June 13, 2005
Watch the watchers...
This article by Max Borders in TechCentral argues that street cameras are not really a violation of civil liberties...
...Indeed, what is the difference between a cop sitting in his patrol car monitoring the streets (and you) whilst eating a Bavarian crème and that same cop sitting in a control room doing the same? You may respond that, in one instance, the cop is not visible to you. But there is nothing to say that cops can't monitor people while obscured by alleyway shadows. In fact, they do it all the time. Would anyone argue that this is a civil rights violation?...
TMLutas counters:
...It's not a bad piece but misses the real problem of the cameras, they make the state too strong. A society where everything done by an individual in public is captured, stored, collated, and attached to a personal file makes it too easy to keep tabs on dissidents, on the loyal opposition, even on personal enemies of those in power....
I think they are both missing the real issue. I think David Brin got it right, in The Transparent Society, when he argued that street cameras are going to happen. They are just too effective, and people's desire for safe streets is so strong, that they are inevitable. Therefore, what civil libertarians should be pushing for is the right to watch the watchers! There's no reason why the same camera technology should not allow us to watch the cops in the control room. (And, civil liberties aside, they would do a much better job of the watching, if they knew we were looking over their shoulders, and could tell the world that Officer Muldoon was busy dunking his donut and didn't even notice the mugging on the screen in front of him.) And maybe citizens should be able to watch the streets also.
Another issue that could be pursued with profit is where, and how long, the recordings are to be stored. Hizzoner the mayor should not be able to collect juicy clips of his political opponents visiting low dives. Perhaps those concerned with civil liberties should be pushing for the feeds to be stored where they are not available, except by court order if they hold evidence of a crime or accident. And they should be erased after a set time.
We are inevitably going to have less "privacy" in public spaces just because of the ever increasing amounts of information that is being captured. The Internet is a sort of public area, but this blog post, though it will probably be read by only a few hundred people, is available to the world, and is possibly being stored in ways I've never heard of, and could be used against me in the future. But the privacy of "big city anonymity" is actually not the norm in history. Most people have lived in small communities, where almost everything is known about everybody. A certain amount of that is coming back, whether we like it or not.
Posted by John Weidner at June 13, 2005 12:32 PM | TrackBackSure! Put cameras everywhere. But they can only be looked at with a warrant...
Posted by: Andrew Cory at June 13, 2005 04:06 PMUm, Andrew, maybe you're too young, but do you remember a certain man named J. Edgar Hoover? And how the need to obtain warrants didn't mean much to his organization?
And don't forget that judges can be bought, and in fact ARE bought and sold every day.
Posted by: Hale Adams at June 13, 2005 04:40 PMHale,
In my mind the choice is not between what I want (no cameras) and what I don’t (cameras), but between egregious violation of civil rights (cameras everywhere that any cop can access at will) and potential violation of my civil rights (cops having to get a warrant from a corrupt judge)...
This stems from my basic agreement with Mr. Weidner, “street cameras are going to happen. They are just too effective, and people's desire for safe streets is so strong, that they are inevitable.” Given that, I want strong controls...
Frankly, I think all this bickering is way off-point. This boils down to a legal issue, namely the courts' interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. For years, the US Supreme Court has been tacking police powers onto the "plain view" doctrine, extending what evidence the police may gather without a warrant even as far as laser-mic sound recordings picked up through the windows of peoples' homes. The court has also gutted the so-called "inadvertent sighting rule," a crucial part of the amendment, which prior to 1990 prohibited police from using evidence not specified on a warrant, unless said evidence was sighted in plain view.
The removal of these barriers represents a long-term erosion of civil liberties, and brings us dangerously close to a police state. It's worth reflecting that the most insidious element of a police state, like Soviet Russia, is not the lack of checks on police power, but rather the undermining of normal human relationships that occurs when people realize they can get back at one another by turning their enemies in. Let's use a simple example to see why the Fourth Amendment is so important, before addressing the camera issue. Let's say a disgruntled former employee of yours calls the police and tells them you sell cocaine out of your house. The police get a warrant to search your house and find -- no cocaine. You don't deal cocaine; the story is a lie. Under the law before 1990, it would stop there. The police couldn't haul you in because, in the course of the search, they found your teenager's marijuana stash, or something funny in your financial records, or pirated software on your computer. Now, in theory at least, they can.
For better or worse, American society is moving in the direction of giving up many of its liberties in exchange for security. Public street cameras are a logical extension of this process, and it's hard to find a legal argument against their employment (even though many of us libertarians may consider them horribly intrusive.)
The argument could end there, but the storage of the images that you bring up is where it gets really interesting. The framers of the Constitution certainly never envisioned the possibility that what's in "plain sight," i.e. what is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, could be recorded, recontextualized, and turned into hard evidence. The real question posed by the cameras is not whether they lower crime rates (they don't) or whether the police should need a warrant to watch you that way (they won't)...the question is whether what's not being actively watched at any given moment can be rewound and reviewed; that is, whether the Past is always "in plain sight." Recontextualized is a key word here. Once recorded, the images are no longer "public space." Nor are they "in plain sight." Nor are they a true depiction of the context surrounding them (simple example: you toss a banana peel off-screen into a trash can, and get a $500 fine for littering, because the trash can isn't in the picture.) If the police can edit images of you into a sequence that might convince a jury you were up to no good, when in fact you were innocent, isn't that the same as going through your papers to try and trump up a charge? So the question for the 21st Century becomes, does our recorded image enjoy the same privacy rights as our personal effects? We may find out before long.
Posted by: Josh Strike at June 14, 2005 06:20 AMAmen, Josh.
Juries have always had the right to find the accused "not guilty" if they believed the law itself was unjust, even if the accused was in fact plainly guilty of breaking the law.
Nowadays, we have judges who have the nasty habit of instructing juries that they cannot judge the law, only the facts, and (thanks to our atrocious public schools) John Q. Juror has no idea that the judge is full of horse manure.
Couple this with what Josh wrote, and Presto! we have a tyranny of overzealous prosecutors, who are determined to find people guilty of anything and everything, because that's their job. (Highly-paid public "servants" have to justify their pay somehow.......)
