IP: NYT: Video Surveillance in the UK

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2001 20:26:54 -0700
> From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>
>
>
> This is the best piece of terrorism and pervasive surveillance
> journalism I've ever seen -- because it's true.  Bruce Schneier
> pointed it out to me.  -- John
>
> The New York Times, October 7, 2001
> BEING WATCHED
> A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
> By JEFFREY ROSEN
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07SURVEILLANCE.html
>
> A week after the attacks of Sept. 11, as the value of most American
> stocks plummeted, a few companies, with products particularly well
> suited for a new and anxious age, soared in value. One of the
> fastest growing stocks was Visionics, whose price more than tripled.
> The New Jersey company is an industry leader in the fledgling
> science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning
> and quantifying their unique physical characteristics -- their
> facial structures, for example, or their retinal patterns. Visionics
> manufactures a face-recognition technology called FaceIt, which
> creates identification codes for individuals based on 80 unique
> aspects of their facial structures, like the width of the nose and
> the location of the temples. FaceIt can instantly compare an image
> of any individual's face with a database of the faces of suspected
> terrorists, or anyone else.
>
> Visionics was quick to understand that the terrorist attacks
> represented not only a tragedy but also a business opportunity. On
> the afternoon of Sept. 11, the company sent out an e-mail message to
> reporters, announcing that its founder and C.E.O., Joseph Atick,
> ''has been speaking worldwide about the need for biometric systems
> to catch known terrorists and wanted criminals.'' On Sept. 20, Atick
> testified before a special government committee appointed by the
> secretary of transportation, Norman Mineta. Atick's message -- that
> security in airports and embassies could be improved using
> face-recognition technology as part of a comprehensive national
> surveillance plan that he called Operation Noble Shield -- was
> greeted enthusiastically by members of the committee, which seemed
> ready to endorse his recommendations. ''In the war against
> terrorism, especially when it comes to the homeland defense,'' Atick
> told me, describing his testimony, ''the cornerstone of this is
> going to be our ability to identify the enemy before he or she
> enters into areas where public safety could be at risk.'
>
> Atick proposes to wire up Reagan National Airport in Washington and
> other vulnerable airports throughout the country with more than 300
> cameras each. Cameras would scan the faces of passengers standing in
> line, and biometric technology would be used to analyze their faces
> and make sure they are not on an international terrorist ''watch
> list.'' More cameras unobtrusively installed throughout the airport
> could identify passengers as they walk through metal detectors and
> public areas. And a final scan could ensure that no suspected
> terrorist boards a plane. ''We have created a biometric network
> platform that turns every camera into a Web browser submitting
> images to a database in Washington, querying for matches,'' Atick
> said. ''If a match occurs, it will set off an alarm in Washington,
> and someone will make a decision to wire the image to marshals at
> the airport.''
>
> Of course, protecting airports is only one aspect of homeland
> security: a terrorist could be lurking on any corner in America. In
> the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Howard Safir, the former New York
> police commissioner, recommended the installation of 100 biometric
> surveillance cameras in Times Square to scan the faces of
> pedestrians and compare them with a database of suspected
> terrorists. Atick told me that since the attacks he has been
> approached by local and federal authorities from across the country
> about the possibility of installing biometric surveillance cameras
> in stadiums and subway systems and near national monuments. ''The
> Office of Homeland Security might be the overall umbrella that will
> coordinate with local police forces'' to install cameras linked to a
> biometric network throughout American cities, Atick told me. ''How
> can we be alerted when someone is entering the subway? How can we be
> sure when someone is entering Madison Square Garden? How can we
> protect monuments? We need to create an invisible fence, an
> invisible shield.''
>
> Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to
> live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric
> surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings,
> shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable,
> a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and
> anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of
> affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United
> Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in
> Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American
> future.
