Surveillance Camera News
S.C.N. Vol I. No.V
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Assorted News Items , Links and Press Peleases for: July 2000
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CANADA REPORT - PRIVACY GUIDELINES
The Office Of The Information & Privacy Commissioner
British Columbia Canada have released a report
Public Surveillance System Privacy Guidelines
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OpSail-Security measures tight for OpSail
[EXCERPT FROM LARGER STORY]
Key OpSail events will be monitored by surveillance cameras
that will beam video feeds to the NYPD's Command and Control
Center at Police Headquarters, the Office of Emergency
Management at the World Trade Center, and to the Coast Guard
Command Center at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island.
AP-NY-07-01-00 1011EDT Copyright (c) 2000 The Associated Press
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VOICES / A Forum For Community Issues
Essay Green Light for Red-Light Photos
Publication Date: Saturday July 1, 2000
Page B-9
Los Angeles Times (Home Edition)
Copyright 2000 / The Times Mirror Company
By PAUL TEETOR
Paul Teetor lives in Manhattan Beach
It's working in West Hollywood. It's boffo in Beverly Hills. Now Los
Angeles wants to join the block party and start its own photo
red-light program.
I say green-light that idea.
Civil rights? Get over it. Where does it say we have the right to
run red lights in privacy? Driving downtown is more terrifying than
basketball practice at Indiana University. Turn signals are optional
and growing obsolete. Distracted people shout into cell phones as
they make sudden lane changes and unannounced U-turns.
Muscular SUVs assert their higher-than-thou territorial dominance
over my 98-pound Toyota.
All too often, the right of way is determined by tonnage and
velocity. In L.A., size really does matter.
Most terrifying of all are the red-light runners. The bloody results
of their reckless, self-important impatience are on the news too
many nights.
Now the L.A. City Council wants to fight back. It will fund a pilot
program that will install these high-tech cameras in 16 of the
most dangerous intersections.
The timing is perfect, the right idea at the right place: reality
programming at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Call it "Surviving
Big Brother." The twist: Big Brother is not only watching you, he's
writing tickets as well.
It even comes with film in the mail, four little Polaroids showing
you in each stage of the forbidden act.
I know, I know. I've heard the whispers: It's a giant step toward
24/7 surveillance of everybody, everywhere. If we don't take a
stand now, the police state will soon be snooping in our bedrooms.
Sorry. I don't buy it.
Democracy is a delicate balancing act, a series of trade-offs
between freedom and responsiblity, between individual
independence and intrusions mandated by the greater good. This
one is a trade-off worth making.
These traffic cameras are no threat to our constitutionally
guaranteed freedoms. They will save lives and help more
Americans pursue life, liberty and happiness--an afterthought in
1776 but a dominant value in 2000.
But for those keep worrying about Big Brother invading our
personal space, hope keeps rolling down the highway. At a recent
convention of the California Peace Officers Assn. in Redondo
Beach, the HALT 2000--High-speed Avoidance using Laser
Technology--was unveiled.
This sleek, silvery weapon lets police stop a fleeing suspect by
shutting off the car's engine and bringing it to a slow, controlled
halt. A laser beam from the remote control gun activates a
computer chip in the car, which then slowly shuts down the fuel
system and gives the driver time to come to a safe stop.
Although a demonstration that quickly brought a black
Mercedez-Benz to a halt generated favorable media coverage and
showed the engineering was solid, the politics of it are more
problematic. There are sure to be even more dire warnings about
Big Brother should the HALT 2000 be proposed for street use.
There's a natural fear that the police might use and abuse it in
situations other than chasing a fleeing suspect. The potential for
trampling on the public's privacy rights is huge, more so than with
the photo red-light program.
Despite the civil liberties issues, there are several compelling
reasons the HALT 2000 could be the city's logical next step after
the photo red-light program.
Theoretically, there would be no more streets closed while police
chased fleeing suspects. No more innocent bystanders killed. And
no more interrupting TV programs for those incredibly annoying
"live and exclusive" car chases.
I say green-light that idea too.
(END) 06:53 EDT July 1, 2000
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Monday July 31 11:13 AM ET
Thieves Pull Off Mission Impossible
SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Residents of a top-notch Brazilian tower building
are wondering why security costs have boosted their monthly rent bill above
$2,000 after robbers breezed past their fortress-like protection, local media
reported.
Fifteen men in ski-masks and surgical gloves pulled off their own Mission
Impossible on Friday, dodging 10 security cameras, six on duty-guards
and an electric fence to break into the chic Sao Paulo building, where
apartments sell for $2 million.
It could not have played out more smoothly for the machine-gun carrying
raiders. Apartment doors opened up before their eyes as unsuspecting
residents fell for the bullied porter's request to carry out emergency heating
maintenance.
Without leaving a trace, the robbers made off with a booty of cash, jewels
and a Mercedes from the 28-floor skyscraper, where residents' $2,200-monthly
upkeep fee helps finance bullet-proof doors and around-the-clock surveillance.
The neighborhood police department is investigating the raid, a police
officer said on Saturday.
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Monday July 31, 12:18 am Eastern Time
TheStandard.com The Secret History By Brian Doherty
The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen (Random House)
Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity From Plymouth Rock to the Internet by
Robert Ellis Smith (Privacy Journal)
Do you consider yourself a private person? If yes, then I'll presume you don't have a listed phone
number and never use a credit card; you don't accept cookies from Web sites, or visit Web sites that
ask for your e-mail address (God forbid name and home address); you don't post to Usenet or join
e-mail lists or discuss anything personal over e-mail; you avoid city streets or shops with surveillance
cameras (look closely, they are everywhere); you don't use a cell phone; and you hide in the closet
when the census worker knocks on your door.
