Getting tough on crime has taken a new high-tech turn. Those who claim to sell safer streets now have a new product on the market — it is a high- tech video surveillance camera. Today’s purveyors of safety are claiming to clean up the streets but it’s at a price, and the price is our right to privacy. The proposal, to install high-tech video cameras, is gaining in popularity, from commuter trains in the Bay Area, too rural school districts in Mississippi, and all the way to Times Square in New York City.
Unfortunately, this new product is not all that it claims to be, and in fact there is no evidence that cities and school districts that are buying this equipment will make us any safer, but there’s plenty of proof that the right to privacy, the right to be left alone, will surely be diminished under the watchful eyes of highly sophisticated snooping devices.
Today’s high-tech entrepreneurs are selling new and improved equipment to spy on people — people walking on the street, passengers on BART trains or even students going to their high school lockers. This is not the stationary video camera you’ve grown accustomed to at your local 7-Eleven store. What is being marketed now, as the fix-all solution to crime, are cameras that are able to zoom in from more than 100 yards away and read the print on political flyers being distributed on the public sidewalk, even if it’s dark outside. These are cameras that also tape your conversation, even if you’re whispering. Indeed, the new video cameras, which are referred to by the manufacturer as CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), have the capability of peering through the windows of private homes and businesses.
If you’re starting to feel a little bit safer at the potential to secretly ferret out lawbreakers (after all, you’ve got nothing to hide, right?), a little look at the recent experience with the current surveillance technology is instructive.
So far, there is no indication that CCTV is a fierce crime fighter. In New York City, after an expensive 18-month experiment, the cameras were removed, having resulted in only 10 arrests. A more comprehensive study in Britain found that the use of CCTV cameras provided no deterrent to criminal activity. However, the study did show that the cameras certainly were not left idle. In fact, the surveillance cameras and the team of in-studio staff responsible for monitoring, were directly engaged in violations of civil liberties.
The study found that the surveillance cameras had a discriminating eye, focusing almost exclusively on people of color, gays and young people. In addition, the British authorities used CCTV to track the movement of individuals and to monitor public meetings, marches and demonstrations.
In New York City, a lawsuit was recently brought by unions against the City University of New York, where a campus security director conceded that a surveillance camera had been concealed in a student meeting room to monitor campus political groups.
Also in New York, we saw the extensive video monitoring of the Million Youth March in Harlem. Police recording of people exercising their constitutional right to speak can have a chilling and intimidating effect. Ordinary people may shy away from political activities if they believe they will be monitored in this way.
The potential to violate the right to privacy, a right deeply valued by Americans and guaranteed directly to Californians under our state constitution, is threatened by the growing use of surveillance cameras. Federal and state laws have long created criminal penalties for illegal wiretapping, and in order to wiretap in the first place, law enforcement is required to show individualized suspicion in order to obtain a warrant. Yet in many ways, CCTV is an even more intrusive form of search than audio wiretapping. CCTV can and has been grossly abused by recording the intimate conduct of citizens and marking innocent people for tracking solely on the basis of racial, gender or other characteristics. No other technique can record in such graphic detail personal and private behavior.
Yet this is a technique that is not explicitly controlled by any law; even wiretapping is subject to greater legal restrictions. The growing sophistication of and power of technology is outpacing already inadequate privacy and criminal laws.
Laws analogous to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prohibits unauthorized snooping into electronic communications, are needed to protect us from the dangerous and watchful eye of Big Brother, as the new technology creates an almost Orwellian potential for surveillance and invites abuse.