>
> I had gone to Britain to answer a question that seems far more
> pertinent today than it did early last month: why would a free and
> flourishing Western democracy wire itself up with so many
> closed-circuit television cameras that it resembles the set of ''The
> Real World'' or ''The Truman Show''? The answer, I discovered, was
> fear of terrorism. In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by
> the I.R.A. exploded in London's financial district, a historic and
> densely packed square mile known as the City of London. In response
> to widespread public anxiety about terrorism, the government decided
> to install a ''ring of steel'' -- a network of closed-circuit
> television cameras mounted on the eight official entry gates that
> control access to the City.
>
> Anxiety about terrorism didn't go away, and the cameras in Britain
> continued to multiply. In 1994, a 2-year-old boy named Jamie Bulger
> was kidnapped and murdered by two 10-year-old schoolboys, and
> surveillance cameras captured a grainy shot of the killers leading
> their victim out of a shopping center. Bulger's assailants couldn't,
> in fact, be identified on camera -- they were caught because they
> talked to their friends -- but the video footage, replayed over and
> over again on television, shook the country to its core. Riding a
> wave of enthusiasm for closed-circuit television, or CCTV, created
> by the attacks, John Major's Conservative government decided to
> devote more than three-quarters of its crime-prevention budget to
> encourage local authorities to install CCTV. The promise of cameras
> as a magic bullet against crime and terrorism inspired one of
> Major's most successful campaign slogans: ''If you've got nothing to
> hide, you've got nothing to fear.''
>
> Instead of being perceived as an Orwellian intrusion, the cameras in
> Britain proved to be extremely popular. They were hailed as the
> people's technology, a friendly eye in the sky, not Big Brother at
> all but a kindly and watchful uncle or aunt. Local governments
> couldn't get enough of them; each hamlet and fen in the British
> countryside wanted its own CCTV surveillance system, even when the
> most serious threat to public safety was coming from mad cows. In
> 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance networks; by 1998, 440 city
> centers were wired. By the late 1990's, as part of its Clintonian,
> center-left campaign to be tough on crime, Tony Blair's New Labor
> government decided to support the cameras with a vengeance. There
> are now so many cameras attached to so many different surveillance
> systems in the U.K. that people have stopped counting. According to
> one estimate, there are 2.5 million surveillance cameras in Britain,
> and in fact there may be far more.
>
> As I filed through customs at Heathrow Airport, there were cameras
> concealed in domes in the ceiling. There were cameras pointing at
> the ticket counters, at the escalators and at the tracks as I waited
> for the Heathrow express to Paddington Station. When I got out at
> Paddington, there were cameras on the platform and cameras on the
> pillars in the main terminal. Cameras followed me as I walked from
> the main station to the underground, and there were cameras at each
> of the stations on the way to King's Cross. Outside King's Cross,
> there were cameras trained on the bus stand and the taxi stand and
> the sidewalk, and still more cameras in the station. There were
> cameras on the backs of buses to record people who crossed into the
> wrong traffic lane.
>
> Throughout Britain today, there are speed cameras and red-light
> cameras, cameras in lobbies and elevators, in hotels and
> restaurants, in nursery schools and high schools. There are even
> cameras in hospitals. (After a raft of ''baby thefts'' in the early
> 1990's, the government gave hospitals money to install cameras in
> waiting rooms, maternity wards and operating rooms.) And everywhere
> there are warning signs, announcing the presence of cameras with a
> jumble of different icons, slogans and exhortations, from the bland
> ''CCTV in operation'' to the peppy ''CCTV: Watching for You!'' By
> one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by 300 separate
> cameras in a single day.
>
> Britain's experience under the watchful eye of the CCTV cameras is a
> vision of what Americans can expect if we choose to go down the same
> road in our efforts to achieve ''homeland security.'' Although the
> cameras in Britain were initially justified as a way of combating
> terrorism, they soon came to serve a very different function. The
> cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel
> that they are being watched at all times. Instead of keeping
> terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to keep
> punks out of shopping malls. The people behind the live video
> screens are zooming in on unconventional behavior in public that in
> fact has nothing to do with terrorism. And rather than thwarting
> serious crime, the cameras are being used to enforce social
> conformity in ways that Americans may prefer to avoid.
