[Reader-list] A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Sat Oct 6 23:05:38 IST 2001
The New York Times | Magazine
October 7, 2001
BEING WATCHED
A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
By JEFFREY ROSEN
PHOTO: Stephen Gill for The New York Times
Caption: Stolen Kiss
Surveillance cameras like this one in London capture criminals and
noncriminals alike.
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.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
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