Why don't Trek ships have CCTV installed?

[MrPointy]

Wouldn't 90% of the problems that happen on board a starship be solved if there were cameras in the vital parts of the ship?

If there's a intruder sneaking about in engineering or the Jeffries Tubes, for example, you can at least see who that is before they get the jump on you.

What about those times when the Enterprise encounters a ship where the crew is killed by some disease, and all they have to go on is the captain's log or some shit?

And I know the ship's computer can track regular crew members through the combadges, but people take those off all the time, so they can go on joyrides on shuttlecraft. Those have incredibly lax security, by the way.

Also, this is the 23rd/24th century, so people should have evolved past installing cameras in people's showers.

 

[Timo]

Yeah, there is plenty of conflicting data on this. Let's deal with TOS first...

In "Court Martial", we see that bridge activity at least during times of alert is visually recorded in great detail, while in "The Menagerie", it is claimed that such visual material is never recorded in such detail. That contradiction might be dismissed by saying that "Court Martial" features material edited by the prosecution for dramatic value, while "The Menagerie" shows dramatically edited material even though it's supposed to be raw feed and therefore amazes our heroes. Or then recordings indeed are only made during alerts.

Okay, so the bridge is covered. Now, ST2 shows recordings from Main Engineering. Admiral Kirk can access it, zoom in and make a dramatic edit. Is this a new feature for the 2280s? If not, why wasn't Ben Finney caught when he hid in Main Engineering? We can assume Finney had the skill and the clearance to foul up any CCTV surveillance, though, so that's not a good example; let's take Lenore Karidian instead. It's not a whodunnit but a shedunnit if CCTV shows the planting of the exploding phaser, the poisoning of the drink etc. And at least the latter does take place at a facility that would warrant surveillance regardless of privacy concerns.

Does the problem lie with access to CCTV recordings? These might be made - but the crew accessing them in realtime or immediately after the fact might have been made impossible for privacy reasons. Yet at least the CO should have the authority to unlock the records.

Now, we might perhaps also consider the fact that landing parties basically never transmit any visuals. All tactical communications appear to be audio only. Why? This might actually be a smart move in some cases, allowing the landing party to pre-filter the information. But often it would instead be useful to have shipboard assets go through the visuals for things the landing party missed.

What does TNG add to this? It doesn't really make sense to assume that the relevant technologies would be more advanced there - they are advanced enough today already. At most, security guards watching the CCTV feed might be replaced by AI routines doing the same, but that should happen in ENT already, not between TOS and TNG.

As pointed out, "security" in general appears lax. But at least it can be tightened in most respects when an emergency arises. Studying of visual records for clues doesn't appear possible or allowed, though. Can't be a tech issue. So... Any ideas?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I think it's a security thing. Current military ships and bases do NOT have CCTV covering the insides of sensitive areas (i.e. anywhere there's a computer monitor, situational display, etc.) so that no one else can get an idea of how they work or what's being shown at a given time.

Moreover, I'm guessing that CCTV was not such a big deal in Trek because security is seen very differently today than it was in the 60s and 80s-90s. We're culturally way more paranoid and concerned about personal space and privacy than we were before. Would Trek's utopian theology clash with a desire to have everything monitored all the time? Probably...

Mark

 

[Timo]

Yet there is CCTV coverage of the bridge, not only for the Enterprises but for the Romulan cloakship of "Balance of Terror"! And Spock demonstrates that the enemy can indeed tap into that and gain access to important secrets. So it appears that Starfleet is not overtly worried about such things....

Whenever there are visual recordings in TOS, they are made by some futuristic means that do not correspond to any observed or even imaginable optical recording devices. And when we do see optical recording devices akin to today's cameras, they work very differently from ours: the "camera" set up to record the wedding in the aforementioned episode has its "lens" pointed in the wrong direction altogether, say, and when Kirk gets his hands on an actual camera in "Patterns of Force", he uses it all wrong in terms of laws of optics.