>
> The dream of a biometric surveillance system that can identify
> people's faces in public places and separate the innocent from the
> guilty is not new. Clive Norris, a criminologist at the University
> of Hull, is Britain's leading authority on the social effects of
> CCTV. In his definitive study, ''The Maximum Surveillance Society:
> the Rise of CCTV,'' Norris notes that in the 19th century, police
> forces in England and France began to focus on how to distinguish
> the casual offender from the ''habitual criminal'' who might evade
> detection by moving from town to town. In the 1870's, Alphonse
> Bertillon, a records clerk at the prefecture of police in Paris,
> used his knowledge of statistics and anthropomorphic measurements to
> create a system for comparing the thousands of photographs of
> arrested suspects in Parisian police stations. He took a series of
> measurements -- of skull size, for example, and the distance between
> the ear and chin -- and created a unique code for every suspect whom
> the police had photographed. Photographs were then grouped according
> to the codes, and a new suspect could be compared only with the
> photos that had similar measurements, instead of with the entire
> portfolio. Though Bertillon's system was often difficult for
> unskilled clerks to administer, a procedure that had taken hours or
> days was now reduced to a few minutes.
>
> It wasn't until the 1980's, with the development of computerized
> biometric and other face-recognition systems, that Bertillon's dream
> became feasible on a broad scale. In the course of studying how
> biometric scanning could be used to authenticate the identities of
> people who sought admission to secure buildings, innovators like
> Joseph Atick realized that the same technology could be used to pick
> suspects or license plates out of a crowd. It's the license-plate
> technology that the London police have found most attractive,
> because it tends to be more reliable. (A test of the best
> face-recognition systems last year by the U.S. Department of Defense
> found that they failed to identify matches a third of the time.)
>
> Soon after arriving in London, I visited the CCTV monitoring room in
> the City of London police station, where the British war against
> terrorism began. I was met by the press officer, Tim Parsons, and
> led up to the control station, a modest-size installation that looks
> like an air-traffic-control room, with uniformed officers manning
> two rows of monitors. Although installed to catch terrorists, the
> cameras in the City of London spend most of their time following car
> thieves and traffic offenders. ''The technology here is geared up to
> terrorism,'' Parsons told me. ''The fact that we're getting ordinary
> people -- burglars stealing cars -- as a result of it is sort of a
> bonus.''
>
> Have you caught any terrorists? I asked. ''No, not using this
> technology, no,'' he replied.
>
> As we watched the monitors, rows of slow-moving cars filed through
> the gates into the City, and cameras recorded their license-plate
> numbers and the faces of their drivers. After several minutes, one
> monitor set off a soft, pinging alarm. We had a match! But no, it
> was a false alarm. The license plate that set off the system was
> 8620bmc, but the stolen car recorded in the database was 8670amc.
> After a few more mismatches, the machine finally found an offender,
> though not a serious one. A red van had gone through a speed camera,
> and the local authority that issued the ticket couldn't identify the
> driver. An alert went out on the central police national computer,
> and it set off the alarm when the van entered the City. ''We're not
> going to do anything about it because it's not a desperately
> important call,'' said the sergeant.
>
> Because the cameras on the ring of steel take clear pictures of each
> driver's face, I asked whether the City used the biometric facial
> recognition technology that American airports are now being urged to
> adopt. ''We're experimenting with it to see if we could pick faces
> out of the crowd, but the technology is not sufficiently good
> enough,'' Parsons said. ''The system that I saw demonstrated two or
> three years ago, a lot of the time it couldn't differentiate between
> a man and a woman.'' (In a recent documentary about CCTV, Monty
> Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics face-recognition system that
> had been set up in the London borough of Newham by wearing earrings
> and a beard.) Nevertheless, Parsons insisted that the technology
> will become more accurate. ''It's just a matter of time. Then we can
> use it to detect the presence of criminals on foot in the city,'' he
> said.
