Surveillance Cameras in Your City
Millions of people who live or work in Manhattan are being secretly videotaped every day on public streets, sidewalks and parks by a growing array of surveillance cameras.
In this new video surveillance world the statue on the mantel or your colleague's bowtie could easily hide a camera. In 1999, over one-hundred thousand surveillance cameras were sold in New York City alone. Public use of surveillance cameras has skyrocketed. Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, New York, and other major cities are now using surveillance cameras to give police an extra set of eyes. If you run a red light, you may get a ticket in the mail a month from now, thanks to a hidden surveillance camera.
Up until now, the courts have been very good in protecting people's constitutional rights when it involves audio surveillance and wiretaps, but timid when it comes to video surveillance, say privacy activists.In New York, one study estimates that a person is filmed by a surveillance camera an average of 73 times a day as they wander by the more than 2,400 cameras that hang from offices, apartments, and storefronts. Civil Liberties groups are lobbying for at least some kind of regulation. Some of their objectives: to see all surveillance cameras listed on a public register, warning signs to alert people when they're being filmed, and regulations about who can access the surveillance tapes.
The increase in surveillance cameras has been causing growing concern because the targets of the surveillance searches have been given fewer legal protections than suspects in normal criminal cases. Moreover, the process of obtaining approval and carrying out the searches and surveillance is shrouded in secrecy.
If intelligence searches do not lead to criminal prosecutions, the targets are never told that they were under surveillance; in criminal cases, suspects must receive notice of any surveillance even if they are never charged.
Surveillance Systems Proliferation leads to Concerns over Protecting Privacy and Public Anonymity
US Citizens have long enjoyed an expectation of anonymity when traveling or performing everyday activities in most public places. They expect not to be recognized, or to have their presence noted and recorded, when making automobile trips far from home, attending large public functions, or visiting a shopping center to make cash purchases. Except for the possibility that they might encounter an acquaintance or violate a law and be asked by legitimate authorities to produce identification, they expect to be able to preserve their anonymity.
A growing array of new surveillance technologies is bringing this situation rapidly to an end. Some of these technologies are responses to heightened concerns about security, but many are simply the natural, if unintended, consequence of swiftly evolving technological capabilities. The surveillance society depicted in the recent film Minority Report, in which people are routinely recognized by name wherever they go--and presented with individually tailored advertising--might not be far in the future.
Most Americans, and privacy activists in particular, believe that a society in which all people can be located and identified, and their activities and associations tracked in any public space, is not a free society. Such a society would be highly vulnerable to the abuse of power by private or public parties. They argue that professionals in information and surveillance technology and law enforcement, groups concerned with civil liberties, and members of the general public should work collectively to preserve and strengthen the concept of public anonymity and strengthen privacy rights.
Already it is impossible to board an airplane, and in many cases even to pay cash for a bus or train ticket, without producing a photo ID. Video surveillance systems capture license plates as automobiles enter or leave parking lots, or pass through toll plazas. Some new tires carry electronic transponders (RFID tags) that can be linked to the vehicle. Security surveillance cameras capture images of faces in thousands of public locations. The Federal Communications Commission now requires cell phone systems to be able to locate callers when they make emergency 911 calls. Some cell phone systems already have the ability to locate callers.
Today, most people remain anonymous much of the time. The bus company's clerks often do not bother to enter passengers' names into their computers, or if they do, the computers do not routinely share that information with other parties. Analogue images of license plates, as well as the thousands of images of faces, are often not subjected to real-time computer processing, recognition, and cross comparison with other databases. But this pattern of benign neglect will likely disappear as advanced automation becomes cheap and ubiquitous.
Does it make a difference if the world knows if someone bought hair dye at the supermarket, flirted briefly with a stranger on the corner while waiting for the light to change, rented an X-rated video, or was denied credit for a car? Surely people can learn to live with such minor embarrassments. Indeed, such matters have been the topic of local gossip in small villages since human civilization began.
But many people in the United States moved out of small villages, or moved west, precisely to escape the strong social control that is inherent in settings in which ubiquitous surveillance makes almost any anonymous public action impossible and everyone remembers peoples' pasts. If current trends in surveillance technology development continue, then everyone in the country soon might find themselves back in the equivalent of a small town. Constant public identification, almost anywhere on the planet, by governments, by firms that want to shape peoples' preferences, by commercial competitors or jealous lovers, might become the norm.
Although preserving a degree of public anonymity is desirable in order to minimize social embarrassment, and important in order to limit social and cultural control, there is a more fundamental reason to resist the erosion of public anonymity. Individuals may not care who knows where they go, who they talk to, or what they do. But, if powerful public or private parties can know where everybody goes, whom everybody talks to, and what everybody is doing, then that can create enormous social vulnerability and the potential for abusive social and political control. The nation's founding fathers adopted a system of government based on checks and balances, arguing that no one in positions of power should be trusted to always act in the public interest, and for the preservation of freedom and civil liberties. That concern remains valid today.
