By now most of us are aware of this story : Mary Bale, a woman living in UK was caught on a CCTV camera dumping a cat in a trash bin. The video was uploaded on Youtube, went viral and made the news worldwide. The response was quick and intense : sheer outrage. Mashable has a good summary of the ways this anger was expressed all over the Internet. Quite a normal reaction, one may think. Yet, something doesn’t add up. How come suddenly nobody seems to be too concerned about the use of CCTV cameras to spy on citizens?

Those are serious topics in our times : the respect of private life, the surveillance of citizens by the Government, the rising specter of Big Brother. It’s one of the recurrent topic on Boing Boing : the rising number of CCTV cameras in big cities, specifically in the UK (try this customized search).

Looks like Big Brother isn’t the problem in this particular scenario : the problem is that we don’t want others to spy on us. But if we happen to find ourselves in a position where we can spy on our neighbors, and maybe catch them doing something we think is wrong, then CCTV cameras are ok, surveillance is good, the system is working just fine.