>
> In the future, as face-recognition technology becomes more accurate,
> it will become even more intrusive, because of pressures to expand
> the biometric database. I mentioned to Joseph Atick of Visionics
> that the City of London was thinking about using his technology to
> establish a database that would include not only terrorists but also
> all British citizens whose faces were registered with the national
> driver's license bureau. If that occurs, every citizen who walks the
> streets of the City could be instantly identified by the police and
> evaluated in light of his past misdeeds, no matter how trivial. With
> the impatience of a rationalist, Atick dismissed the possibility.
> ''Technically, they won't be able to do it without coming back to
> me,'' he said. ''They will have to justify it to me.'' Atick struck
> me as a refined and thoughtful man (he is the former director of the
> computational neuroscience laboratory at Rockefeller University),
> but it seems odd to put the liberties of a democracy in the hands of
> one unelected scientist.
>
> Atick says that his technology is an enlightened alternative to
> racial and ethnic profiling, and if the faces in the biometric
> database were, in fact, restricted to known terrorists, he would be
> on to something. Instead of stopping all passengers who appear to be
> Middle Eastern and victimizing thousands of innocent people, the
> system would focus with laserlike precision on a tiny handful of the
> guilty. (This assumes that the terrorists aren't cunning enough to
> disguise themselves.) But when I asked whether any of the existing
> biometric databases in England or America are limited to suspected
> terrorists, Atick confessed that they aren't. There is a simple
> reason for this: few terrorists are suspected in advance of their
> crimes. For this reason, cities in England and elsewhere have tried
> to justify their investment in face-recognition systems by filling
> their databases with those troublemakers whom the authorities can
> easily identify: local criminals. When FaceIt technology was used to
> scan the faces of the thousands of fans entering the Super Bowl in
> Tampa last January, the matches produced by the database weren't
> terrorists. They were low-level ticket scalpers and pickpockets.
>
> Biometrics is a feel-good technology that is being marketed based on
> a false promise -- that the database will be limited to suspected
> terrorists. But the FaceIt technology, as it's now being used in
> England, isn't really intended to catch terrorists at all. It's
> intended to scare local hoodlums into thinking they might be setting
> off alarms even when the cameras are turned off. I came to
> understand this ''Wizard of Oz'' aspect of the technology when I
> visited Bob Lack's monitoring station in the London borough of
> Newham. A former London police officer, Lack attracted national
> attention -- including a visit from Tony Blair -- by pioneering the
> use of face-recognition technology before other people were
> convinced that it was entirely reliable. What Lack grasped early on
> was that reliability was in many ways beside the point.
>
> Lack installed his first CCTV system in 1997, and he intentionally
> exaggerated its powers from the beginning. ''We put one camera out
> and 12 signs'' announcing the presence of cameras, Lack told me.
> ''We reduced crime by 60 percent in the area where we posted the
> signs. Then word on the street went out that we had dummy cameras.''
> So Lack turned his attention to face-recognition technology and
> tried to create the impression that far more people's faces were in
> the database than actually are. ''We've designed a poster now about
> making Newham a safe place for a family,'' he said. ''And we're
> telling the criminal we have this information on him: we know his
> name, we know his address, we know what crimes he commits.'' It's
> not true, Lack admits, ''but then, we're entitled to disinform some
> people, aren't we?''
>
> So you're telling the criminal that you know his name even though
> you don't, I asked? ''Right,'' Lack replied. ''Pretty much that's
> about advertising, isn't it?''
>
> Lack was elusive when I asked him who, exactly, is in his database.
> ''I don't know,'' he replied, noting that the local police chief
> decides who goes into the database. He would only make an ''educated
> guess'' that the database contains 100 ''violent street robbers''
> under the age of 18. ''You have to have been convicted of a crime --
> nobody suspected goes on, unless they're a suspected murderer -- and
> there has to be sufficient police intelligence to say you are
> committing those crimes and have been so in the last 12 weeks.''
