Look what just popped up in the sleepy little beach town of Leucadia, California.
Look… up in the sky… it’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s… a government surveillance camera recording citizens’ activity.
I’m guessing the city got a federal grant to install it. Just for traffic safety, you know. Nothing to be alarmed about.
And to get the sheeple used to being monitored, much as they’ve become accustomed to being groped by TSA goons for the privilege of air travel… or to allowing no-knock warrants and asset forfeiture without due process in the name of the “War on Drugs.” Heck, no one even noticed when Obama signed a bill allowing the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge.
Are you OK with this, America?
Look into my eyes… you are getting safer, safer, you are getting safer,
My good W.C.,
If you want to observe a superb tool to render citizens not only accepting but joyous about these and other such evolutions, watch a number of episodes of CSI: NY in succession, as Mac and Stella and crew use the wonderful new technologies available to them (quite a few, of course, still fictional and melodramatically graphic) in fusion to separate the good guys begging to log their fingerprints, DNA reference samples, cervical indices, penile lengths and girths, and anything else they can possible volunteer from that tiny, maladjusted segment of society who resist.
And, truly, what good and sane citizen would in his right mind leave any desires of the taciturn, underacting, and exemplary Mac Taylor unsatisfied? And did you know he lost his wife in 9/11 and plays bass in a band?
Compliant with any and all CSI:NY protocols: good.
Non-compliant any and all CSI:NY protocols: sociopathic.
All of which is only to say that Big Brother cannot really do very much if Little Brother and Sister are not already in motion, hand in hand, running to leap into his arms.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Nothing a few dozen halfway-decent shooters with .22 shorts couldn’t take care of.
Plus there is the benefits to such shooting of receiving free room and board from your fellow citizens for a few years or so.
Surveillance of public areas doesn’t bug me overmuch; I don’t expect to have privacy thereabouts anyway. But maybe I’m just weird like that . . . .
My good MI,
There are several aspects to regard in all of this. The problem is not so much the random, isolated elements that might be represented by, say, both Susie and Camera Alpha410Delta spending Monday, April 16, 2012 – but only Monday, April 16, 2012 – people-watching the public square, in the course of which both observe citizen MI patronizing the footnote store on fully three separate occasions. In and of itself, of course, this would be innocuous.
The problem comes into play when one party in the government-citizen equation but not both or all begins to eliminate the randomness and isolatedness of such ongoing observations of public life by integrating and fusing more and more elements of public, semi-public, semi-private, and private activity (this TSA-scanned vagina is sporting a tampon string, that one is not; skip the former, hit on the latter) into a more and more seamless whole, the sort of seamless whole we might understand intellectually from Sunday school as part and parcel of the power represented by omniscient divine monitoring but which we for the most part since the days of early Judea have come to expect not to be arrayed as such a one-sided power of knowledge over us outside of those societies defined by significant domestic police sectors heavily peopled with domestic spies.
If all of this were as mutually transparent as the innocent public square – Camera Alpha410Delta sees both you and Susie; Susie sees both you and Camera Alpha410Delta; you see both Susie and Camera Alpha410Delta – or even as mutually empowered as the no-longer-so-innocent public square – Camera Alpha410Delta continuously records both you and Susie; Susie continuously records both you and Camera Alpha410Delta; you continuously record both Susie and Camera Alpha410Delta things might remain perennially as innocuous, if a bit more complex; perhaps the three of you ultimately decide to mutually take a break from all that recording and grab a bite to eat together on the patio of the little bistro across from the footnote store.
The problem of lopsided, one-sided god-like omniscient power and control over all others comes into play when the integration of previously innocuous public and semi-public elements leads, as anyone who has ever casually integrated easily available public Internet information knows it does, to the derivation, discovery, and then further integration of semi-private and private information that can ultimately lead to either control of individual behavior, the steering and selection of individual life options, or all.
But, then again, the problem ultimately is not the seeking and advance of such one-sided power by one or more parties over others – human history would not be human history without such reflexes of human nature. The problem ultimately is the self-conditioned acceptance and acquiescence to it, something as simple, as easy and as comfortable as filling out and sending in that American Community Survey so those pesky phone calls during TV time will stop.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Will need to think about this some. Query: have you read Brin’s “Transparent Society”?
