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I just finished reading Being Watched: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance in the NY Times. It talks in great depth about the British system of surveillance cameras.
According to one estimate, there are 2.5 million surveillance cameras in Britain, and in fact there may be far more . . . the average Briton is now photographed by 300 separate cameras in a single day.
Before you advocate using cameras and automatic face recognition in airports or other public places take second and read the article.
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.
After the British installed this technology they've not caught a single terrorist. Not one. They don't even have a good database of terrorists.
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.
This article is full of many amazing quotes and statistics. I only posted half of the quotes I pulled out of the article. But I wanted to leave you with one final quote. And I want you ask yourself about the kind of society we want America to be in ten years.
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.
posted on Sunday, October 07, 2001 10:35 AM Print
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