> When I asked for the written standards that determined who,
> precisely, was put in the database, and what crimes they had to have
> committed, Lack promised to send them, but he never did.
>
>  From Lack's point of view, it doesn't matter who is in his database,
> because his system isn't designed to catch terrorists or violent
> criminals. In the three years that the system has been up and
> running, it hasn't resulted in a single arrest. ''I'm not in the
> business of having people arrested,'' Lack said. ''The deterrent
> value has far exceeded anything you imagine.'' He told me that the
> alarms went off an average of three times a day during the month of
> August, but the only people he would conclusively identify were
> local youths who had volunteered to be put in the database as part
> of an ''intensive surveillance supervision program,'' as an
> alternative to serving a custodial sentence. ''The public statements
> about the efficacy of the Newham facial-recognition system bear
> little relationship to its actual operational capabilities, which
> are rather weak and poor,'' says Clive Norris of the University of
> Hull. ''They want everyone to believe that they are potentially
> under scrutiny. Its effectiveness, perhaps, is based on a lie.''
>
> This lie has a venerable place in the philosophy of surveillance. In
> his preface to ''Panopticon,'' Jeremy Bentham imagined the social
> benefits of a ring-shaped ''inspection-house,'' in which prisoners,
> students, orphans or paupers could be subject to constant
> surveillance. In the center of the courtyard would be an inspection
> tower with windows facing the inner wall of the ring. Supervisors in
> the central tower could observe every movement of the inhabitants of
> the cells, who were illuminated by natural lighting, but Venetian
> blinds would ensure that the supervisors could not be seen by the
> inhabitants. The uncertainty about whether or not they were being
> surveilled would deter the inhabitants from antisocial behavior.
> Michel Foucault described the purpose of the Panopticon -- to induce
> in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
> assures the automatic functioning of power.'' Foucault predicted
> that this condition of visible, unverifiable power, in which
> individuals have internalized the idea that they may always be under
> surveillance, would be the defining characteristic of the modern
> age.
>
> Britain, at the moment, is not quite the Panopticon, because its
> various camera networks aren't linked and there aren't enough
> operators to watch all the cameras. But over the next few years,
> that seems likely to change, as Britain moves toward the kind of
> integrated Web-based surveillance system that Visionics has now
> proposed for American airports and subway systems. At the moment,
> for example, the surveillance systems for the London underground and
> the British police feed into separate control rooms, but Sergio
> Velastin, a computer-vision scientist, says he believes the two
> systems will eventually be linked, using digital technology.
>
> Velastin is working on behavioral-recognition technology for the
> London underground that can look for unusual movements in crowds,
> setting off an alarm, for example, when people appear to be fighting
> or trying to jump on the tracks. (Because human CCTV operators are
> easily bored and distracted, automatic alarms are viewed as the wave
> of the future.) ''Imagine you see a piece of unattended baggage
> which might contain a bomb,'' Velastin told me. ''You can back-drag
> on the image and locate the person who left it there. You can say
> where did that person come from and where is that person now? You
> can conceive in the future that you might be able to do that for
> every person in every place in the system.'' Of course, Velastin
> admitted, ''if you don't have social agreement about how you're
> going to operate that, it could get out of control.''
>
> Once thousands of cameras from hundreds of separate CCTV systems are
> able to feed their digital images to a central monitoring station,
> and the images can be analyzed with face- and behavioral-recognition
> software to identify unusual patterns, then the possibilities of the
> Panopticon will suddenly become very real. And few people doubt that
> connectivity is around the corner; it is, in fact, the next step.
> ''CCTV will become the fifth utility: after gas, electricity, sewage
> and telecommunications,'' says Jason Ditton, a criminologist at the
> University of Sheffield who is critical of the technology's
> expansion. ''We will come to accept its ubiquitousness.''