We might well deduce that anything and everything can be visually recorded from all angles at any time, as long as the ship has working internal sensors or perhaps just one working tricorder somewhere. We also know that Starfleet has faith in its visual recordings, as per "Court Martial" (where we also learn that the faith is misplaced and somebody like Finney can falsify the recordings at will; Spock does the same thing with audio recordings in "The Menagerie", again establishing both significant faith and the fact that high-level experts can misuse it). So recordings can be made; are made; and are trusted. The only odd thing here is that they are not made proper use of.

But let's think about it: which episodes would end differently if the heroes went through their CCTV material? There are two conditions there: one, that the perp gets caught in camera and is not a superentity capable of avoiding that somehow; and two, that watching CCTV would be a faster means of catching the perp than the method actually used.

TOS whodunnits are quickly listed. Well, not. But I have all night.

1) "Man Trap" has the Salt Vampire roam across the ship with impunity for a good reason: CCTV would be too slow to track all the shapeshifting, which apparently influences the observer across a distance anyway and would probably fool the person doing the records reviewing.

2) "Charlie X" is a superbeing. Nuff said.

3) "Enemy Within" might in theory end up differently if visuals were carefully studied. But the Evil Kirk wreaks most of his havoc at a quick pace, and the Good Kirk is such a wuss that there's no hope of him organizing a CCTV review anyway.

4) "Mudd's Women" has Mudd conspire. But this is not suspected until it's too late, so no help from CCTV surveillance there. Had Kirk not posted a (surprisingly deaf) live guard next to the con man, he might have paid more attention to recordings, but alas...

5) "Dagger of the Mind" involves van Gelder moving through the ship at too fast a pace for CCTV reviewing to help. Conventional monitoring is about to catch him when he reaches the bridge anyway.

6) "The Menagerie" features two superentities forging records. CCTV would be no match for the combined powers of Spock and the Talosians. Kirk or Mendez may have checked up the recordings to see whether Spock lies about the message from Pike, but that would have changed nothing.

7) "Conscience of the King" in no way indicates that Lenore Karidian could falsify starship visual records. There is plenty of time to wonder who set the bomb in Kirk's quarters or poisoned Riley; the heroes also know exactly which CCTV snippets to review, as they have the place and the time down pat.

8) "Tomorrow is Yesterday" wouldn't change much even if Christopher were kept under CCTV surveillance. And hey, something does alert our heroes to the fact that he's trying to shoot or threaten his way out.

9) "Court Martial" has been discussed already. Finney apparently had all the angles covered, literally.

10) "Space Seed" probably did feature CCTV surveillance of Khan. But Khan moved fast. End of story.

11) "The Alternative Factor" would only have become more mysterious if our heroes followed Lazarus through CCTV and saw his personality suddenly change when his twin took his place... That Lazarus so effortlessly wanders about is a mystery to being with, but retroactive CCTV review would not help.

12) "Amok Time" CCTV investigation into Spock's odd behavior would certainly run into privacy issues.

13) "Mirror, Mirror" has CCTV wired into a transporter set to kill!

14) "The Doomsday Machine" works from the assumption that Decker's account of the last moments of the Constellation crew was true. It's too unlikely to be that, but records probably did not survive.

15) "I, Mudd" leaves no time to stalk Norman through CCTV.

16) "Journey to Babel" is a full-fledged whodunnit for the center part, but strangely decides not to be! No real investigation is made into the Tellarite's death. Diplomatic immunity? This might not prevent reviewing of CCTV material, but might require shutting down cameras in many areas, including the crime scene.

17) "The Trouble with Tribbles" might be resolved more quickly if K-7 had proper CCTV. But everybody thinks that the danger comes from the Klingons, not from Darvin, who knows his way around the security measures anyway.

18) "And the Childen Shall Lead" concludes a stretch of episodes where superentities in total control of the ship are the one onboard threat. CCTV is irrelevant in those.

19) "No Beauty" involves a murder mystery of sorts. But who would dare review the CCTV tapes and risk going mad?

20) "The Day of the Dove" negates the advantages of CCTV intelligence gathering in several ways: the Klingons (think they) control parts of the ship, and the * entity makes everybody stupid anyway.

21) "The Tholian Web" might move along faster if visual recordings of Kirk's appearances were studied. Again, the time and the place would be known in detail, so reviewing ought to be easy. But perhaps the heroes know that ghosts won't show up on film (and this holds true for phased people, too)?

