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Chapter 1

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The History of Infiltration and Covert Recording

The era of the professional undercover journalist wearing tiny cameras in order to expose wrongdoing reached its peak in 2009. There was a lot of anger that year. In April, just 6 months after the world economy was shredded by the lies and games of bankers (and by the rest of us taking unsustainable house and personal loans),1 that anger found its expression and epicentre in London.

Thousands of people gathered on the streets there in order to protest at the forum of the governments and central bank governors from the 20 major economies or ‘G20’. Many of the people who came to protest wore black clothes, and some had handkerchiefs over their faces. The police wore riot helmets and shields, and massed together. The focus of it all was the City of London (the main financial district), and particularly the big banks’ international headquarters, towering over the skyline.

G20 crowd and police lines

Seething masses of humanity and walls of police mixed on the streets with journalists and cameras. Many of those cameras were waved openly at people, but some of the filming was less obvious – because it was being done secretly.

More covert recording was going on in one day, and in one place, than ever before. The City of London’s streets were crawling with hidden cameras. I had never seen such a deployment of infiltration on all sides. Undercover journalists mixed among the protestors. Plain-clothes police were out in force too, I was told, including a number of officers with surveillance cameras trained on protestors – recording faces and identities.

G20 injured protestor and police

The conflict seemed preordained and almost rehearsed from previous protests. The police had said they would not tolerate anarchy or violence, and the protestors had said they would be peaceful. Journalists were seeking to record and judge who was right. They had been seeking out black-hooded anarchists planning to attend and who were allegedly intent on violence.

It was the high-water mark for secret recording both by the state and by journalists. I suspect that never again will so many undercover cameras be in use by paid professionals in one place. However, despite that massive effort on both sides, they all missed the main confrontation.

The abiding image of that conflict is of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor trying to make his way home through the edge of those protests when he was pushed and struck – causing his death. Tomlinson had not been involved with the protests. He was just trying to get home.

An American banker, a portfolio manager named Christopher La Jaunie, happened to be on that side street where Tomlinson was attacked and happened to have a compact digital camera.2 Mr La Jaunie filmed those iconic images of Mr Tomlinson being struck, using that camera at a distance, unseen.

The omnipresent camera in everyone’s mobile or cellular phones, at the ready in every pocket – or in this case, a tourist camera – could turn anyone, even a passing banker at an anti-banker protest, into a citizen journalist. La Jaunie’s recording changed the face of the G20 riots. That footage forced the Metropolitan Police to respond properly to the tragic death. The police officer who pushed over Mr Tomlinson was acquitted of manslaughter but sacked for gross misconduct. The Met made a formal apology to the family and paid an out-of-court settlement.3

The tectonic plates that govern who films who shifted at that moment. The basic assumptions about how secret filming is done truly changed. It became much clearer to me than ever before that, in future, professionals like myself would no longer be doing most of the covert work and surveillance that appeared on television and in films. We had handed over that responsibility to a new generation: citizen journalists.

Journalists were all following what they thought was the ‘big story’ – that is, the main bulk of protestors and particularly the anarchists in black with bandanas hiding their faces. The police were focused on the same group, trying to identify the ringleaders. All those professional cameras were clumped together, pointing where everyone expected the main action to occur. In other words, none of the professionals – the police, the investigators, the journalists – were on the little side street where Ian Tomlinson died.

It is generally a fact that members of the public employ surveillance either more indiscriminately (outside their homes, in their cars or on their bikes, for example) or else more reactively (seeing something bad and switching their phone on) than professionals. That means they can react and record in places where professionals are nowhere to be seen. Real people are able to record important evidence that journalists could not even dream of getting close enough to capture.

This chapter sets out a condensed history of some of the reasons we have arrived at this position. It is just a brief and selective history, more of a flavour than a definitive guide.4

The short summary would be that in the second half of the nineteenth century covert cameras were invented and followed by hidden audio recorders. After the first proper secret filming took place, undercover television was invented. Then citizen journalists, social activists and others took up video cameras. And now the public is using ‘proper’ secret cameras.

