From business community use of RFI
and CCTV in malls and on public streets, to community law enforcement use of
drones for surveillance, to alleged NSA abuse of the 4th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution through its internet cyber-spying, to use of racial
and ethnic profiling by both homeland security and large urban police
departments there has arisen a political mindset that fully ascribes to
security for all at the cost of personal liberty for none. While we in America
think this is a cause for current concern, the Orwellian surveillance present
in Great Britain gives us a glimpse of the future that might very well lie
before us. This is surely a topic that
will be with us for many months and years to come; so, today I try to take a
brief look at public surveillance its growth and implications.
According to the technology section
of the British publication, “The
Telegraph” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveillance-camera-for-every-11-people-in-Britain-says-CCTV-survey.html)
, there are between 5 and 6 million
Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras already installed in Britain or
roughly one camera for every 11-14 people in that nation! In France, CCTV is used by the city of Nice
to issue parking tickets (http://singularityhub.com/2010/10/18/surprise-cctv-cameras-in-france-used-to-issue-parking-tickets/). Interestingly, it is the Germans who are the
slow adopters of surveillance systems among the European community. This appears to be partially because of the
legacy of Gestapo tactics used during the time of Adolf Hitler combined with
the oppression of the former East Germany by the Soviet Union following the end
of World War II.
In the United States, the World Trade
Center (NYC) and, more recently, the attacks during the Boston Marathon upon
unsuspecting populations has given rise to a public demand for greater safety
in public forums, governmental willingness to direct a large percentage of
public tax dollars to surveillance efforts and ever more sophisticated
technologies to perform biometric, voice, video and analytical chemical
surveillance. Increasing, we wear
clothes, use personal products and carry credit cards that have imbedded RFI
tags. We get into our cars that have
position locater devices installed as part of the car’s integral components and
speak on our cell phones that also have GPS capability. As we step into a down town street that has
both public and private video surveillance cameras we stop to take a picture of
a friend and note that the camera mode of the cell phone we are using gives the
exact location that the picture has been taken.
Interestingly, the national public outcry over Homeland Security use of
full body scanners has been long forgotten and lost in the midst of all of the
other intrusions into and restrictions on personal liberties.
The truth is that, Americans are
becoming ever more comfortable and accepting of this public awareness of our
movements and personal actions.
According to an April 2013 British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) news
story(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22274770)
, “While the US never embraced state-sponsored CCTV the way the UK has, it has
nevertheless used surveillance as a national security and law-enforcement
measure for years.” And, while the US effort has been a curious mix of private
and public surveillance strategies, the events of September 2001 in New York
and April of 2013 in Boston, with the resultant massive increase in funding for
both the NSA and Homeland Security were game changers. As stated by Jay
Stanley, a police analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, in the BBC
story, the current trend “…is the introduction of the police-run cameras”. The article goes on to give the view of Ray
Kelly, Chief of the NYC Police Department, as he stated on MSNBC Television: “The people who
complain about it, I would say, are a relatively small number of folks, because
the genie is out of the bottle. People
realize that everywhere you go now, your picture is taken." But the reality is that those who create the
algorithms to select what information is worthy of viewing inevitably enter
into the world of “profiling” which, in its natural progression results in the
loss of liberty. And what isn’t said in the article or by Ray Kelly is that
virtually every email, every text message and every photograph you communicate
is also capable of being “watched”.
Of
course, we are now talking about what is referred to as “social media”, where
it has become plainly obvious that the world, in general, and America, in
specific, is becoming desensitized to the potential for misuse of personal
information. Facebook is only one of several popular modes
of social media that include Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and others. Even ISPs and portals for the sending of text
and email messages through communication hosts such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile
are subject to scrutiny. All collect voluminous amounts of personal and metric
data on individual users. And, while there are supposed safeguards to prevent
misuse of all of the data, opinions and pictures that we ourselves upload onto
social media sites, the implications of the recent disclosures made through
articles in the British publication The Guardian based on information
obtained as a NSA contractor by Eric Snowden cannot lead us to any other
conclusion than that the national government holds the ultimate trump cards and
could, on pretext of stopping a terroristic act, seize whatever information it
wished from whomever it wanted, to be used in whatever way it wanted.
So,
what is the “average citizen” to do? We cannot escape Moore’s Law and its
corollaries and our dependence upon ever sophisticated technology does require
new rules for both access and oversight. With barbarians showing themselves at the borders
of our financial, energy, political, military and transportation systems we are
hard pressed to hear the words of Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding
fathers, who stated: “Those who would give up essential
liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety.” We desperately need our elected representatives to be more forthright
in their disclosures of what will and will not be safeguards for personal
liberties in our increasingly complex internet world lest we lose both our
security and our liberties.
