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The Path of Least Surveillance
prostoalex writes: "Business Week draws attention to the growth of monitoring and surveillance systems in modern society. Only in Manhattan, as article claims, there are at least 10,000 cameras. Londoners, at the same time, are caught on tape 300 times per day. Is it a necessary measure of pre-caution, or, as Marge Simpson put it, "as long as everybody is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done"?"
It's a complex issue, but my overall thoughts on the matter - note this isn't neccesarily what's actually legal today, but what I feel is "right".
Anyone (a private citizen, a corporation, or a government agency) should be allowed to surveil public places. If I want to wear a bodycam walking all over the public parts of town, it's my business. Same goes for security cams watching streets/sidewalks near a business, and the same goes for government run cams. After all, you have no expectation of privacy in public anyways.
Publication/Sale/Transferrance of camera footage shot by these cameras should be forbidden without the permission of everyone in every frame. If you can't track them all down, and get their consent, you can't publish it raw. You can get away with it by blurring out any unknowns or non-consenters with a good blurring algorithm (I highly suspect some current forms of blurring seen on police tv programs can be undone by averaging the errors over time, but it's just a suspicion). I think this should include celebrities, contrary to current legal opinion.
Of course, in the case of the government, we really can't them from doing what they want with the images. Luckily on a broad scale they probably couldn't track us all, simply too much data. However, they could easily actively track for a "top 100 list" of people that they want to find and/or track. What I'd like to see is that any active wide-area face/person tracking (e.g. watching for a list of specific terrorists' faces on all cams in Manhattan for period of time) should require some sort of warrant or court order that relies on some evidence or at least reasonable suspicion - and no, "Ashcroft says so" doesn't meet that requirement for me.
11*43+456^2
Yeah, when you think of surveillance, what do you think of? 1984. We're all being watched, right? Except us in the States are still protected by our Bill of Rights (unless you are a libretarian, then they *are* out to get you).
But I was pondering this kind of stuff just a few days ago when I learned that all 48 stores that are owned by my employers company will have their cameras linked together by the internet. So supposedly the owner could punch in a number, and see whatever is happening in that store at a time.
What concerned me was how centralized this system seemed. It was one thing when each store kept their own security tapes which were rotated every few days, which was largely controlled by our local manager. It was another when people I don't even know can spy in on me anytime they want.
So I really don't know what to think of this. It almost seems like something they have every right to do. But who is preventing them from outsourcing the monitoring job to another company? Next thing you know, all workers in the State are being monitiored by the same people.
Just as long as they don't install a speaker system as well.
I can imagine suddenly hearing what sounds like the Voice of God bellowing "You are sitting on the counter." I look around. "Get off the counter and get back to work."