Brookline's Fabulous Compromise

In the spring of 2010, the camera committee for Brookline finalized its report on the outlines and uses of the Brookline police cameras and their levels of effectiveness over the course of the little more than a year that they had been active. This report, measuring 59 pages in length, outlines not only the uses of the cameras, but also their post-compromise situation. This situation is defined as one where the cameras are to be active only between 10 PM every night and 6 AM each morning. While this is a serious limit on the former 24/7 policy the police had been employing, it does seem to still allow the cameras to be effective. However, the full purpose of this report was not to analyze the cameras, but more to outline their purposes and the guidelines for their use in Brookline. As noted in the report, the cameras are stationary Bosch Autodome 300 cameras. The use of sound is disabled for the cameras, however they can rotate around 360 degrees and have a 28x zoom capacity. In addition, the committee defines that the cameras are not usually actively monitored, but rather that the footage is stored at 30 minute segments for 14 days, unless the footage is required in an ongoing investigation. To actively monitor the cameras, one must obtain written permission of the chief of police, who has executive control over them. A final technical aspect to the cameras is that they boast no face-recognition software, and there are no plans to install any in the future.
One troubling thing about the cameras that was listed however concerned the sharing of the footage. As it is reported, nine other suburbs of Boston have constant access to the footage displayed by the cameras, as does the city of Boston on certain occasions. In fact, the footage is widely shared on a microwave network between the other communities, making the footage quite public in its own right. In addition, the police chief himself has commented saying that viewing of the footage by police departments other than Brookline's is "common." This presents quite a concern for those who advocate privacy as assured by the first amendment, though the report also covers that maintaining that (as of spring 2010) the cameras had not been officially reported to have infringed on first amendment rights. Finally, it should be noted that as of the time of this report, 99 requests to view the footage had been reported, and 79 of the requests had proved useful in assisting with policing. However, two things worthy of noting are that the requests are not all individual incidents, and that the cameras themselves are stated to have the primary purpose of simply assisting in the solving of crime, and do not boast attempting to prevent it. With this, one has to wonder whether or not the camera's are really living up to their potential, but the statistics given seem to indicate that they do.

A Lagging Round Up: The People, The Law and Conclusions

Well it's certainly been a long time since I've written one of these, but the information that I've gathered in the meantime should more than make up for it. However, for this post I'm going to simply focus on the end of David Lyon's book (which I've previously been commenting on), and the conclusions he draws as he wraps up the growing concept of a surveillance society. In the last 120 or so pages of his book, Mr. Lyon begins to focus not only in on the effect that the growing surveillance society has on the public (and their reactions to it), but also spends some time critiquing and analyzing the various laws that are (and are not) in place to help protect us and our own privacy. Now starting with the impact on the citizens of the world and the general reaction to the concept of modern surveillance, Lyon admits that there lies one major difference in people when it comes to perceptions of surveillance and that difference lies mostly in the status of these individuals. For instance, he cites both Chairman Mao of Japan and Joseph Stalin of Russia as men who in their time advocated surveillance and the inclusion of privacy on a public scale as ways to balance and regulate the young countries both of them were leading. Noting other former world leaders, Lyon explores the historical growth of surveillance from simply keeping tabs to the new concept of "Big Brother" and its relevance in modern society. But the Chairman Mao's of the world are not the majority. As one statistic in Lyon's book notes, 70% of individuals admitted that they wanted to hold on to their privacy very dearly and would much prefer a society in which the government asked them each time before gathering data on them. In addition, people believed almost unanimously that the governments of the world should help regulate and stop the free sharing of information between corporations. Now this ties back into earlier information that Lyon explores into that the groups who actually profit the most from data collection and information on individuals are large corporations or companies. True, there is often sharing that also goes on between governments and corporations (especially in a much more recent sense with applications such as Facebook helping to share information or even the creation of camera networks in cities encompassing both the private and public systems of surveillance). However the fact that information is now more easily gathered and shared than ever is a scary thought. An article in a state paper a few weeks ago noted a girl who at age 12 experienced a traumatic sexual experience, and the photos taken of the event were still pursuing her to the present day.

