Posted on 07/19/2005 12:56:39 AM PDT by goldstategop
Will the civil libertarians please shut up now? If they had had their way, London’s public surveillance cameras would have been unplugged long ago, and the British police would not have quickly identified the 7/7 suicide bombers from their pictures in the King’s Cross and Luton train stations—a breakthrough crucial to tracking down other participants in the plot. The London attacks have exposed the privacy fanatics’ campaign against public cameras as folly; it is just a matter of time before reality crushes other civil libertarian excesses as well, including opposition to data mining and to immigration law enforcement.
Few crime-fighting technologies have inspired more hysterical rhetoric from privacy nuts than public cameras. Erecting a camera on a street corner where drugs are sold, say, has been portrayed as the stratagem of a totalitarian state intent on controlling a submissive public. And few anti-camera campaigners have matched the philosophical excesses of legal journalist and law professor Jeffrey Rosen. Rosen’s absurdities were penned after 9/11; they look even more embarrassing after 7/7.
Ironically, it was London’s recently vindicated camera network that had inspired Rosen’s flights of fancy. Rosen visited England in the weeks after 9/11 to report on the Orwellian nightmare that America risked replicating in an overreaction to the World Trade Center attacks. London has over half a million public cameras, according to the Wall Street Journal, the highest number anywhere. Rosen reported his findings in an October 2001 New York Times Magazine cover story and in his 2004 book, The Naked Crowd.
Rosen saw in England’s cameras less the heavy hand of a Gestapo or a Stasi and more the sophisticated stratagems of postmodern literary theory. Mimicking the French pseudo-historian Michel Foucault, Rosen charged that public cameras were “technologies of classification and exclusion.” As a “post-Marxist,” Foucault had left behind economics in favor of sexier topics like deviance and social control. Rosen’s take on cameras echoed Foucauldian obsessions. Public videos, said Rosen, are instruments of “social conformity. . . . They are ways of putting people in their place, of deciding who gets in and who stays out.”
This is trendy academic code for a much homelier reality—the reality, say, of a small business owner trying to protect his livelihood from shoplifters. Rosen was particularly incensed by Borders Books’ plan to install a face recognition system in its flagship Charing Cross store; the system would have recognized previously convicted Borders shoplifters. In Rosen’s view, this unjust system limited shoplifters’ freedom to reinvent themselves anew—in Rosen’s words, to “define and redefine their own reality.” Or, in less exalted language, to return to the scene of the crime undetected.
Besides shoplifters, what other courageous nonconformists do cameras seek to “classify and exclude?” Oh, terrorists, for one. London had erected a ring of cameras around its financial district in the 1990s after a string of Irish Republican Army bombings there. The strategy worked: the cameras had a measurable deterrent effect on the IRA’s campaign, the RAND Corporation’s Brian M. Jenkins recently told the New York Times.
But the toll of crime and terrorism are not the “far-reaching social costs” that Rosen worries about. Rather, this influential legal commentator frets about the loss of anti-authoritarian individualism that cameras induce. It is an article of faith among surveillance critics like Rosen, the ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt, and Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow that public videotaping produces crippling inhibitions in the public. Fearful of being filmed in all their glorious non-conformity, citizens will cower in their homes or venture into the public square only under constant behavioral self-censorship.
The idea that a society that has long defined the pinnacle of success as getting your picture on TV, where hordes of would-be exhibitionists vie to be humiliated on reality TV shows, where thousands of others erect video cameras in their homes to broadcast truly private behavior to millions on the Internet—the idea that such a publicity-ravenous society would care one iota about cameras on boulevards or in ATM facilities defies logic. But the privacy fanatics’ counterintuitive claim can be tested empirically. Are London girls any more inhibited about exposing vast swathes of midriff than girls in unsurveilled cities? Is foot traffic on Oxford Street less than one would expect from the population density? Did British streets empty upon the highly-publicized installation of cameras? These are all testable hypotheses; none of the privacy fear-mongers has suggested investigating them, much less done so; they know the results will expose their claims as fraudulent.
