In a post on Tech Central Station, Professor Reynolds overlooks certain benefits of surveillance cameras. The professor says:
As a deterrent, at least, they were a failure. Civil libertarians fear these cameras, with some reason (my guess is that they’ll be used more to catch parking scofflaws and to dig up dirt on political opponents than to reduce crime or terrorism) but the real story is their ineffectiveness. Every cop sitting in a control room, eating doughnuts and watching monitors, could be out on the street, looking at things with his or her own eyes and in a position to do something about what he or she sees. Nonetheless, the response to the London bombings will probably include a call for more, not fewer, cameras.
That’s a mistake. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in a superb essay published just after 9/11 (but sadly no longer available online), London’s “ring of steel” camera network never caught a terrorist…
Professor Reynolds overlooks the following benefits (to the watchers, anyway):
Well, I guess this means that good looking women will have little luck committing crimes. Perhaps this is why Winona got caught???
Of course, criminals/terrorists will now start recruiting hot babes into their gangs/cells so they can divert the cameras’ attention. Like chaff to radar I tell you.
Regards,
St Wendeler
Another Rovian Conspiracy
The cameras are not ogling. The individuals for whom they are an extension are ogling. Do you suppose they wouldn’t be ogling if they were present in the same location behind sunglasses or any other observation post?
It is women, as well as elders and infirm, who have the most to gain from the extended police presence cameras give to each existing officer. To have multiplied police observation points in our deepest subways and darkest public passageways is to deter the crimes of opportunity which are almost always unleashed on these populations by cowards who previoulsy had reason to believe they would escape detection.
It is also cameras and other recording technologies which expose the crimes and excesses of public officials, previously hidden from our view by the Code of Silence. They can be abused, as any tool or weapon, but they can also be more readily subpoenaed and give damning testimony than can corrupted human officials.
I know its very popular to indulge oneself in the celebrated outrages of the Big Brother storyline, brought to us by an anti-American socialist. Orwell never visited the United States he deplored. And its doubtful that he cared to examine how our profoundly successful system of Constitutional checks and balances would transcend the totalitarianism he thought had to flow from capitalism. Our oversights of democtratic authority can and should free us to venture forward into those promises human innovation and technologies hold, knowing that our errors and failures are more honestly and readily correctible than in most other cultures.
But before assuming we cannot abide by state of the art technology because of our human flaws, please consider who the people are who will be paying a disproportionately hard price for such a techno-puritanism. The weak, the most preyed upon, the least armed, the least well off and connected.
Might most of not better endure a few excesses of official discretion, hopefully called to answer for them at least as well as they always have been, rather than making the least able among us pay a crushing price for letting truly bad actors continue to go undetected?
sho nuff rufus!
rufus, you’re far too optimistic. If everyone was watched equally, and if everyone could watch equally, you might have a point. It would not be a society I much like, but it would at least be equitable, with the option to “expose the crimes and excesses of public officials” as you say. But the nature of the thing is that there are only a few watchers, and nobody gets to watch the watchers. For example, in places where police cars have cameras, you will find the records are readily available if a suspect does something bad, but mysteriously disappear (“technical difficulties”) when the police does something bad.
All this is not a new idea, google Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (for example here and here). That may not be Hell, but it is a very good approximation. No thanks.
To have multiplied police observation points in our deepest subways and darkest public passageways is to deter the crimes of opportunity which are almost always unleashed on these populations by cowards who previoulsy had reason to believe they would escape detection.
You might have a point if there was any evidence that the additional observation served to deter crime. From England’s crime rates over the last decade and the recent terror attacks (as more and more of their ‘policing’ has been via camera) one would have to say that there’s precious little proof that it does. Not only that, but officers on the beat have the ability to detect and react to crime as or before it occurs, as opposed to remote officers that no matter how enhanced their detection ability becomes are essentially powerless to actively prevent crime. Deetection and evidence collection only help after someone has become a victim. Therefore every cop watching a monitor is one unavailable to actually prevent people from being victimized.
…please consider who the people are who will be paying a disproportionately hard price for such a techno-puritanism. The weak, the most preyed upon, the least armed, the least well off and connected.
The solution to that isn’t to give the government more power, it’s to empower those citizens to protect themselves. Assure self defense and the tools to effective defend oneself as basic human rights (this is also the first and most important check and/or balance of democracy). Allow citizens to decide where and how they’ll be policed and protected. Get rid of laws that turn ordinary citizens into criminals and tie up police that could be better employed on more serious crimes.
The objection isn’t to the technology of cameras, the objection is to cameras for the exclusive and unchecked use by the state. The only real assurance that we have that the cameras are actually being used for our protection is the word of the state. This makes the naive assumption that the state is always truthful and always (or even usually) acts in the best interests of it’s citizens. No state ever has, no state ever will. And while you bask in the false security of a protective, mothering government, their agents are oggling your mother.