The Surveillance State

A friend recently got pulled over by the police while running errands in town. We live in a green suburb of New York, a wealthy town with no violent crime, and very little property crime. We have an active police force that patrols for traffic violations and my friend was driving below the speed limit when stopped and had not run any stop signs or red lights.

As the officer approached her car, she rolled down her window, got out her driver's license, and put her hands on the steering wheel. These are the defensive positions African Americans have to take when pulled over by the police, even in safe, leafy suburbs. The officer greeter her and asked for her license. She asked why she was pulled over and he replied that she was driving without insurance. Her car had been in an accident and and she was driving a new car with a different insurance policy that had a two day gap in coverage and she was driving in that gap.

"How did you know that before pulling me over," she asked.

It was then that the officer explained that Port Washington had been wired with 22 street surveillance cameras that scan license plates and look up outstanding violations, warrants, insurance gaps, inspection expirations, and any other issue that can be investigated. Notifications are sent to the police in seconds after the scan, with alerts about the make and model of the car, last seen location, and direction of travel. The police just need to find the car and verify the license plate with their own cameras and pull over the car to write a ticket.

It is an amazingly efficient system that has an obvious ROI to a police department that makes most of its operating revenue from traffic violations. What is shocking however, is that this system was implemented without widespread public notification or review. There is no ongoing public oversight over how the system is implemented, and if the officers show racial or gender bias when cars are pulled over, how many tickets are issued, and if any of the drivers are arrested. One can easily imagine many scenarios for abuse in a society like America with diminishing trust in public institutions, widespread racism, and polarization along political lines.

A similar system was tried in Boston and discontinued after six months after an audit revealed that police used the system to target the same vehicles and ignored many others.

Throughout the world, public authorities are wiring our cities and towns with surveillance technology that transfers huge powers to the state with little public oversight. Its not a democracy when an unelected police force can use technology developed by private sector firms to monitor civilian life and pick who gets charged with crimes. We the public should be ALARMED about the increasing use of public/private partnerships to transfer political power from elected governments to private firms and police without public participation, oversight, and transparency.

These tools threaten the future of privacy and democracy in our societies and we need new political forums and tools to inject public control over their use and implementation. The political order of the 18th and 19th centuries was not designed to protect the public from 24/7 surveillance. The privacy nightmare scenarios of the late 1990's are becoming reality at an alarming pace today and the public is largely uninformed, uninvolved, and unrepresented in key decisions in how technology is being deployed to collect data about everything.

Left unchecked, most western democracies will resemble China in a decade.