Techie Trepidation - Part 3

Video Surveillance

Those little black plastic domes are turning up in more proliferate numbers every day, in places that you would expect, and places you wouldn't - at least not in the numbers and level of sophistication that we have been seeing in some parts of our fair city.

Take a recent visit to the friendly neighborhood grocer, for instance. Granted, the proprietor has the right to protect his assets and discourage loss by theft, and in an orderly society that lives by the rule of law we should be generally accepting of a necessary amount of monitoring of customer activities on private property.

The photo to the right shows the check-out area of a local grocery store. Between the large and smaller camera housings in the ceiling, I counted 16 camera housings in this frame alone. There are several others strategically placed over the aisles and other places, including the parking lot.

Larger stores such as Target and Wal-Mart offer an even more intensive arrangement of black domes; look at the ceiling for a while next time you're in a 'big box' outlet. It's pretty impressive, but to exactly what end? How many cameras are truly necessary? How many of the housings actually contain cameras, and how many are just a deterrent (leave an empty housing in the paper towel aisle and put 10 cameras over the Video Game section)?
What is done with the recordings, and how long are they kept? What are the operators looking for, and how do they obtain it?

As possibly un-exciting as this may be to many of you, you'd be surprised at the apparent lack of monitoring capabilities in places where you might expect to see it.
Witness this picture of the Food Court at Mesa Mall, taken this past weekend. A more detailed look revealed some emergency lighting, heat detectors and sprinkler heads, but there doesn't appear to be a single camera housing across the entire length of what can be a very crowded public gathering area.

Perhaps this is the converse of the grocery store theory in operation; the less hard evidence that the mall operator has in their possession, the better it can defend itself against litigation for all manner of things that happen in the mall. True, you might not get the guy running from a clothing store with an armful of merchandise, but you also won't get the overzealous mall cop tackling him, either.

The more insidious nature of this type of surveillance was expressed by Barry Steinhardt on the ACLU Blog a couple of weeks ago. He did such a fine job that I have re-printed the entire post below. While it is unknown what steps the Obama administration will take to assure that this type of monitoring is not as intrusive in public areas as it appears to be in private ones, there is still a need for diligence, caution, and respect for the rights of the law-abiding individual.

Have a good day.
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You Are Being Watched!

Barry Steinhardt, ACLU Technology & Liberty Program
January 12, 2009

You are being watched! Once that might have just been the ravings of a paranoid, but increasingly it’s all too true. More and more of the public spaces in America are being plastered by video surveillance cameras — and increasingly, the “they” behind those cameras is not a disconnected collection of shopkeepers and building security guards, but the government itself. One of the big trends that we are seeing in the past few years is video surveillance that is 1) run by the government and 2) made up of a network of cameras, centrally controlled.

And the images captured by those cameras are no longer spinning away harmlessly on old, recycled VHS cassettes. Today they are digital. They can be stored, archived, and indexed on today’s nearly limitless hard drives.

The bottom line: we’re quickly moving into an entirely new era. I get calls from reporters all the time asking, “how many video cameras are there in America?” or “How often is the average American filmed by cameras?” or “How many cities are building government camera systems?” I’ve never been able to supply precise answers to these questions, and usually suggest they try calling camera industry sources. We may never know how many private cameras are out there, but governments must, at least, reveal when they are building a system. So we’ve decided to build a web site to at least track how many of these new government-run surveillance systems are being deployed. The site, called www.youarebeingwatched.us, will serve as an information clearinghouse to track the deployment of those kinds of systems in the U.S.

Among the most serious new systems we’re seeing are those in Manhattan and Chicago. Police authorities in New York City announced in July 2007 that they were planning to create a London-style “Ring of Steel” network of pervasive surveillance in downtown Manhattan, which will include cameras trained on cars and license plates tracking all vehicles, as well as thousands of other public and private surveillance cameras, and a central location from which they are monitored by police. The cameras may well be paired with face recognition technology in attempt to identify not only cars, but the occupants. Chicago, meanwhile, which has been pouring money into its own camera system, recently announced the installation of automated image analysis software into its extensive camera system.

The entire paradigm of video surveillance in the United States has shifted. We have moved from periodic installation of hard-to-search analog video cameras to the vision of a pervasive, unified system that uses a variety of technologies to track individuals and their movements. These systems reflect the power of the convergence of technologies. By combining cameras, computerized image analysis, RFID sensors, and down the road potentially other technologies such as GPS, these systems show how new surveillance technologies are becoming far more powerful in combination than in isolation. The “Ring of Steel” vision threaten to become the perfect storm of always-on, pervasive government surveillance.

A lot of this new video surveillance activity is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is distributing grants grants to localities for that purpose. In effect, DHS is allowing local police to circumvent the local democratic and budgetmaking process and serving as an enabler for such departments when they wish to waste resources (including police officers’ time) on surveillance systems.

Our new site includes a flash map of the United States showing the location of cities that have installed municipal surveillance cameras, a compendium of press clips and other information about camera deployments, links to studies on the effectiveness of surveillance cameras and other information about the issue, and a “take action” function that allows you to send a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security on this issue.

It may take time for the harm and waste of these camera systems to become apparent to the American people. Meanwhile, we are at least tracking what’s going on.