Ordinary people, you see, understand an elemental truth that continuously eludes the civil liberties lobby: public cameras only capture public behavior, behavior already observable by many more eyes than will ever watch a video feed from a nearby camera. In fact, the only people whom public cameras inhibit are criminals; they liberate the law-abiding public. Following the installation of seven video cameras in Los Angeles’s beleaguered MacArthur Park in 2004, the L.A.P.D. watched “in amazement” as crime plummeted, gangs, drug dealers, and pimps disappeared, and low-income families began returning to the park, reported the Los Angeles Times in October.
To be sure, London’s surveillance system did not deter the 7/7 attacks. It is difficult to think of any earthly measure that would deter a suicide bomber. But the ability to identify perpetrators within days of a terror event is the next best thing after prevention, especially when co-conspirators are still at large. London’s cameras provided an essential service to national security without any cost in civil liberties.
Don’t expect any second thoughts from the privacy lobby, however. Although Jeffrey Rosen has not been heard from after 7/7, a British privacy campaigner quoted in the Wall Street Journal remains stubbornly opposed to cameras. And other civil libertarian nostrums appear as comfortably sacrosanct after this latest attack as before. National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg fretted recently that advising transit riders to watch for suspicious behavior could lead to “racial profiling.”
But although the civil-libertarian crusaders are unchanged by this latest attack, their authority may not be so untouchable. A New York Times article on public cameras in American transit systems last week failed to quote a single privacy advocate on the terrible social repercussions of such surveillance, an omission almost unthinkable a month ago. The only public cameras that we need to unplug after 7/7 are those that the mainstream media once reliably trained on privacy doomsayers
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Maybe there is some value in public cameras as a deterrent. Other than that, they seem to be fairly useless. They certainly haven't been useful in stopping a crime once it's started. We have some film from 9/11 of the terrorist boarding the planes. Likewise, a film of the terrorist in London was discovered after the attack.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
They worked SO WELL the PREVENT the London bombing, didn't they??? NOT!!!!
Deterrent value = zero.
Meanwhile, the Toronto Transit Commission have announced to all the local news agencies and over the air to all the ships at sea that their cameras are so few and so low-tech that they would never ever be of any use in capturing terrorists or identifying them. They expect that maybe in 2009 they will have some 1970s technology if they can find a garage sale in a real city somewhere, so if you are planning to blow up a major subway system, better make it the TTC.
Then they went back to agonizing about the upcoming liquor store strike.
The way I see it, the cameras replace what we used to have....an observant and discriminating public which would not tolerate lawbreakers in their midst. When society gets huge with no brakes on behavior we get modern society. This is a small step towards replacing that and conclusions like "deterrent value= 0" don't match the facts presented in the rest of the article.
" They worked SO WELL the PREVENT the London bombing, didn't they??? NOT!!!!"
Erm, deterring suicide bombers is well, tough. Most other crimes, on the other hand...
Better than cameras are an armed citizenry with the gumption to hold criminals caught in the act, and beat the hell out of them if necessary, until the cops arrive.
Cameras are nothing more than an excuse for government "to do something" so lazy people need not self-govern their communities.
A self-governing community will pour citizens into the streets by the dozens when the call "Help!" is heard. A camera can't do that.
So we have to give up our privacy (and don't feed me that cr*p about "public spaces"--there is great difference between observation by the general public and continuous observation by big brother) to make you feel better. As I said--the actual deterrent value is zero. A huge cost in real dollars to install, maintain, and pay "watchers", and the bottom line is IT DIDN'T WORK.
And it will NEVER work as a significant deterrent, the "facts" in the article notwithstanding.
I don't agree they deter all crime - at least not terrorism. The terrorists DON'T CARE - THEY'LL BE BLOWN UP.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.