The question to ask in these scenarios however is the subject of Lyon's next exploration. Looking into the laws that govern surveillance, Lyon notes only one real conclusion. The laws protecting privacy and limiting information gathering and sharing in the US and abroad have one thing in common, they're all weak. Exploring laws in countries such as Australia, the US, and Canada, Lyon shows that there are relatively few laws on the books that protect against  corporations sharing of information. Now whether or not this is a planned set of actions in order to also protect the government's right to share information I can't say, though I wouldn't be surprised. The essential problem with this however is that, while the sharing of information can be harmful when it's limited to data and names, when you start to mix in more modern technologies such as facial matching and cross-records searches of a person's entire life, their life and who they've always been comes to take over the process. Essentially, their life becomes the property of the government, and as Lyon notes several times, privacy in this sense becomes property.

But what general conclusions does Lyon come to draw? Firstly he states that it is undeniable that the field, range, and capacity of surveillance is expanding exponentially with every year. There is more that can be recorded each year, and with the advancement of technology there are every day more ways to gather it. This also leads into his second conclusion, which is that technology is making the ability to watch and enable a "Big Brother" society a far more realizable and possible future. Technology is increasing the range of surveillance, and maximizing it's capacity 10-fold. However, it is his final conclusion that is possibly the most significant. Thirdly, Lyon concludes, is that the sharing of information is fundamentally changing the way people interact. People are becoming data cards, nothing more than the information they make available to everyone. Though Lyon wrote this in 1994, this holds more truth now than anything else. Between Facebook, social dating sites, or even online colleges and application, people are now more than ever just a collection of words on a computer. Disregarding the social connotations of this, what can we say it says about privacy? In my opinion it makes privacy a very internal thing, and only the information we choose not to share at this point, is what can be considered private. Anything else in this day and age, well that may as well be public property.

The World's Tabs and The Rise of Technology

 For much of his book David Lyon has explored both the history and general effect of the growth of surveillance. However in his chapter "The Surveillance State: Keeping Tabs on You" he begins to explore the how prevalent these systems literally are in our society and in related ones. He starts the chapter by noting a system in Canada where the central government (in the 1990's) operated a total of 2,20 databases with about twenty files per person, and where 10% of the population's names were contained on the police computer. The shocking thing to imagine is if these were the levels in the 1990's, what could have the evolution of technology past that have done. Fortunately, as Lyon notes later, American systems are more likely to rely on existing systems such as Social Security instead of developing all new systems to tackle the growing amount of information available. However, the vast majority of this information in this chapter was centered around systems developing in other countries. For instance, a single network in Thailand that, in 2006, gathered personal information on 65 million Thai citizens. In addition, the chapter also contains a lot of information on British systems, such as the the practice of the "whole person concept," which means that information on citizens would be available to a variety of systems and organizations in Britain. A third foreign example was the time taken to go into the Canadian carded health care system. In Canada, the Health Number system where each citizen has a health number printed on a card that identified their type of health care and other personal information. While this system advocated more privacy and faster service, there were  concerns, legitimately expressed, over the potential for abuse of the more integrated personal health information system. This final example also noted the value of "smartcards" in a surveillance capacity. Lyon concludes the chapter by raising the question of whether or not this increased surveillance capacity truly promotes totalitarianism as the technology helping it rises or not.

Lyon's next chapter focuses more in on what I'm truly interested in in the terms of surveillance society and the rise of surveillance technology. In this chapter, Lyon delves into the aspect policing plays into information gathering and sways away from the systems that hold information in terms of the central government. To start, Lyon explores what he calls "the single most significant item" about how individuals are identified in terms of UPI's (universal personal identifiers), which are used to pinpoint individuals more easily. The context of UPI's makes it easier to learn about suspect individuals that the government requires information on, and can make tracking down certain individuals much easier by holding information about residence, place of employment, or even just a zipcode. Later, Lyon examines the use of information and registration in certain criminal cases. For example, he notes the American National Auto Theft Bureau, and how these organizations can be used to help locate cars by registration or even license plate number. However, the potential for abuse still lingers about these systems, and how integrated these systems seem to be. However, the key chunk of this section of Lyon's book lies in his statement that "All the advanced societies possess large-scale computer systems for policing." For instance, the National Crime Information Center (run by the FBI) had, in 1994, records on seventeen million people, and handled a million transactions every day. Another example would be the British Police National Computer, which was meant to hold vehicle records, but now holds fifteen million records including fingerprints, convictions, and wanted or missing persons. However, Lyon also notes that reaction to these events has not always been positive, noting unrest that occurred in Liverpool and London over "community policing." As a conclusion, Lyon goes into worldwide policing, such as the link between Britain's General Communications Headquarters and the NSA. Finally, in a note I found very interesting, Lyon makes note of the "video vigilantes" phenomenon where citizens with cameras often videotape police brutality or crimes and in doing so help policing overall, or, in other cases, rebel against the growing aspect of social control by government systems and national policing systems.

