In Safety's Name, Technology Breaches Privacy

January 23, 2006 by Nicole A. Ozer, The Daily Journal

The recent revelation that the federal government has been listening in on our phone calls and reading our e-mails is yet another reminder of the dangers posed by the unbridled use of surveillance technology. The threat to our privacy is by no means limited to warrantless wiretapping.

Lately, cities in the San Francisco Bay Area have been busily installing video cameras on public streets to combat crime. But the reality is these high-tech surveillance measures are little more than high-priced BandAids. Indeed, rather than prevent or reduce crime, they simply shift it to a new location. This builds pressure to install more cameras in more locations.

In San Francisco, a city celebrated for its respect for privacy and civil liberties, the video surveillance project began last July when Mayor Gavin Newsom used drug forfeiture funds to install two video cameras in the Western Addition. By October, six more locations had been selected for cameras - two in the Mission District, two in Bayview-Hunter's Point, one in Bernal Heights and yet another in the Western Addition.

Perched atop utility poles 27-feet above the ground, these state-of-the-art video cameras have a 360-degree view and roll 24-hours a day. With their DVD-quality video and options for sound, they can zoom in close enough to read and record the book or legal brief you are carrying, the name of the doctor's office you are entering, or the face of the person you are talking to or kissing goodbye. Everything the camera sees can be stored on a hard drive or a central database in perpetuity.

Meanwhile in Oakland last October, City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente used an "innovative, private-public" funding approach to put up surveillance cameras in his district. In doing so, he circumvented the City Council, which had carefully analyzed and rejected street cameras as a crime prevention measure, first in 1997 and then again in 1999.

Oakland's surveillance cameras were purchased by the city and loaned indefinitely to merchants who agree to grant the police department overriding authority to manipulate the cameras and access the surveillance footage via an Internet site. Three of the five initial "pilot" cameras are already up and running.

De La Fuente's move marks a remarkable about-face. He voted against the cameras in 1999. According to an article in the San Francisco Examiner, he said that, rather than reducing crime, the cameras would simply move it to other parts of the city and that he would rather spend city funds on other, more proven crime-prevention initiatives.

"Installing a few or a few dozen surveillance cameras will not make us safe. It should also not be forgotten that the intrusive powers of the state are growing with each passing decade," he told the Examiner.

And in the Central Valley, between Modesto and Stockton, the small town of Ripon also plans to install 20 wireless public surveillance cameras in public parks and the downtown area. The city of Richmond is also considering a similar public surveillance system. Wireless surveillance footage would travel through an unlicensed portion of the radio spectrum that is firmly in the public domain, is often used by devices like wireless phones and baby monitors and can be easily intercepted. Just as one can use a scanner to hear what police are transmitting via their patrol car radios, anyone with a wireless-enabled computer can potentially hack into an insecure system and obtain the video footage for improper purposes.

If present trends continue, Californians might very well find themselves in the same position as the British, where there is one camera for every 13 people and citizens are photographed more than 300 times a day - at a cost of millions of dollars. But the results have been poor, according to Professor Martin Gill.

As lead researcher for a British Home Office study released in 2005, Gill found that, "[f]or the most part CCTV did not produce reductions in crime and it did not make people feel any safer."

Ultimately, research has found that it is not cameras but community policing programs that effectively prevent, reduce and solve crime. And it is community policing programs that neighborhood organizations such as the African American Community Police Relations Board have long been asking San Francisco to adequately fund. These programs make a real difference in our communities and respect fundamental civil rights.

However, if only cameras receive the little city funding available, the crime will continue unabated down the block, and there will be inevitable pressure to install ever more public surveillance cameras to keep up with the shifting targets. And it will not stop there. As technology advances, so will the privacy invasions.

It is not far-fetched to think that face recognition technology will soon be used to connect what the camera sees with digital pictures and dossiers about our personal lives. In fact, the Los Angeles Police Department has been testing cameras equipped with face recognition. While the government may not have digital photos of all of us now, this database will exist in the next two years if pressure from the states and from civil liberties groups is not successful in stopping implementation of the federal Real ID Act.

Rushed through Congress in the spring of 2005 as a little-known attachment to an Iraq and tsunami appropriations bill, the Real ID Act requires the creation of a de facto national identity card and national database of personal information by 2008. A state driver's license will not be accepted for boarding a plane, opening a bank account, or entering a federal facility, unless it complies with the new Department of Homeland Security standards for uniformity.

All drivers' licenses will include all of the personal information on the face of the license along with digital pictures in a common machine readable format, all of which will be linked through a shared database available to the 50 states and the federal government. Images from video surveillance cameras provide another link in the surveillance society chain.

Similarly, Radio Frequency Identification technology could also be easily coupled with the public surveillance cameras. Radio frequency ID tags, tiny computer chips that can be programmed with any information and then read at a distance by a reader without alerting the holder of the tag, is one of a handful of technologies being considered by Homeland Security as the common machine readable device in driver's licenses. Why not combine an such a reader with a video surveillance camera to find out more about the person being watched by the camera?

Video surveillance does more than imperil our privacy. Public surveillance cameras also create a new and easy tool for discriminatory targeting, voyeurism, stalking or blackmail. A sociological study of the British surveillance cameras has shown that the cameras are used to focus disproportionately on people of color, women, and those who look or act slightly differently.

Black people were up to two-and-a-half times more likely to be monitored and one in 10 women were monitored entirely for voyeuristic reasons. Just last April, a San Francisco police officer was suspended from the department for using surveillance cameras to ogle women at San Francisco International Airport. Once surveillance cameras are up, it is very hard to control how they are used or abused.

Video cameras only provide the illusion of preventing crime, and in the end, do nothing but lead us inexorably closer to George Orwell's world in "1984": "There was of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

As the nation debates the legality and ethics of President Bush's domestic spying program, it behooves us to challenge assertions that government-sponsored video surveillance is needed to keep us safe.

Nicole A. Ozer is Technology and Civil Liberties Policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.