THE BIRTH OF SECRETLY RECORDED IMAGES

The history of hidden cameras and covert recording is driven by the story of ordinary filming – that is, open recording with normal cameras. The two things run in tandem. As long as there has been a way to record things, someone somewhere has been thinking about using that same technology to capture secret footage without the subject realising.

This truth goes right back to the beginning: it was not that long after the photographic stills camera was invented that someone started thinking about how to make a secret stills camera.

The result was the ‘Lancaster’, a covert camera pocket watch. This was a palm-sized fob watch – obviously not something on one’s wrist back in Victorian days.

Lancaster Pocket Watch, patented 18865

Source: Copyright © Bonhams

The idea was that anyone could play spy and take photos of anyone else with a truly hidden camera.

The Lancaster looked like a pocket watch until the time came to take a photograph, when it was unlatched, extended and the device was activated.

The problem is that the Lancaster was really impractical. A camera specialist at Bonhams auction house said:

It would have been very inconvenient to use as four very small catches had to be released in order to remove the glass screen and to fit a separate metal sensitised material holder for each exposure. As a result, the model sadly sold badly and is much rarer than the improved version which came on the market in 1890.6

Other hidden stills cameras were developed across the next 50 years.7

Most of the covert images taken between the 1890s and 1940s did not use a proper hidden stills camera like the Lancaster. Most of the photos being taken without the subject realising during that time used a long-lens camera – the photography was hidden by dint of being at a distance.

For example, in the 1870s the British state used long-lens stills cameras to gather pictures of suffragettes, women who had been imprisoned for demanding women’s voting rights. Because the police photographers were far away, the suffragettes did not realise their image was being captured. In 2003, Kew Gardens held an exhibit of those surveillance photographs. They appear almost paparazzi to modern eyes.8

Women seeking the right to vote are captured, in moments of rest, in those photos without their knowledge.

Today, the position is actually very similar to back then: secret filming is now being done both with ‘proper’ secret cameras (the modern heirs to the Lancaster) and also with the cameras in ordinary mobile or cellular telephones (just as ordinary cameras were being used back then).

Although there have been ‘proper’ hidden cameras since not long after the birth of photography, most covert recording has always used ordinary cameras that are perfectly visible but hidden far away or used such that no one sees them.

THE HIDDEN AUDIO RECORDER

Audio recorders lent themselves to disguise more easily than early stills cameras. Tape recorders changed from being large reel-to-reel devices into machines that were small enough to fit in a briefcase – and were then used to capture serious evidence of wrongdoing or antisocial behaviour.

The era of the true secret recording had begun.

The following example illustrates the reach of an audio recorder, hidden away, anywhere and in anything where it will fit. In 1976, two journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, snuck a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase into meetings with the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, just weeks after he had quit office.9

In remarkable tape recordings the former prime minister set out his fears that the British Secret Service believed he was a Communist spy. Decades later, declassified documents would prove Wilson largely right: there was a plot against him led by his own spies. Penrose wrote the following:

Unbeknown to Wilson, Courtiour and I secretly recorded many of our meetings with him, almost always conducted at his Georgian house at 5 Lord North Street, close to the House of Commons. The cumbersome machine was smuggled into his study in a briefcase carried by Courtiour. Over a period of nine months we accumulated hours of tape recordings. Those tapes have, since then, remained untouched in the loft of my Kent home and at Courtiour’s London home.10

There are other examples where audio recorders changed whole sectors in just the same ways that secret cameras are now opening up new hidden worlds.

In 1972, The Guardian newspaper in England used a disguised audio recorder to prove an ex-convict was being blackmailed by two police detectives in an effort to make him name other criminals. They had set him up – made it look as if he’d committed a crime they knew he’d had no part in:

DETECTIVE:But I don’t particularly want to lock you up, but I want someone.

MAN:So in exchange for me…

DETECTIVE:I want someone.11

Covert audio recording technology meant that journalists at the BBC, The Guardian and elsewhere could absolutely prove the wrongdoing by public officials in a way that previous generations would have struggled with just pen and paper based only on testimony.

