Living Under Surveillance

Written By: Diogenes
Date: 2007-10-28 13:16:14
<a href="/article/95544822-living-under-surveillance">Article Link</a>

The UK is now the world’s most watched country, having upwards of five million closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras keeping a watchful eye on the public, with the average citizen being caught on camera around 300 times per day.

Upwards of 1.5 million automobiles can now be tracked and located anywhere in the United States — or in fact anywhere on Earth — using OnStar, General Motor’s onboard car-to-mobile-phone-network communications system.
Telecom giant AT&T has allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to set up what could only be called a “spy room” on AT&T property to make routine monitoring of phone calls easier.

Marijuana farmers in Wisconsin now must fear not only conventional law enforcement methods, but also the Internet. Satellite images from Google Earth — yes that Google Earth — have been used to locate farms and arrest farmers.

The trend of one-to-one marketing has driven businesses to be more aggressive in both discovering and remembering facts about their customers. Firms like Donnelly Marketing, which keeps dossiers on over 90 percent of American households, collect and manage massive files regarding each family’s preferences in everything from pets to politics.

Face-recognition software was successfully tested during Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa, Florida, with approximately 100,000 faces being scanned and identified. (Several law-breakers — mostly ticket scalpers — were noticed, but no arrests were made, since it was just a “dry run”!)

The FBI, apparently unsatisfied with their success using data mining, is issuing so many National Security Letters (NSLs) — administrative subpoenas that require no probable cause while simultaneously precluding the recipient from ever disclosing that the letter was issued — that they plan to automate the process of tracking them.

Clearly this presents a challenge to a free society. That challenge stems from the imbalance in power between the state and the people where surveillance is concerned. That imbalance must be addressed if freedom is to be maintained.

Conflicting Views
The odds are pretty good that most people, when asked what that term means, would think of some image from the Will Smith movie, Enemy of the State, in which an innocent man is pursued relentlessly by a federal security apparatus employing the latest high-tech surveillance gadgetry. Many would agree, also, with the movie’s tagline, “It’s not paranoia if they really are after you.”

It does seem these days that “they” really are after “us.” The question is not whether or not a surveillance society will occur, particularly in Western societies like the United States and the United Kingdom. That horse is out of sight already. The question is more what the unavoidable ubiquity of surveillance will mean to the individual and the collective. The question is how society should deal — how society will deal — with routine, widespread, nearly constant surveillance, not just by government but by private entities as well, now that surveillance technology is quite clearly not only common but also here to stay.

But how much surveillance is too much? Such questions amount to quibbling over price. No one can prevent the proliferation of surveillance tech, and no one can preclude “bad people,” including some agents of the State, from also having it. That much is certain. Can freedom and privacy coexist with the surveillance society? Absolutely. However, one cannot determine the proper amount of surveillance by the government if one has already ceded the entire decision to that government.

Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?
So far, Americans seem to favor surveillance over privacy. For example, a recent survey by ABC News found that most Americans favor increased use of police surveillance cameras to “fight crime.” This, despite the fact that precious little data illustrates that cameras do anything to reduce crime. Indeed, despite the lack of real security benefits, publication of a single story illustrating that a heinous killer was caught via video can justify almost any infringement upon the privacy of ordinary citizens.

Security expert Bruce Schneier calls this effect, within the realm of surveillance psychology, the “availability heuristic.” Most people would rather all their deepest secrets be posted on the Internet tomorrow than have a psychopathic serial killer escape capture today, assuming that’s the trade-off. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Today’s “I’ve got nothing to hide” can turn into tomorrow’s “but I didn’t know that was against the law!” That’s particularly the case when a government moves in the direction of imposing more and more laws and regulations on its citizens — denying the right to keep and bear arms, for instance.

While the bulk of the American public seems convinced that more surveillance is a good thing, both for safety and convenience, the technorati are not as uniform in their view. Schneier thinks legislation is the only methodology for curtailing, or at least somewhat stemming, the advance of surveillance and the corresponding loss of privacy. In a recent blog entry he says:

We’re never going to stop the march of technology, but we can enact legislation to protect our privacy: comprehensive laws regulating what can be done with personal information about us, and more privacy protection from the police. Today, personal information about you is not yours; it’s owned by the collector. There are laws protecting specific pieces of personal data — videotape rental records, health care information — but nothing like the broad privacy protection laws you find in European countries. That’s really the only solution; leaving the market to sort this out will result in even more invasive wholesale surveillance.

It is ironic that Schneier speaks of the protection available in European countries, given the number of times per day that a typical citizen of the UK is caught on camera. Another person worried about increased surveillance is author Naomi Wolfe. According to Wolfe’s The End of America, the United States is well on its way to becoming a fascist empire due to the fact that creating a surveillance society is one of the “Ten Steps to Fascism.” The Bush administration claims to have a legitimate reason for massive privacy infringement: protecting the U.S. public from the ever-present specter of terrorism, but are its arguments legitimate?

<a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/node/5993/print">http://www.thenewamerican.com/node/5993/print</a>

[Proofreader’s note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on October 29, 2007]

An interesting opinion on surveillance technologies, coming from deep America and its watching civilian militia. The conclusion gave me a creepy feeling of thugs, a militarized state and armed civilians, all hands on the holster ready for some sort of MadMax last stand. If this is what the New American is about, we may be in a for a showdown. Like a Larson comic, it would seem Americans are exchanging the mythical wild far west for the surreal far side of things. How's that for a party ! --- « Il y a une belle, une terrible rationalité dans la décision d'être libre. » - Gérard Bergeron

This warning must be heeded, and won't

"The imbalance in power can only be maintained or exacerbated if two things happen. One, if we allow those who rule us to take away the instruments by which our freedom can be maintained. Two, if we forget that we must require both responsibility and accountability of anyone who purports to protect us. Your safety and security has always been, and will always be, your responsibility. Let’s make sure we don’t forget that.

And for heaven’s sake, let’s keep watching the watchers. If we fail to do so, all the checks and balances built into the system — from the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures to habeas corpus — will ultimately be totally lost along with freedom."

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"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."

William Blake