The Philadelphia Inquirer recently investigated Philadelphia’s use of what it described as a “little-examined 7,000-camera system that subjects residents across the city to heightened surveillance with few rules or safeguards against abuse.” The article details how Philadelphia narcotics police not only allegedly failed to disclose their use of video surveillance in arrest reports or to prosecutors, but also that the video sometimes showed officers lied when they testified.
The Conversation US spoke with Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a practitioner-in-residence at NYU School of Law, about what these new video systems can do and the privacy and other concerns that they call up.
What can these cameras do?
The closed-circuit television, or CCTV, cameras that most Americans pass by every day may look interchangeable, but behind the lens a lot has changed in recent years. As video surveillance cameras have become cheaper and more ubiquitous, they have also become more powerful – with more and more high-definition images and the ability to pan, tilt and zoom. But the most significant change in cameras like those used in Philadelphia are the networks that police departments have set up to collect these countless images of the daily lives of city residents.
A variety of AI tools can also collect this data in new ways that some may find alarming.
Automated license plate reader software can track drivers around the city in real time and create a long-term log of their cars’ movements. Do you want to know where a driver is now or was parked two years ago? Just check the database.
And pedestrians are no less sensitive to surveillance. Facial recognition software can scan images to automatically identify individuals and track them throughout the city.
How widespread is this technology?
According to the Inquirer’s investigation, Philadelphia’s camera network was growing at an astonishing pace. Over the past decade, the city has grown from 216 cameras to a network of more than 7,000 cameras operated by police and transportation officials.
But those are just the cameras that city officials directly monitor and access in real time.
In addition, police routinely use the images captured by private surveillance cameras. This includes everything from multimillion-dollar Internet-enabled camera systems in major stores, offices and universities to the individual cameras that homeowners or small business owners screw into their door frames or exteriors. The public simply has no idea how many of these private cameras are in use or how often their data is accessed.
How is this different from traditional police video surveillance?
Traditional cameras offered a narrow, grainy perspective in one fixed spot. Not only did these systems collect far less data than today’s cameras, but they also retained far less.
A single CCTV camera at a bank may help police identify a robbery suspect, but otherwise poses no threat to privacy. It is confined to a small space where privacy concerns are minimal and security concerns are high. But the mass deployment of cameras creates a fundamentally different model, collecting far more information about all of us and creating a much greater potential for abuse.
Police have tried these techniques for decades, but the technology was simply not up to the task. When the City of London Police deployed its so-called ‘ring of steel’ security system in the 1990s, fewer than 20 cameras attempted to track cars entering a small part of the British capital. core. Officers manually recorded vehicle license plate numbers and monitored driver profile photos.
The labor-intensive exercise was impossible to scale up.
Deploying such a system across a city would likely have required every police officer in the city, and then some. Through automation, technology enables this mass surveillance by reducing the marginal costs of tracking, allowing police to expand monitoring much more broadly than would previously have been financially or pragmatically possible.
What privacy issues does this raise?
A single camera can capture our image; a citywide camera system can reconstruct our lives. Network camera systems like the one in Philadelphia, in combination with smartphones and other internet-enabled devices, allow officers to reconstruct an individual’s movements for days or weeks at a time, all without any court oversight.
While it takes a warrant to install a GPS tracker on a resident’s car, police can mimic GPS-like location tracking without a warrant, all thanks to mass camera systems. And facial recognition in municipal cameras threatens the First Amendment, which protects freedoms of speech, religion and peaceful assembly. Police are armed with a way to track down almost any person at a political protest, abortion clinic or house of worship. Such surveillance melts away the anonymity that is indispensable for an open society.
Are there any other risks or unintended consequences?
I believe that giving the keys to a small surveillance state to thousands of city employees is a recipe for disaster.
The Philadelphia Inquirer found that the city has policies that prohibit zooming in on residents for entertainment, spying on someone by zooming in through their window, or blatant racial profiling. But what was not found was evidence that these safeguards were being enforced.
When thousands of employees can spy on their neighbors, romantic partners and business rivals on a whim, it begs the question: who’s watching the onlookers?
For now, the stark answer appears to be no one.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Albert Fox Cahn, New York University
Read more:
Albert Fox Cahn receives funding from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project