THE FIRST SECRET FILMING: AUDIO, AND IMAGES AT A DISTANCE

Roger Courtiour was not just someone who recorded a former prime minister secretly with a hidden audio recorder; he was also one of the first people to do actual proper secret filming, using film cameras.

‘This was the early seventies’, he told me. ‘There were only maybe five or six places people sold drugs around London. We learned about one and I went in to buy drugs wearing an audio recorder while the team filmed me using a long lens on a camera, from a vehicle parked nearby.’

It sounds easy enough, but Roger remembers that it was actually anything but straightforward: ‘Of course being me, the audio recorder I was wearing didn’t work. I don’t think it switched on. We were [just] learning everything back then.’

We only see examples of secret filming that works, but often people fail because of technical problems. Today the same remains true. Members of the public doing their own secret filming need to do secret filming better in order to avoid being caught and in order to capture footage that proves the allegations they are making, just like back when journalists were learning the tricks of the trade.

Most of those lessons appear in later chapters, but one seems appropriate to discuss here because Roger talked about it when he reminisced about that first time he used secret filming. That lesson is that there are real limits to secret filming. There are many things that covert recorders cannot capture. Roger was filming drug deals, and at the time that seemed to him to be the end of the matter. He thought about it in pretty straightforward terms: ‘It was illegal, so of course it seemed like something we should film.’

Now he thinks more about the fact that his secret filming could only tackle certain targets. ‘Later I thought more about the fact that we were filming low-level people, not the people making the real money,’ he said. He could film anything at the street level with the new long-lens film cameras while wearing an audio recorder, but his cameras could never get at the bosses. Secret filming is very powerful, but there are always limits to what it can capture. As with most of the lessons in this book, that is just a fact that needs to be borne in mind and considered in each case of covert recording.

REAL UNDERCOVER TELEVISION

In the decades that followed, the camera crept ever closer to the action in television documentaries. Television recording started (as above in Roger Courtiour’s recollection) with audio recorders in someone’s pocket and giant film cameras some distance off. Then cameras just small enough to fit in a lady’s handbag or similar were developed. Finally, recorders – audio and picture – became small enough for operatives to wear in their clothes.

Early covert recording technology was terribly bulky and unwieldy. Undercover reporters working for me these days still worry they will be discovered even though their recorders are tiny, but when I started out just 15 years ago I had a quite bulky tourist-style video camera under my armpit. With some pretty clever modification, a cable could run off and take in video and audio from external microphones and a camera lens.

That modification, attaching a remote tiny lens, brought both image and sound right on top of the action. We could record wrongdoing while working just so long as no one spotted the giant recorder.

Those newly modified cameras were beyond the scope, expense and knowledge of most of the public at that time. The fact that we had these things and that most people could not get access to them meant that for a while the story of secret filming felt like it was pretty much the story of journalists. The need for specialist cameras gave birth to a mini-industry of which I am at the tail end.

Many British readers will remember the long-running ITV series World in Action, which is credited with pioneering the use of covert cameras in a series of documentaries:

World in Action, an investigative current affairs series from Granada Television (1963–98), used these methods [of undercover filming] successfully where ordinary entry was impossible and where there was demonstrable public interest justification. To enter a guarded steel works where over ten workers had died in industrial accidents, this writer [Gavin MacFadyen] impersonated a local iron worker secretly to film where and how these workers had died. In other undercover films, on corruption and child labour in Hong Kong, he impersonated a Catholic priest from the Holy Carpenter Guest House, and an Indiana doll salesman. Later he would play right wing American television producer while documenting election fraud by the People’s National Congress in Guyana. Other producers secretly filmed while pretending to be anthropologists in Argentina while pursuing Nazi war criminals, and conventional tourists while investigating Czechoslovakia during the Cold War…12

Another World in Action film is particularly relevant to people carrying out their own secret filming today. In 1997, the team rigged an entire domestic home with hidden cameras. That technique, putting cameras in objects that then sit static inside a room, is the one we now see members of the public using most, whether it is in care homes, hospitals, when filming a nanny or even when catching a philandering spouse. Before such techniques came into wider circulation, journalists had invented them for television.