22) "Wink of an Eye" has the heroes running out of time to begin with. But they do spend much of it studying visual records!

23) "Elaan of Troyius" features little mystery. Wrongdoers are immediately captured through conventional security measures.

24) "The Way to Eden" is the next time onboard nastiness is not the work of an invincible superpower. But Dr. Sevrin is lampshaded as an expert in a field well suited for avoiding CCTV.

25) "Turnabout Intruder" might indeed end differently if somebody suggested reviewing the tapes: Lester would definitely start killing people in panic!

...Any comments or ideas?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

The "Balance of Terror" angle is interesting. Spock manipulates Federation telecommunications technology to tap in on Romulan visual communications. This underscores the perils of even the most secure closed-circuit television/CCTV surveillance. Eavesdropping seems to be a fact of life for hackers in the STAR TREK universe. Ergo, the Federation might not want to put everything under the "evil eye".

One should also point out that, of the Federation starships and/or crews discovered to be lost in TOS, CCTV technology would not have prevented the loss of the crews of the Archon, the Valiant, the Excalibur, the Exeter, or the Defiant. It is a foregone conclusion that starships, by definition, spend a great deal of time isolated in deep space where security issues would be minimal, as there is nothing to threaten the starship's crew or operations. The only exception I could think of, off the top of my head, would be Losira ("That Which Survives"), and the utility of CCTV would have simply confirmed the existence of an intruder without illuminating what could be done about the threat. In "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", the Cheronian personal defense screens make Starfleet-issue enforcement problematic at best, and Spock seems to use the ship's sensors to track the fugitives as they make their way to an empty transporter room.

CCTV might have helped Kirk's crew avert at least some disaster when Nomad roamed the ship unattended in "The Changeling", but that's not entirely clear.

Comparing the video capabilities of "Court Martial" with the flight recorder's visual record in TMP2 is interesting, but hardly conclusive. I find it highly unlikely that every nook and cranny about a thousand-foot-long space vessel could be usefully placed under direct video surveillance at will. Could Capt. Kirk have found LCDR Ben Finney with greater ease? That's a tough one. Finney knew the ship as well as any crew member. It's a logical tug-of-war between the normal security of a starship, versus the cunning and intimate knowledge Finney had to secret himself for what was apparently just a few days at most. What if Finney hid inside an equipment storage locker or a cargo hold or a ventilation duct?

 

[Unicron]

Considering the script for BOT originally had references to the Romulans stealing Federation secrets through espionage, might that better explain Spock's ability to tap into their systems?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Sooo.... they have it or don't have it, as the plot-of-the-moment demands.

 

[Timo]

I find it highly unlikely that every nook and cranny about a thousand-foot-long space vessel could be usefully placed under direct video surveillance at will.

Yet TOS appears to feature technology that would make this trivially possible. In-universe visuals in TOS come from angles where there is no Starfleet camera, just a Desilu camera. So either Starfleet can create visual reconstructions from arbitrary angles without needing to point a camera at the target (and without having to suffer any line-of-sight handicaps), or the Starfleet has tiny (nanotech?) hovering cameras readily available at random locations... See for example the educational video about the kligat.

What if Finney hid inside an equipment storage locker or a cargo hold or a ventilation duct?

Supposedly, Finney would still have to forge visual records - namely, those that show him departing the Ion Pod and heading for the putative locker or duct. We can't readily assume that a "path of invisibility" would have been available for Finney as such. And those visuals would be the first ones Kirk would check, even before suspecting any foul play. But I guess forging "nobody here but us beeping instruments" is technically simple - just loop or mislabel a bit of tape from a moment when there really was nobody there.

...Although it might actually be far more demanding to hide the fact that any substitution has taken place than to create convincing visual illusions, given 23rd or even 20th century technology. That is, once Finney got past the safeguards with his exceptional skill and clearance, he could choose between showing an empty room and showing fifty false witnesses in convincing detail, without much extra effort.

Considering the script for BOT originally had references to the Romulans stealing Federation secrets through espionage, might that better explain Spock's ability to tap into their systems?