>
> At the moment, there is only one fully integrated CCTV in Britain:
> it transmits digital images over a broadband wireless network, like
> the one Joseph Atick has proposed for American airports, rather than
> relying on traditional video cameras that are chained to dedicated
> cables. And so, for a still clearer vision of the interconnected
> future of surveillance, I set off for Hull, Britain's leading timber
> port, about three hours northeast of London. Hull has traditionally
> been associated not with dystopian fantasies but with fantasies of a
> more basic sort: for hundreds of years, it has been the prostitution
> capital of northeastern Britain.
>
> Six years ago, a heroin epidemic created an influx of addicted young
> women who took to streetwalking to sustain their drug habit. Nearly
> two years ago, the residents' association of a low-income housing
> project called Goodwin Center hired a likable and enterprising young
> civil engineer named John Marshall to address the problem of
> under-age prostitutes having sex on people's windowsills.
>
> Marshall, who is now 33, met me at the Hull railway station carrying
> a CCTV warning sign. Armed with more than a million dollars in
> public financing from the European Union, Marshall decided to build
> what he calls the world's first Ethernet-based, wireless CCTV
> system. Initially, Marshall put up 27 cameras around the housing
> project. The cameras didn't bother the prostitutes, who in fact felt
> safer working under CCTV. Instead, they scared the johns --
> especially after the police recorded their license numbers, banged
> on their doors and threatened to publish their names in the
> newspapers. Business plummeted, and the prostitutes moved indoors or
> across town to the traditional red-light district, where the city
> decided to tolerate their presence in limited numbers.
>
> But Marshall soon realized that he had bigger fish to fry than
> displacing prostitutes from one part of Hull to another. His
> innovative network of linked cameras attracted national attention,
> which led, a few months ago, to $20 million in grant money from
> various levels of government to expand the surveillance network
> throughout the city of Hull. ''In a year and a half,'' Marshall
> says, ''there'll be a digital connection to every household in the
> city. As far as cameras go, I can imagine that, in 10 years' time,
> the whole city will be covered. That's the speed that CCTV is
> growing.'' In the world that Marshall imagines, every household in
> Hull will be linked to a central network that can access cameras
> trained inside and outside every building in the city. ''Imagine a
> situation where you've got an elderly relative who lives on the
> other side of the city,'' Marshall says. ''You ring her up, there's
> no answer on the telephone, you think she collapsed -- so you go to
> the Internet and you look at the camera in the lounge and you see
> that she's making a cup of tea and she's taken her hearing aid out
> or something.''
>
> The person who controls access to this network of intimate images
> will be a very powerful person indeed. And so I was eager to meet
> the monitors of the Panopticon for myself. On a side street of Hull,
> near the Star and Garter Pub and the city morgue, the Goodwin
> Center's monitoring station is housed inside a ramshackle private
> security firm called Sentry Alarms Ltd. The sign over the door reads
> THE GUARD HOUSE. The monitoring station is locked behind a thick,
> black vault-style door, but it looks like a college computer center,
> with an Alicia Silverstone pinup near the door. Instead of an
> impressive video wall, there are only two small desktop computers,
> which receive all the signals from the Goodwin Center network. And
> the digital, Web-based images -- unlike traditional video -- are
> surprisingly fuzzy and jerky, like streaming video transmitted over
> a slow modem.
>
> During my time in the control room, from 9 p.m. to midnight, I
> experienced firsthand a phenomenon that critics of CCTV surveillance
> have often described: when you put a group of bored, unsupervised
> men in front of live video screens and allow them to zoom in on
> whatever happens to catch their eyes, they tend to spend a fair
> amount of time leering at women. ''What catches the eye is groups of
> young men and attractive, young women,'' I was told by Clive Norris,
> the Hull criminologist. ''It's what we call a sense of the
> obvious.'' There are plenty of stories of video voyeurism: a control
> room in the Midlands, for example, took close-up shots of women with
> large breasts and taped them up on the walls. In Hull, this
> temptation is magnified by the fact that part of the operators' job
> is to keep an eye on prostitutes. As it got late, though, there
> weren't enough prostitutes to keep us entertained, so we kept
> ourselves awake by scanning the streets in search of the purely
> consensual activities of boyfriends and girlfriends making out in
> cars. ''She had her legs wrapped around his waist a minute ago,''
> one of the operators said appreciatively as we watched two teenagers
> go at it. ''You'll be able to do an article on how reserved the
> British are, won't you?'' he joked. Norris also found that
> operators, in addition to focusing on attractive young women, tend
> to focus on young men, especially those with dark skin. And those
> young men know they are being watched: CCTV is far less popular
> among black men than among British men as a whole. In Hull and
> elsewhere, rather than eliminating prejudicial surveillance and
> racial profiling, CCTV surveillance has tended to amplify it.
