Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of the New Republic, is the author of “The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age.”
After every thwarted terrorist attack, there are predictable calls for more surveillance cameras. Before the failed Times Square bombing attempt, the N.Y.P.D. got a $24 million Homeland Security grant to install a security network in Midtown with surveillance cameras, chemical sensors, and license plate readers. Despite evidence that such a system wouldn’t have prevented last Saturday’s attack, many will demand an even more elaborate surveillance network as a result. But all the best empirical research suggests that it will be a waste of money.
Consider how Google, Facebook and other Web services could be harnessed to surveillance cameras to monitor everyone’s movements.
Cameras sometimes play a supporting role in identifying the perpetrators after an attack has occurred. But in all the major terrorist attacks since 9/11, including the London bombings, the perpetrators would have been identified without the cameras. In the Times Square case, there was so much forensic evidence at the crime scene that the police were able to identify the former owner of the Pathfinder through the vehicle identification number, leading to the arrest of the suspect on Monday night without necessarily relying on
the footage from more than 80 surveillance cameras.
If there are already so many surveillance cameras in midtown and lower Manhattan -– more than 4,000 below 14th Street, according to one count why should anyone care about a few more? Even if they’re a placebo that makes us feel safer without actually making us safer, what’s the harm?
Although the harms were largely hypothetical when I began writing about surveillance cameras in the Britain and the U.S. right after 9/11 they are about to become much more tangible.
Google, Facebook and other Internet services could be asked to carry out Web-based facial recognition technologies that will make it possible for anyone to snap a cellphone picture of a stranger on the street, plug the picture into Google, and produce tagged and untagged pictures of the person across the Web, challenging our expectations of anonymity in public as camera footage proliferates.
That challenge will become even more acute over the next decades, as Google and Facebook confront pressure to post live feeds from all public and private surveillance cameras online. As the surveillance network in world capitals becomes ubiquitous, it will be possible to click on a picture of me in Midtown, back click on me to see where I came from, forward click to see where I’m going, making possible 24/7 surveillance of everyone in the system. When confronted with this not-so-hypothetical scenario, most people balk. And to accept 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance in exchange for virtually non-existent security benefits seems like a bad bargain, by any sane cost-benefit analysis.
So what’s the solution? More cops are always useful. Human intelligence is invaluable, and it’s important to keep citizens on the side of the police so they’re willing, like the Times square street vendors, both disabled Vietnam vets, to go out of their way to help. The arrest of the owner of the explosive-packed S.U.V. shortly before midnight on Monday demonstrated again that security depends on investigative work, which is not about installing more cameras.
Although the harms were largely hypothetical when I began writing about surveillance cameras in the Britain and the U.S. right after 9/11 they are about to become much more tangible.
Google, Facebook and other Internet services could be asked to carry out Web-based facial recognition technologies that will make it possible for anyone to snap a cellphone picture of a stranger on the street, plug the picture into Google, and produce tagged and untagged pictures of the person across the Web, challenging our expectations of anonymity in public as camera footage proliferates.
That challenge will become even more acute over the next decades, as Google and Facebook confront pressure to post live feeds from all public and private surveillance cameras online. As the surveillance network in world capitals becomes ubiquitous, it will be possible to click on a picture of me in Midtown, back click on me to see where I came from, forward click to see where I’m going, making possible 24/7 surveillance of everyone in the system. When confronted with this not-so-hypothetical scenario, most people balk. And to accept 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance in exchange for virtually non-existent security benefits seems like a bad bargain, by any sane cost-benefit analysis.
So what’s the solution? More cops are always useful. Human intelligence is invaluable, and it’s important to keep citizens on the side of the police so they’re willing, like the Times square street vendors, both disabled Vietnam vets, to go out of their way to help. The arrest of the owner of the explosive-packed S.U.V. shortly before midnight on Monday demonstrated again that security depends on investigative work, which is not about installing more cameras.
0 comments
Post a Comment