Maybe you aren't quite that private. It turns out that defining privacy is a somewhat knotty problem,
particularly when it comes to matters of regulation. Some think the law should protect your right to be
left alone as much as you want to be; others might say that one person's sense of intrusion is another's
exercise of liberty (like spam - demon spawn or legitimate tool of commerce?).
Two recent books have jumped into the debate with gloomy assessments of the state of privacy in
America: Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity From Plymouth Rock to the Internet
by Privacy Journal editor Robert Ellis Smith and The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of
Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen, legal writer for the New Republic.
These books, ostensibly about privacy, are mostly about privacy law, which is not necessarily the
same thing. Smith thoroughly reviews all of the judicial twists and turns that led to the current legal
conception of privacy - from an influential 1890 Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren Harvard Law
Review article to Supreme Court cases like Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965) and Planned
Parenthood vs. Casey (1992). These examples provide shifting and sometimes contradictory
opinions about our right to make personal decisions free of government interference.
Less comprehensive than Smith, Rosen focuses at length on two things: Bill Clinton's impeachment
and the rules of evidence in sexual harassment law, and the threat that computers present to our
control of personal information. According to Rosen, his two topics are united by "the importance of
maintaining private spaces to protect individuals from being judged out of context in a world of
fleeting attention spans."
Yet as the vague and ever-shifting legal formulations Smith and Rosen include show, it's hard to draw
a line between one person's liberty to investigate, speak and publish and another person's privacy.
Information - even if it's about you - doesn't necessarily belong to you. Once it is in someone else's
mind, legally suppressing it raises tricky First Amendment questions.
Privacy law is further complicated because there are two kinds of intrusion on privacy, with different
entities doing the intruding. One involves government interference in matters that aren't necessarily the
government's concern (like contraceptive use, at issue in the key privacy-defining Griswold case).
The other involves private entities spreading or using information about ourselves we would rather
others not know.
That second kind of intrusion has been made far easier and more prevalent by computers, as both
Smith and Rosen discuss. It is easy to tut-tut the loss of privacy inherent in the networked world. As
our list of things a truly private person must do to avoid observation and disturbance of any kind
illustrates, however, protecting privacy has costs - costs that most of us don't want to pay. That's
why people want to regulate things like spam and cookies.
It seems easier to legally restrict what other people can do than to worry about developing or using
technology to work around them. It may be even easier to realize that the benefits of the quick and
efficient spread of information perhaps outweigh any costs of a decrease in privacy.
After all, privacy is inherently vague. Neither decades of legal cases nor these two books have come
up with a definition on which most would agree. And we are hypocrites about it - we have an endless
curiosity for personal details about others even as we zealously protect our own.
Perhaps we worry about privacy more than it's worth worrying about anyway. Except when police
officers are the ones doing the violating, most of the privacy violations of the Internet age are weak
tea. In general, the worst you can expect is spam e-mail and junk mail that's better targeted toward
the interests you have expressed online.
In some cases, commercial trading of private information can cause you trouble - like inaccurate
credit reports, or insurance companies knowing too much about you. The former can be solved with
the distribution of better information - part of the positive side of the networked world that privacy
advocates often ignore. As for the latter, well, do you really have a right to insurance at rates that you
wouldn't have received had the insurance companies known more about you?
Those already in a frenzy over technology and privacy, though, should get out the smelling salts:
Privacy-disrupting technologies are only going to get better (or worse). Wealthy, concerned parents
will doubtless soon be able to equip their kids with global positioning system implants and send
remote controlled video cameras scurrying after them. Soon after that, not-so-wealthy parents will be
able to track their children, as well as anyone who wants to keep tabs on someone. We will all be
swirling haplessly in a giant fishbowl.
However, as social experiments in banning controversial things (alcohol, drugs, guns) show, legal
restrictions aren't likely to halt the spread of privacy-disrupting technologies, which all have benign
applications, too. Video cameras, for example, aren't going away any time soon.
Science fiction visionaries say grin and bear it, and combat it where you can. For every technology
that lets someone snoop, another usually comes along to protect someone from snoopers, such as
encryption technologies like Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.
And don't forget the advantages you give up by making privacy trump all other concerns. For
example, we didn't used to have devices in our homes - phones, doorbells, radios - that allow total
strangers to violate our privacy and talk to us with or without our permission. Still, with voicemail,
caller ID and other such devices we now manage to get a great deal of use out of that infernal ringing
machine.
Though Smith and Rosen are mostly concerned with government and the law, most of our privacy
concerns aren't going to end up in court. For the majority of us, our biggest privacy worry will be
what our ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend is saying about us. We're not apt to have intrusive magazine
articles written about us or have our picture used in an ad without our permission, as did some of the
people whose court cases helped to define privacy law. What most of us care about is private
privacy, not the sort of public-privacy horror stories that fill these books.
Rosen's vivid description of the privacy-destroying effects of recent changes in sexual harassment law
- and ongoing debates about encryption, DNA databases, biometric national ID cards and roving
wiretaps - should remind us of one thing: If our lives are becoming more of a fishbowl, it is most likely
the government that's putting a hook in us, not Internet companies or direct marketers - or nosy
neighbors.
Brian Doherty is an associate editor at Reason magazine
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