Or then Spock and other Vulcans know far more about the Romulans than they let the Earthlings know. Who knows, possibly Spock actually had close relatives aboard the Romulan ship - an uncle, perhaps?

Sooo.... they have it or don't have it, as the plot-of-the-moment demands.

The thing is, they never lament the lack of it.

I would, even if I had already spent five years out there without the capability and knew perfectly well it wasn't and wouldn't be available for reason X. "If only we had recordings of who visited my cabin just before the bomb began to whine..."

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Oh! Let's not forget the opening act of Star Trek IV, which has the Klingon Ambassador showing off footage of the landing party arriving on the Enterprise moments before she blew. The footage had Klingon script running over it, and conveniently omitted Kruge shouting "GET OUUUUUT! GET OUT OF THERRRRRRE..!". Where would this footage have come from? Did they access or salvage data from the Enterprise? And if so, where'd they get THAT from? The ship was commandeered hours later - presumably they could have accessed its computer and downloaded the information.

Or maybe Kruge, in a fit of depression from the dishonor of losing his crew, figured to at least tell someone about it before beaming himself down? Or then, perhaps Commander Dan Fielding? He disappeared between movies, maybe he took all the information with him..

Mark

 

[Timo]

Just because Starfleet doesn't believe in away team visual recording doesn't mean Klingons wouldn't carry a recorder with them... Kruge might be constantly watching the feed from, say, two or three smallish hovering automatons accompanying the boarding party. Their audio quality might be lacking, though, requiring Kruge to query the team leader for details.

Perhaps a monitoring drone also accounts for the third-party exterior visuals on the Klingon tape? Might just be standard 23rd century sensor tech in action, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

It's jus another case of the "Hollywood magic camera".

 

[Wingsley]

I prefer to think that the producers of TMP4 decided that they had an opportunity to tie the previous movie directly to the new one by re-using the Klingon invasion scene and making it look like the Klingons had their own GoPro cameras mounted on their armor so they could beam live footage back to Kruge, and Kruge, in turn, transmitted the live feed directly back to his Klingon superiors. From Kruge's point of view, this was an historic opportunity to at least capture footage of a working Federation starship, if not capture the starship itself.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, only two factors speak against this: a wider shot shows no suitable "cameraman" at the supposed position (but this situation could easily have changed between shots), and Kruge's point man gives a verbal description that would appear completely redundant if Kruge had eyes-on-the-spot (but redundancy is a sound military tradition).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

Except that the camera angles don't work for "GoPro" equipped Klingons.

 

[Timo]

Well, the only angle that couldn't possibly work is the one showing the team entering the bridge, beginning with a view of the closed turbolift doors from the bridge side. For all the others, the first factor I mention above contains its own fudge factor: there could always be a Klingon crewman at the camera position, even though obviously the director didn't place any of the extras there for real.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

It may be a false assumption that there are cameras at all. All you may need is enough of the right kind of digital data.

Consider how today it is possible to create 3d environments and characters with various degrees of realism (Baggines, what is a Baggines, Precious?) using specific kinds of digital data. Typical, these environments and characters take a long time to produce but the sophistication is increasing as the time to do them is decreasing. So much so that it is possible for a individual with a home computer to create FX only a studio with vast resources could do in the not-too-distant past.

Now extrapolate three hundred years of computer advances where the digital data collected by tricorders and other sensors could be used to produce the images we see as flight recorders and whatnot.

Or to put it another way, it is not to difficult to accept that, between cameras and holodecks there was an intermediate step.

 

[Timo]

Exactly. The very basis of televised Star Trek is that the visuals must be coming from something else besides cameras, because the televising is being done with cameras that exist behind wild walls, above the set, etc - places where no camera can exist in the Trek universe itself! But this is no problem storywise, not for a scifi story.

Nevertheless, there must be certain artificial limitations to the ability to synthesize an image, for dramatic reasons. Now, synthesizing "fake" images is one thing: the whole Klingons-on-the-bridge thing could be an artist's impression created to drive home a political point as dramatically as possible. But the part where the turbolift doors are shown opening can't be "real" or at least not "realtime", as if such imagery could be obtained and analyzed without major delay, there would be no need for boarding parties in the first place!

Timo Saloniemi