Better Late than Never, Better Private than Panopticon

It's been a long week and though that serves as no excuse for this post being days late, it is nice to get it out on this page as I describe in further detail my next foray into the world described in The Electronic Eye. David Lyon left the reader at the end of the first 50 pages of this book with a description of surveillance growth over history. Now, in his chapter entitled "From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon, he describes the differences from feeling like "Big Brother is watching you" to the reality of how much social control comes with the gathering of data, the loss of privacy, and the transparency of individuals in society. Forwarding his analysis of data gathering he sites a prison plan from Britain in the 1790's. This prison was entitles the Panopticon penitentiary and was designed to be a form of prison rooting itself in a design that made all prisoners visible to the guards, but the guards invisible to the inmates, giving them the specific sense that, as Lyon puts it, like God, there are a set of invisible eyes watching them. In describing this, Lyon goes on to reveal that surveillance can be best described as the "accumulation of coded information" and that it refers to the "direct monitoring of subordinates within the capitalist workplace," usually without those subordinates knowing someone is watching their every move. But as Lyon's reveals, everywhere from the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) to the FBI and CIA are constantly gathering data on us whether we are suspect or not. This information can be harmless, such as driver's liscences and policitcal information, but as Lyon says, it does enclose us in a type of "electronic Panopticon." He also makes references in this chapter to George Orwell's book 1984, which describes a dystopia, a society in which, as the term goes, "Big Brother is always watching." And Lyon's key point here is that as technology increases, these metaphors for contemporary surveillance, though not descriptive of the entire problem, become more and more accurate.

Peering into The Electronic Eye

I decided to start my research into the abuse and growth of public surveillance with a book entitled The Electronic Eye, by David Lyon. Despite being written in 1994, and therefore not including some of the more recent surveillance developments, so far the book seems to have a good, rounded view of surveillance in the modern age and its implications for social privacy. Lyon begins his book with a look into the different ways in which we are impacted by surveillance on a daily basis, noting both credit information, social security numbers, the use of driver's licenses and caller ID, and several other types of data collection as ways that personal information is no longer private. He begins, in the start of this book, to explore the implications of having all personal data stored on a computer somewhere, and how easily that information can be shared and required for certain modern actions. For example, he sites his own experience moving to Canada and starting a life as a mess of data transactions and personal forms. In addition, he explores how even data given to a someone for buying a present can, by the relative sharing of that information in the private sector, lead that personal information to be recorded by the government. In short, he explores his "surveillance society" as a growing issue world wide with the growth of computers and digital technology. As two fginal notes, he mentions that the UN, in 1948, promised that "no one shall be subject to arbitrary interference in his privacy, home or correspondence." What Lyon notes and goes into is that the definition of what is "arbitrary" has been slowly changing as the definitions of what is "private" and what is "public have changed, and continue to change. In the following section, Lyon begins to explore what has led up to this modern status, and how the history of privacy legislature and practice has led us to this new "surveillance society." Later I believe he will connect this to what the implications are for the future, and what context the past should be taken in, and that's what I will be interested to see in his next segment as he continues to explore the modern publication of our own privacy.

Opening up our "Surveillance Society"

Modern technology has all but destroyed the concept of privacy in a modern society. From police cameras, to data collection, to sharing of personal data within private corporations, it almost seems like no personal information is, well, personal anymore given how much it gets spread around. Even corporations like Facebook maintain that they do give out your private information to other companies, such as advertising firms, schools, or possible jobs you might be searching for. In other words, it's hard to say these days what is private or not anymore, and to what extend privacy in the modern world should be protected, and how much it is currently being infringed upon. However, over the course of the next month or so I will be doing a significant amount of research into this aspect, with a central focus into Boston's own issues with it, though I will be exploring the larger concepts as well. My goal will be to look into the levels of information gathering that occur without our knowledge from day to day, what laws are currently in place to help protect us, and what we should be doing should our personal privacy turn out to be too public. There are certain moral rights everyone should have, and in certain ways modern society, sometimes called, in this context, surveillance society, blurs these expectations. I don't yet know enough to make a judgment about what to do about this issue, but as I learn more I will come to a better understanding of our own privacy, and how we can help protect it from abuse in this technologically changing world.