Intentionally obscure speech or writing, designed to confuse an audience rather than clarify an issue." (See this page, from About.com, for more.) I believe that the term "CCTV" is a form of "skotison" and it does not help us understand or appreciate the role of surveillance cameras - what they *really* are - in our society.

First to unpack the acronym. CCTV is an acronym for "closed circuit television." Let's begin with that. First of all, this is not - in all but the most trivial of examples these days - anything close to a "closed circuit." When surveillance cameras were first installed, there were some in which the camera and a monitor were in a "closed circuit." Today, however, these are exceedingly rare. 

First of all, the cameras aren't in any sort of "circuit," but rather they are part of a "network." Many, many cameras are connected using wires (or wirelessly) using network protocols and connections familiar to us from the internet. In fact, many cameras are ON the internet or an internal version of the internet (an "intranet"). It makes a lot of sense for the designers and installers and users of these cameras to put them on a network. You don't need so many wires (instead of one wire per camera, you have many cameras on one wire, like Christmas lights). You can monitor the camera from anywhere in the world, and people do this all the time. In fact, there are the equivalent of "Call Centres" in low-wage countries who do outsourcing of surveillance camera monitoring.

Second, the cameras aren't directly connected to a television. They are routed to a recording device - generally a computer with a hard drive these days. The computer is responsible for recording samples from all of the cameras assigned to it, and storing (some) of the frames from those images onto a hard disk. 

Third, they don't go from camera to disk to a television. Some subset of those images, typically in a rolling series with a few frames from a bunch of different cameras, goes to a computer monitor somewhere. A person, who may or may not be in that building, and who may or may not be paying any attention at all, will be assigned the task of looking at some number of monitors. At Translink, for example, in a system with 1200 cameras, they have a staff of half a dozen people who watch about 20 monitors. At any given moment only 2% of the cameras are being watched.  Sometimes a computer program "watches" for the staff, looking for suspicious activity - a movement where movement isn't expected, for example.

It would seem that "closed circuit" or "CC" is obscuring what is really going on with what we might better call "a digital computer network for recording of video from surveillance cameras." Quite a mouthful, to be sure, and it wouldn't fit very neatly on a sign or sticker.

Now let's consider the use of the word "television." Television is a technology but it is also a business and an entertainment form. In television, you have a small number of actors, who are widely known and who are paid to participate, and a vast anonymous audience who watches and knows who they are. With the surveillance cameras around us, the tables are turned. We have a vast number of "actors" who are not paid and often do not even know they are being recorded being watched by a tiny number of paid people who have no idea who we are. Again, the word obscures what is going on.

I refuse to use the word "CCTV" and I urge you to reject it as well. They are surveillance cameras, plain and simple. And, if you want to be precise you could add that they are digital surveillance cameras connected to a computer network for storage, analysis, and monitoring.