It is none other than USA Today who recently ran the headline
Cities opening more video surveillance eyes. I think anyone reading this can first agree with me on the point that USA Today is hardly an apex of hard-hitting investigative journalism. Indeed, while it's nice that this development is finally showing up in the mainstream press, for years people all across the country have been waking up to discover that their cities, with little public input and often proceeding with absolutely no privacy safeguards in place, have begun sprouting black half-spheres from their streetlights and utility poles.
As we speak, the US is undergoing a massive transformation : cities all over the country are rolling out surveillance systems of hundreds or even thousands of cameras. Los Angeles. New York. New Orleans. Chicago. Boston. DC. Honolulu. Baltimore. What is being slid slowly and perhaps permanently into American life is a technological system, ostensibly for the prevention of terrorism (and, further down the slippery slope, common street crime), which has proven to be not only ineffective at preventing what it claims to, but is also prone to misuse and abuse.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the rate at which surveillance cameras actually prevent crime is arguable, and the number of terror incidents they have prevented is, to the best of my knowledge, zero. Bear in mind I'm speaking here of public surveillance, not the systems in place around power plants, chemical depots, nuclear facilities, etc. Surveillance didn't prevent the bombings in London. Or the second set of bombings in London. Or the bombings in Madrid. Crime wise, they failed spectacularly to prevent the Columbine shootings. Why, then, this hard push for constant and ubiquitous public surveillance?
First, let's take a look at Chicago. Chicago's new surveillance system, while far from 'Orwellian', does put to shame many of the panoptical scenarios envisioned by Philip K. Dick : begun with a pilot program in the late '90s, it will eventually grow to a system of more than 2,200 cameras: Chicago's roads, transit systems, streets, sidewalks, and public housing (yes, people's homes) will all be monitored from a the guts of a single fortified building. Eventually, Chicago police will be able to pull the live video feed of any camera into their snazzy new in-car computers. Further down the road, private organizations will be able to install cameras and have them linked into the police-run network. The cameras also contain technology to detect gunshots, which Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley noted in 2004 was originally implemented in part to protect the cameras.
If you're interested in more technological detail, Wired published an article on the surveillance system in May. What's interesting is that the article contains not a single mention of 'terrorism'. Not one. The Chicago police seemed to have rightly assumed that, in the environment of ritualized fear being hoisted upon us since 9/11, people won't make a lot of noise about surveillance systems of unprecedented reach and scale being installed in their cities - if they know about it at all.
The Chicago Sun-Times, on April 7th, 2004, quotes Daley as saying that he would "love to see cameras installed on every street corner in Chicago". "We own the sidewalk, we own the street, and we own the alley", he says. "In America, there's no such thing as a police state."
It may interest you to know, at this point, that Richard M. Daley is the son of Richard J. Daley, the former Chicago mayor whose 'Subversive Activities Unit' illegally maintained dossiers on more than 250,000 individuals and organizations in the 1960s and 70s. The SAU had cooperated with the FBI in both the implementation of COINTELPRO and the 1969 assassination of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The Alliance to End Repression worked together with the ACLU, beginning in 1974, to shut down the Red Squad, and in 1981, the unit was abolished by consent decree. However, in 1997 the new Mayor Daley began a legal process that eventually allowed the police to once again do things like film protestors for the purpose of identifying individuals.
So, in short, a police department with one of the worst civil rights records in the country will soon come to possess one of the country's most advanced surveillance systems, asking the people of Chicago to take them on their word that it won't be abused.
We need to be talking about this, and we need to be watching for this. Too often, proponents of these systems get away with dismissing their critics with a wave of the hand. "This is America," they sigh. "Anyone who doesn't appreciate these cameras is either a criminal or a conspiracy theorist." There needs to be a far, far greater public debate over the use of such surveillance systems. As it stands now, most people, who are neither strongly for nor against these systems, simply seem to be ignoring them, and trusting that they'll be used by the government for unambiguous good.
For example, in 2004, the city of Boston installed a number of new surveillance cameras, and overhauled systems run by the Transportation Authority and Port Authority. This was ostensibly done to provide 'additional security' for the Democratic National Convention. But after the convention was over, the cameras stuck around, and apparently no one thought this move needed to be justified, or that any guidelines for the use of these cameras needed to be laid out.
Needless to say, there are far more examples than just Chicago and Boston, and while I could prattle on for pages about the intricacies of America's new surveillance systems, I think I'll cut it off here.
But I would like to ask you, fellow dKos readers, to consider this information. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask our governments, national, state, and local, to justify the installation of these systems. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask why so much tax money should be poured into a technological system that has shown historically to be terribly ineffective at preventing crime when other, more effective preventative measures may be available. And I do not think it conspiracy-minded to ask hard questions about the threats that a proliferation of surveillance may pose to traditional American freedoms, or to demand that, where these systems are deemed genuinely necessary that protections be in place to determine who has access to the footage, how long it's retained, and what it will be used for.
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See also :
Red Squad Redux, In These Times
CHA To Install Additional Cameras At Developments, NBC 5
Chicago To Be Watched by CCTV, Security Info Watch
Chicago Moving to 'Smart' Surveillance Cameras, PoliceOne
Police Unveil Portable Surveillance Camera, WBAL Baltimore
HPD Needs Surveillance Volunteers, KGMB9 Honolulu
Shares of Biometric, Security Firms Jump, ABC News
Public Eye is a good blog to keep up with if you're interested in the use of surveillance, as are the Politechbot and Interesting People mailing lists. Christian Parenti has also written a wonderful book on the history of government surveillance entitled The Soft Cage.