>
> After returning from the digital city of Hull, I had a clearer
> understanding of how, precisely, the spread of CCTV cameras is
> transforming British society and why I think it's important for
> America to resist going down the same path. ''I actually don't think
> the cameras have had much effect on crime rates,'' says Jason
> Ditton, the criminologist, whose evaluation of the effect of the
> cameras in Glasgow found no clear reduction in violent crime.
> ''We've had a fall in crime in the last 10 years, and CCTV
> proponents say it's because of the cameras. I'd say it's because we
> had a boom economy in the last seven years and a fall in
> unemployment.'' Ditton notes that the cameras can sometimes be
> useful in investigating terrorist attacks -- like the Brixton
> nail-bomber case in 1999 -- but there is no evidence that they
> prevent terrorism or other serious crime.
>
> Last year, Britain's violent crime rates actually increased by 4.3
> percent, even though the cameras continued to proliferate. But CCTV
> cameras have a mysterious knack for justifying themselves regardless
> of what happens to crime. When crime goes up the cameras get the
> credit for detecting it, and when crime goes down, they get the
> credit for preventing it.
>
> If the creation of a surveillance society in Britain hasn't
> prevented terrorist attacks, it has had subtle but far-reaching
> social costs. The handful of privacy advocates in Britain have tried
> to enumerate those costs by arguing that the cameras invade privacy.
> People behave in self-conscious ways under the cameras,
> ostentatiously trying to demonstrate their innocence or bristling at
> the implication of guilt. Inside a monitoring room near Runnymede,
> the birthplace of the Magna Carta, I saw a group of teenagers who
> noticed that a camera was pivoting around to follow them; they made
> an obscene gesture toward it and looked back over their shoulders as
> they tried to escape its gaze.
>
> The cameras are also a powerful inducement toward social conformity
> for citizens who can't be sure whether they are being watched. ''I
> am gay and I might want to kiss my boyfriend in Victoria Square at 2
> in the morning,'' a supporter of the cameras in Hull told me. ''I
> would not kiss my boyfriend now. I am aware that it has altered the
> way I might behave. Something like that might be regarded as an
> offense against public decency. This isn't San Francisco.''
> Nevertheless, the man insisted that the benefits of the cameras
> outweighed the costs, because ''thousands of people feel safer.''
>
> There is, in the end, a powerfully American reason to resist the
> establishment of a national surveillance network: the cameras are
> not consistent with the values of an open society. They are
> technologies of classification and exclusion. They are ways of
> putting people in their place, of deciding who gets in and who stays
> out, of limiting people's movement and restricting their
> opportunities. I came to appreciate the exclusionary potential of
> the surveillance technology in a relatively low-tech way when I
> visited a shopping center in Uxbridge, a suburb of London. The
> manager of the center explained that people who are observed to be
> misbehaving in the mall can be banned from the premises. The banning
> process isn't very complicated. ''Because this isn't public
> property, we have the right to refuse entry, and if there's a
> wrongdoer, we give them a note or a letter, or simply tell them
> you're banned.'' In America, this would provoke anyone who was
> banned to call Alan Dershowitz and sue for discrimination. But the
> British are far less litigious and more willing to defer to
> authority.
