One of the most insightful comments I’ve had about my current employer
when along the lines of this: You’re the most paranoid person I know.
Now you’re a professional paranoid for The Man. It’s perfect! There’s
a twisted logic there that makes sense.
Today I played Big Brother. I was the guy behind the proverbial (ahem!)
mirrored glass. I was the guy watching the screen that goes to the camera
that was watching you. Yes, I was the guard of the panopticon.
One of the key lessons of the day is that mass surveillance serves only to
advise the distribution of resources. The cameras I watched were primarily
used to monitor the arrival of flights and the crowd movements of a couple
thousand people. Officers can be allowed to leave the inspection area to
take care of other business when there are no passengers. Surveillance
makes it possible to have enough advanced notice that they can be called
back to greet arrivals. The result is you never show up and find there’s
nobody to let you in.
A second lesson is that the ratio of data examined to data collected is
effectively 1/∞. Somewhere there is a computer storing the movements
of every one of the thousands of people who moved through the airport
today. From their approach to their movement through the airport to their
departure – every second was on camera. I don’t know how many cameras the
airport has but I suspect they number over a thousand. The mass of data is
so great it it would take over three continious years for one person to
examine one day’s recordings. (Ten people? Three months.) How fast would
that fill up your hard-drive? The honest truth is people aren’t very
interesting to watch on a surveillance camera. All the nuances that makes
“people watching” fun are lost unless you get lucky. I saw someone dancing
on the tarmac while he waited for a late flight to arrive, but the only
reason I noticed is I was waiting for it too. Web cams were the neat-o
thing a while back, but they kinda when the way of the blink tag. With
good reason.
Surveillance is only useful when something has happened, or you’re waiting
for something specific to happen. I think that’s the problem Reality TV
runs into on occasion – when nothing happens, nobody watches. If we know
someone interesting is arriving we can watch them all the way through the
airport. In our case, so we can have them met by officers. If we want to
know where someone came from (e.g. so we can send them back there) we can
follow them backwards to their origin. But until someone becomes
interesting, they’re just players in a film that will never be watched.
This kinda makes art/activist adventures like the Surveillance Camera
Players’ and World
Sousveillance Day a waste when the object is security cameras and the
audience The Watchers because… we probably won’t notice. Those around
you will though and that’s probably more important anyway. Taking a photo
of me in uniform, however, may result in the removal of your film
because I don’t want my face on a “Dead or Alive” poster (something that
never occurs to most people), but that doesn’t have much to do with
surveillance cameras.
Though my employers have implemented a biometric
system or two, the experience so far is that they aren’t worth the
time or money. INSPASS has effectively been cancelled, the machines gather
dust in the inspection area like punch-card computers. NSEERS is continued
despite it’s gross inefficiencies (cost/number of arrests) for national
security reasons (heh).
The ACLU
warns that Americans “havent yet felt the full potential of the new
technology for invading privacy because of latent inefficiencies in how
government and businesses handle information.” I agree, but to be honest,
the more I know about how its done the more comfortable I get. One of the
greatest ironies of the Pentagon’s now-notorious Total
Information Awareness project is that its head, Rear Adm. John
Poindexter, would be a target of constant detentions and searches because
of his felony convictions. Do you think Mr. Poindexter will reconsider
when gets deported from somewhere because of his previous convictions?
Maybe he doesn’t travel.
In my opinion anyone intent on undermining the such a system should be
calling for zero tollerance enforcement instead of a
moratorium on development of a single database. Besides, it’s networks
of databases
you have to worry about, not a centralized database. Yes, it’s always the
private sector that pioneers
these things in the first place. But we must remember that even when
money’s involved, it’s not
easy to sync the person and the action even if you get
all the information correct.
None of which, of course, means you shouldn’t join the fight to protect your rights.
——
UPDATE 01/26/03: The U.S. Senate’s been on an anti-Orwell roll recently
first they suspended
funding Total Information Awarness and then they did the same to the
National Security
Entry-Exit Registration System. Both of these programs it the presses
hard recently which might explain the Upper House’s special attention.