It was not just World in Action that drove through the use of secret cameras as a tool to capture evidence of antisocial or illegal behaviour. There were many other British TV series that used covert recording, programmes such as Kenyon Confronts (BBC), Undercover Britain (Channel 4) and Disguises (ITV).

There are more undercover television series and documentaries than I could list here. The point is that journalists have played a substantial role in the evolution of covert cameras; we have learned some lessons about what works and what does not work. I am trying to pass those lessons on to a new generation of covert photographers and videographers.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM BEFORE UNDERCOVER CAMERAS: ARMED WITH TOURIST CAMERAS

The first wave of citizen video journalism was powered not by hidden cameras but instead by the public using 8-mm and SVHS cameras to film events the mainstream media ignored. The sheer availability of those relatively small 8-mm and SVHS cameras made it possible for almost anyone to get a camera and record what they believed was important, rather than what some news editor decided to send a camera crew out to record.

‘You could now go into a shop in Bradford, Brisbane or Birmingham, Alabama, hand over the equivalent of $1,000 and have yourself an almost broadcast-quality camcorder kit’, Thomas Harding wrote of that video revolution.13

The existence of tourist cameras and video activism from the 1980s onwards produced worries about privacy. Hemmed in on one side by surveillance by the state and on the other by widespread filming by individuals, there was concern from some professionals that nothing would be private.

One leading video activist and later prolific Sky News journalist, Roddy Mansfield, wrote in Harding’s book:

Some people express concern that an army of activists wielding camcorders increases society’s ‘Big Brother’ factor. Yet if you attend live exports or sabotaging a hunt, you’ll be videoed by the police, private security guards and detective agencies working for the government, all of whom are compiling secret files on us. That’s spying on people. Yet when I see a security guard assault someone, or a police officer use unreasonable force, or a fox being torn apart, or a 400-year-old tree being destroyed, I’ll be the first one to video it. That’s not spying on people; that’s justice!14

Taking up cameras always takes bravery.

Those tourist cameras wielded by citizen journalists were not ‘secret cameras’; they were not hidden. They did still sometimes record important footage, where the subject of filming did not realise. The most famous early covert footage – filmed by an ordinary citizen – was the beating of Rodney King by a group of police officers in 1992, in Los Angeles. That footage was covert because the police officers did not realise they were being filmed; they did not know someone on a balcony had a zoom on a small tourist camera powerful enough to capture evidence of that beating from a significant distance.

WHERE WE HAVE ARRIVED: THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST AND HIDDEN CAMERAS

Now it is not going to be people like me who sweat most and really change things. The most interesting secret filming is increasingly not being done by professional journalists. Members of the public are taking up the baton.

In 2012, Joyce Zannoni was disgusted by what her mother was being fed in a care home in Leicestershire. Her mother was supposed to have only liquidised foods, but she had been served beans on toast. On another occasion, her mother’s window was broken and the ceiling was mouldy. It was clear that her mother was not being properly cared for.

The grand-looking house on the hill at the top of a pretty village, with its high stone wall and open garden, was not matching its exterior with good care inside – at least as far as Joyce could tell.

Completely disgruntled, Joyce took up her mobile phone and used it to film what she was seeing. The mobile phone in Joyce’s pocket had – in one fell swoop – turned into a weapon against poor care. It had turned into a method of gathering evidence. She captured hard proof that backed up her concerns.

At that stage, like most members of the public using their phone or a hidden camera to secretly record wrongdoing, she had no thought that the footage she was recording might be featured in a television programme on the BBC’s Panorama programme. That was not her purpose. She just wanted her mother to be given food she could eat.

Joyce’s phone was visible, but it captured what was really happening, without people realising, at least at first. On the footage you can hear when a care worker spots her and tells her she has to stop filming, that she is not allowed to film in the care home. Joyce has to stop – she has been discovered. Although it was not very surreptitious, it was covert filming in order to uncover evidence of wrongdoing until she was discovered.

