was handcuffed, detained and threatened with arrest for filming officers on her mobile phone.

Lawyers for Gemma Atkinson, a 27-year-old who was detained after filming police officers conduct a routine stop and search on her boyfriend, believe her case is the latest example of how police are misusing counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

Atkinson's mobile phone recorded part of the incident at Aldgate East underground station on 25 March, one month after Section 58(a) - a controversial amendment to the Terrorism Act - came into force, making it illegal to photograph a police officer if the images are considered "likely to be useful" to a terrorist.

Atkinson handed the footage, in which an officer can be heard telling her it is illegal to film police and demanding to see her phone, to the Guardian and said she was seeking to challenge the force in a judicial review. The incident was captured on CCTV.

The opening part of the mobile phone clip shows two uniformed police officers searching her boyfriend, Fred Grace, 28, by a wall in the station. Atkinson said she felt that police had unfairly targeted Grace, who did not have drugs in his possession, and decided to film the officers in order to hold them to account.

Seconds later, an undercover officer wearing jeans and a black jacket enters the shot, and asks Atkinson: "Do you realise it is an offence under the Terrorism Act to film police officers?" He then adds: "Can you show me what you you just filmed?"

Unfortunately, we don't have to look very far to discover traces of these all-encompassing surveillance projects.

One example was a 2003 DARPA program called "Combat Zones That See" (CTS). The plan was to install thousands of digital CCTV networks across occupied cities in the belief that once the system was deployed they would provide "warfighters" with "motion-pattern analysis across whole city scales." CTS would create a nexus for mass tracking of individual cars and people through algorithms linked to the numeric recognition of license plate numbers and scanned-in human profiles. ...