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All Crime All the Time 10 July 2008 #151
All Crime All the Time
By Dr Dave McIntyre, Director, Integrative Center for Homeland Security,10 July 2008
The funny thing about technology, is that sometimes when we use it to control a problem, the technology ends up controlling us. Technology is not mean or wicked – it is just logical. And that can raise some logical questions . . . which I will share with you, if you will give me Just a Minute for Homeland Security.
I’m Dave McIntyre, Director of the Integrative Center for Homeland Security at Texas A&M.
Four things have combined to raise unprecedented questions about the degree to which we want video cameras to observe our every move. First was legal precedent from several years back suggesting that no one has a right to expect privacy in any public place, from a sidewalk to a restroom. This has been accompanied by the dramatic fall in the price of cameras, allowing them to be placed everywhere, from street corners to business offices. Technology developed after 9/11 allows public and private camera systems to be networked, so that an operator with the right preparation can follow a person seamlessly from a street camera, to a subway camera, to a camera in a private restaurant. And finally, the consolidation of new police intelligence capabilities into fusion centers has given some localities more resources than they can actually employ against existing terrorist threats.
New York City may be living on the edge of attack every moment, but many places in middle America are using cameras and other new police intelligence capabilities to identify other wrong doers, under what they call an “all crimes” concept. Using counter terror resources against crimes that support terrorism – like smuggling or bank robbery – makes great sense. And so does using them against other major crimes, like murder. But at some point, logic suggests that the huge apparatus of state surveillance will end up chasing some pretty mundane criminals.
This is not paranoid speculation. It is reality in Great Britain, where a terrorist threat, the greatest use of surveillance cameras in the world, and the application of security networks against “all crime,” have combined to produce hundreds of cases of police using high technology to prosecute litterers, illicit users of handicapped parking spaces, and people who don’t pick up after there dog. The BBC reported one family who had their every movement tracked by camera for two weeks as officials tried to prove that they had children attending schools outside the district where they lived. [1] This is not an isolated case. More than 3,000 people were targeted by “all crime TV” last year. Logic says that official policy will come here, and if it is ever married with the ability to impose civil fines – as we do with speeder and red light cameras – watch out. We could soon be seeing “All Crime Television” . . . all the time.
This is Dave McIntyre, Director of the Integrative Center for Homeland Security at Texas A&M, inviting you to join us again next week on Just a Minute, for Homeland Security.
[1] The BBC has run a series of reports on this subject, available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7468430.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7369543.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/dorset/7343445.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/dorset/7341179.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7230476.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tees/6994381.stm