Mobile or cell phone cameras are becoming an important tool for gathering evidence.

Joyce’s evidence prompted the council to investigate. They substantiated her concerns ‘under the category of neglect’. Their own investigators – coming in as a result of her evidence and persistence – found chaotic mealtimes and serious environmental concerns.

Later, we got involved and some of Joyce’s footage and her photos were broadcast on the BBC.

In response to the film (which I produced), and despite the council’s findings, the care home denied that some residents missed out on food and drink. They did not accept there was neglect and have pointed out that, since the film, an inquest into the death of Joyce’s mother did not conclude that neglect had been a contributing factor.

The owner of the care home also formally complained to the UK broadcast regulator, Ofcom, about that film, arguing that we were unfair. Those complaints were not upheld.15

Joyce’s footage and photos, combined with her incredibly diligent note-taking – she had kept all the relevant emails, dates and notes from that time – had won the day.

This example is only one of many from around the world.

The reach of miniature cameras will only increase over the coming decades.

They need to be used wisely.

NOTES

1.The Economist (2013) ‘The origins of the financial crisis.’ Available at www.economist.com/news/schoolsbrief/21584534-effects-financial-crisis-are-still-being-felt-five-years-article, accessed on 1 February 2015.

2.This has sometimes been questioned, primarily by conspiracy theorists; however, see contemporaneous report for Tomlinson’s inquest: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12856002, accessed on 19 November 2015.

3.Lewis, P. (2009) ‘Video reveals G20 police assault on man who died.’ Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/apr/07/video-g20-police-assault, accessed on 5 June 2014.

4.Readers who want more on the history, particularly of investigative journalism, are referred to: de Burgh, H. (2008) Investigative Journalism. Oxford: Routledge; or Pilger, J. (2004) Tell Me No Lies. London: Jonathan Cape.

5.See, for example, Thomas, R. (2011) ‘The history and evolution of spy and investigative photography.’ Available at www.pimall.com/nais/nl/spyphotography.html, accessed on 1 February 2015; or http://io9.com/5959454/steampunk-spy-fi-real-life-gadgets-perfect-for-a-victorian-era-james-bond, accessed on 19 November 2015.

6.The Watchismo Times (2007) ‘Victorian 1886 spy camera pocket watch.’ Available at http://watchismo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/watchismo-times_10.html, accessed on 4 April 2015.

7.Stapley, J. (2014) ‘6 of the best vintage spy cameras ever made.’ Available at www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/articles/6-of-the-best-vintage-spy-cameras-ever-made-5475, accessed on 4 April 2015.

8.Casciani, D. (2003) ‘Spy pictures of suffragettes revealed.’ Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3153024.stm, accessed on 24 July 2015.

9.Dwyer, P. (2006) The Plot Against Harold Wilson. British Broadcasting Company, BBC2, 2006. London: British Broadcasting Company [no longer available online]. Also: Wheeler, B. (2006) ‘Wilson “plot”: the secret tapes.’ Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4789060.stm, accessed on 5 June 2014.

10.Penrose, B. (2006) Quoted in Wheeler, B. (2006) ‘Wilson “plot”: the secret tapes.’ Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4789060.stm, accessed on 5 June 2014.

11.Bunyan, T. (1976) The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain (p.220). London: Julian Friedmann Publishers.

12.MacFadyen, G. (2008) The Practices of Investigative Journalism. In H. de Burgh (ed.) Investigative Journalism (p.150). Oxford: Routledge.

13.Harding, T. (ed.) (2001) The Video Activist Handbook (2nd ed.) (p.9). London: Pluto Press.

14.Mansfield, R. (2001) How I Became a Video Activist. In T. Harding (ed.) The Video Activist Handbook (2nd ed.) (p.13). London: Pluto Press.

15.Ofcom (2015) Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin, Issue number 261, 8 September 2014, pp.52–70. Available at http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/obb2601/obb261.pdf, accessed on 25 April 2015.