>
> Banning people from shopping malls is only the beginning. A couple
> of days before I was in London, Borders Books announced the
> installation of a biometric face-recognition surveillance system in
> its flagship store on Charing Cross Road. Borders' scheme meant that
> that anyone who had shoplifted in the past was permanently branded
> as a shoplifter in the future. In response to howls of protest from
> America, Borders dismantled the system, but it may well be
> resurrected in a post-Sept. 11 world.
>
> Perhaps the reason that Britain has embraced the new technologies of
> surveillance, while America, at least before Sept. 11, had
> strenuously resisted them, is that British society is far more
> accepting of social classifications than we are. The British desire
> to put people in their place is the central focus of British
> literature, from Dickens to John Osborne and Alan Bennett. The work
> of George Orwell that casts the most light on Britain's swooning
> embrace of CCTV is not ''1984.'' It is Orwell's earlier book ''The
> English People.''
>
> ''Exaggerated class distinctions have been diminishing,'' Orwell
> wrote, but ''the great majority of the people can still be 'placed'
> in an instant by their manners, clothes and general appearance'' and
> above all, their accents. Class distinctions are less hardened today
> than they were when I was a student at Oxford at the height of the
> Thatcher-era ''Brideshead Revisited'' chic. But it's no surprise
> that a society long accustomed to the idea that people should know
> their place didn't hesitate to embrace a technology designed to
> ensure that people stay in their assigned places.
>
> Will America be able to resist the pressure to follow the British
> example and wire itself up with surveillance cameras? Before Sept.
> 11, I was confident that we would. Like Germany and France, which
> are squeamish about CCTV because of their experience with
> 20th-century totalitarianism, Americans are less willing than the
> British to trust the government and defer to authority. After Sept.
> 11, however, everything has changed. A New York Times/CBS news poll
> at the end of September found that 8 in 10 Americans believe they
> will have to give up some of their personal freedoms to make the
> country safe from terrorist attacks.
>
> Of course there are some liberties that should be sacrificed in
> times of national emergency if they give us greater security. But
> Britain's experience in the fight against terrorism suggests that
> people may give up liberties without experiencing a corresponding
> increase in security. And if we meekly accede in the construction of
> vast feel-good architectures of surveillance that have far-reaching
> social costs and few discernible social benefits, we may find, in
> calmer times, that they are impossible to dismantle.
>
> It's important to be precise about the choice we are facing. No one
> is threatening at the moment to turn America into Orwell's Big
> Brother. And Britain hasn't yet been turned into Big Brother,
> either. Many of the CCTV monitors and camera operators and policemen
> and entrepreneurs who took the time to meet with me were models of
> the British sense of fair play and respect for the rules. In many
> ways, the closed-circuit television cameras have only exaggerated
> the qualities of the British national character that Orwell
> identified in his less famous book: the acceptance of social
> hierarchy combined with the gentleness that leads people to wait in
> orderly lines at taxi stands; a deference to authority combined with
> an appealing tolerance of hypocrisy. These English qualities have
> their charms, but they are not American qualities.
>
> The promise of America is a promise that we can escape from the Old
> World, a world where people know their place. When we say we are
> fighting for an open society, we don't mean a transparent society --
> one where neighbors can peer into each other's windows using the
> joysticks on their laptops. We mean a society open to the
> possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every
> day; a society in which people can travel from place to place
> without showing their papers and being encumbered by their past; a
> society that respects privacy and constantly reshuffles social
> hierarchy.
>
> The ideal of America has from the beginning been an insistence that
> your opportunities shouldn't be limited by your background or your
> database; that no doors should be permanently closed to anyone who
> has the wrong smart card. If the 21st century proves to be a time
> when this ideal is abandoned -- a time of surveillance cameras and
> creepy biometric face scanning in Times Square -- then Osama bin
> Laden will have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now
> imagine.
>
> Jeffrey Rosen is an associate professor at George Washington
> University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New
> Republic. He writes frequently on law for The Times Magazine.
>
> **************************************************************************
> Bruce Schneier, CTO, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.  Ph: 408-777-3612
> 19050 Pruneridge Ave, Cupertino, CA 95014
>
> Free Internet security newsletter. See:
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