My good MI,
No, I believe I read several of his other works, including some collaborations with Benford, but not that one.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
It’s a non-fiction book; the associated website is here:
davidbrin.com/transparent.htm
As I recall, he argues that mutual transparency – i.e., where surveillance observes the activities of government agents, as well as citizens in public places – would help preserve freedom. It’s an interesting notion. Not sure how I feel about it.
(because we have already exhausted our 5-deep nesting)
My good MI,
To my mind, Schneier (linked from within the Brin link) seems to have the stronger argument, at least insofar as it would seem to be more conceptually consistent with the assumptions that undergird the Constitution, to wit, that those who could and would control the citizenry should be presumed to inevitably tyrannize them and so should be procedurally hobbled from any such potential attempts at any and every turn, while just the opposite – that is, every opportunity to contain, control, and retard the grasp of government – should be made freely available to the citizenry.
What seems to mitigate against this – cameras on the governors rather than on the governed – are the perennial vices to liberty of expediency and comfort that technology is indiscriminately tasked to deliver: because cameras cost less than more circumscribed alternatives, we citizens can now keep an extra $X that we might otherwise have to pay in taxes to preserve our privacy and liberties, with which we can now purchase something more immediately and obviously appealing to us. And, really, at the end of the day, is being cared for as a drone in the hive really all that bad, particularly when we all get GPS-trackable 4G smartphones to play with, to boot? With respect to the Commerce Clause, wouldn’t it just be more comfortable to set our constitutional sphincters on fully open? No more painful straining to differentiate this from that.
By comparison, Brin’s approach appears to me in the end to be effectively academic wishful thinking, on the order of “can’t we just all get along and live, open and naked, in a new technological harmony?”
At the end of the day, our values as citizens inform and drive our technology and its fruits. For example, we have a rather sexually free and open society now, at least in the West, heavily underwritten and enabled by technology, and yet we still have no qualms about carving out extremely strict prohibitive stria against child pornography.
A different complex of values, similarly strictly parsed, could deliver us both technology and liberty and personal privacy, albeit simply not with the same portions of comfort and expediency we appear to desire now.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
The bill had overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. Roughly 90-10 in favor in the Senate. A bit closer in Congress. A veto would not have mattered. I think H.M. Stuart’s point about people wanting this kind of bill is pertinent.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/112-2011/h932
Steve
Those of us who grew up in small towns or close-knit neighborhoods never expected privacy in the public realm. Since most of our basic legal and constitutional documents were written by people who grew up in such places, it follows that the original intent of the Founders would have been perfectly okay with nosy neighbors and senior citizens with too much time on their hands observing and reporting on the misbehavior of their neighbors. Whether they would be okay with mechanizing or digitizing that function today, when anybody capable of observing and reporting accurately is probably off at a job, or too intimidated by misbehaving neighbors to report to anybody, is a whole other question, worthy of extensive research. But there is certainly nothing outrageous about street cameras used merely to observe the behavior and misbehavior of ordinary citizens on the street. I might feel differently about it if such cameras also included sound recording. That would raise serious First Amendment issues.
Why do I really like street cameras? Because the Wired Family has lived for forty years a few doors away from an intersection between a main street which has been designated as a federally funded artery and a couple of side streets. That intersection is within a 3- block radius of three elementary schools and a senior citizens housing development. The designation of a local street as a “federally-funded artery” apparently means that the Department of Energy wants to encourage traffic on that street to move quickly, so as to save fuel (never mind that the city speed limit on such streets is 30 mph.–most real-world traffic on this particular street moves between 45 and 60 mph.) So anyway, I spent four years, on behalf of a paper organization called Society of Tired and Outraged Pedestrians, lobbying local, state, and federal officials to get the speed limit reduced, at least within our neighborhood, or to install stop signs or traffic lights or at least a few reminder signs that, under Illinois law, pedestrians have the right of way at any intersection except where there is a traffic light and it says “Don’t Walk.” Our efforts failed at every level. And then our new mayor discovered traffic cameras, and the fact that the city can make money by busting drivers for speeding, running stop signs and red lights, and other egregiously bad driving. He is not exactly my favorite politician, but unless he does something really outrageous during the rest of his term, I will vote to re-elect him just on the strength of the traffic cameras.