I am going to be watching the G20 summit from the safety of my home office, over Twitter; by ‘safety’ of course, I mean safety from both police and protesters.

Business offices in London are locked-down from today, due to fear and advice from several parties. Some firms (or their landlords) have told employees to stay home and if they must come in they should wear casual clothes (“chinos”, apparently, for those who’ve forgotten what casual clothes look like) and phone a number to warn security that they will need to be let into the building. I presume it would be inviting different problems if the employees went “too casual” and arrived at work sporting green mohicans or whatnot. Presumably any protester sporting chinos and a jacket will contrawise be safe from harm.

No pun intended.

On a sunny day such as it is now, it’s all an invitation for folk to work from home. The Metropolitan police (who have all had leave canceled and may therefore include a few peeved individuals) will likely consider the City as a target-rich environment. Key BBC central London Traffic “Jam Cams” have been switched off (“This camera is in use, keeping London moving”) – which is the usual indicator of expected trouble and censorship ahead.

Both activists and police are hoping that Twitter will keep them ahead of the game, but in a country where photographing police has been criminalised and the journalists are so much expecting trouble that they’ve set up a helpline for when they are harassed, my question is: is Twitpic going to come to the fore – where there is no question of a friendly policeman seizing SD-cards or erasing JPEGs because the photo is online and in a hundred webcaches before there is any way of stopping it.

All of which makes me wonder: if things start to go pear-shaped, how far will it have to go before the Met extend the jam-cam blackout to the City’s cellphone base-stations? Block SMS, block 3G; I am pretty sure someone’s already thinking like this if I am thinking like this.

I suppose it depends how many people there are, remaining in the City. Hence this posting.

ps: if you are shooting images on a cellphone it’s a bit of a toss-up about image recovery if one gets deleted; SD cards and the like, with FAT filesystems, are pretty trivial to recover “deleted” images even after “quick” formatting … but when your camera managed its own filesystem and may not provide a raw interface to its memory / image storage, matters may be more difficult … how SD cards are more easily seized, etc … so it’s your call.