Lafayette is among the growing list of cities thinking about putting cameras in public places as a deterrent to crime and aid in crime solving. Those of us who worry about such things are increasingly seen as cranks. As even Fran Quigley of the Indiana ACLU notes:
. . . courts have consistently held that cameras taping acts in public places cannot be challenged because residents do not have an expectation of privacy in such settings.
"Obviously, it's a different story if cameras are placed where filming can occur in private homes," Quigley said.
But one step leads to another, and the next step is worth thinking about:
Although the SkySeer is not yet capable of spying into windows, some critics are uneasy about eyes in the sky monitoring daily life.
"A helicopter can be seen and heard and one can make behaviour choices based on that," said Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "Do we really want to live in a society where our backyard barbecues will be open to police scrutiny?"
And the police commander's remarks about why we shouldn't really worry about all this aren't exactly comforting:
Police say the concerns are unwarranted because everybody is already under surveillance.
"You shouldn't be worried about being spied on by your government," said Commander Heal. "These days you can't go anywhere without a camera watching you, whether you're in a grocery store or walking down the street."
Comments
It's interesting to note that on ANY given day in London...you will be on video approximately 325 times. And the people there are OK with that, apparently.
It also made it easier to nab the tube bomber.
So...when can we get them on the SOUTH side of Fort Wayne?????
I've got the locations already picked out!
;)
B.G.
Somebody said privacy would be the issue of the 21st century. Looks like he or she was right, regardless of what other concerns pop up.
If you put cameras where they can photograph private business and pass a law instructing them not to point where they shouldn't, it's only a matter of time before those who put the commune above the individual start finding reasons to allow government or law enforcement to secretly "re-task" those cameras, or upgrade them to have illegal capabilities that weren't there when the cameras were installed.
Satellites shoot mostly from overhead and photograph exteriors. It's not the same thing at all as cameras on the ground which can be placed in any location and rendered invisible to all but the rare expert.
We make illegal abuses of our privacy 100% easier if we desensitize ourselves to cameras in plain view wherever we go. Not because we have anything to fear, but because cameras don't record selectively once installed.
The digital archives would almost certainly be coveted as new sources of data mining for all kinds of unsavory interests, commercial, moral and criminal.
If this sounds far-fetched, imagine how long it would take for a bio-recognition search engine with access to the digital video archive to identify and collect images of interest on thousands of people before a human ever expended time or effort to evaluate the results. Imagine some disreputable or activist type selling access to confidential archives just as they now sell batches of confidential profiles and IDs.
We can't buy spam, spyware or phishing blockers for our daily movements, and if somebody invented a "Cam-Jam," our so-called public servants would probably make its possession a felony -- but grant permits to small classes of people who in their opinion are special or worthy of privileges.
If we tightly control the placement of cameras, they won't be in places where we would find expansions of their original mission unacceptable in a free society.
"We make illegal abuses of our privacy 100% easier if we desensitize ourselves to cameras in plain view wherever we go."
That's the scary part for me. As the law has been developing, the concept that is used is "expectation of privacy." Certainly we have that in our bedrooms (so far), but not at red lights, or at malls, etc. But the more we get used to being watched, the less expectation of privacy we have, which is then used against us to further expand the places where we don't expect privacy.