Get ready – maybe you’re on camera !

 

                            By Kenneth Bagnell

 

    In the days after the dreadful Boston bombing of April 15, the air was filled with information that was often contradictory, sometimes incorrect. The bombing was a profound tragedy destroying lives of individuals and families on all sides. But when it came to public opinion one was almost unanimous,  at least in the media which  often mirrors public opinion: images caught on storefront surveillance cameras were seen as key to the successful pursuit of the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, both sad to say, Muslim. (The former died in a shootout, the latter is, as I write, in prolonged and serious condition in hospital.) Boston’s commendable paper, The Boston Globe,  promptly ran an editorial  expressing a view I expect is broadly based: “Surveillance cameras: a tool for deterrence.” Probably.  But there’s more to be said.  

   Let’s say I’m out for a walk in the city where I live, Toronto. I stroll south on Yonge St. from Bloor Street to College, a section lined by small shops. I pause now and then to look in windows, once or twice to enter a store, browsing or maybe buying a notepad. When I reach College I cross to the easterly side of Yonge and head back to Bloor, again dropping in as I did on the opposite side. Two friends, one a veteran Toronto police officer in the area, the other a knowing citizen of the neighbourhood, insist my likeness will be, at the end of my walk, on forty maybe fifty cameras, outdoor ones, indoor ones or both. (Maybe also, of course, on social media.) Does this matter? To me, it does. To some people it’s a very worrying trend. They don’t like it.

          The case for official surveillance cameras (CCTV) in public places comes first from police forces who aren’t just self-serving. They’re truly concerned with citizen safety. Most large Canadian municipalities now have the cameras, Toronto leading with about 40 but they’re across the country in smaller numbers.  (The total number is virtually trivial  compared to the eleven thousand on London’s subway.)  The  cameras  are encouraged, in general  by voices like that of thoughtful journalist  Marcus Gee who way back in 2009 wrote a column  in The Globe & Mail with a telling caption: “Toronto would be a safer place with a camera on every corner.” His argument I expect, isn’t meant to primarily please the police but the public. Spokesmen from both private and police sectors express enthusiasm for the cameras more and more: Michael Thompson of Toronto city council predicting: “More cameras will be utilized in the city.” And Superintendent Douglas Quan of the Toronto Police Services, said in The National Post: “It’s another tool to make communities safer.”

          I can respect their opinion,  provided the cameras are highly and closely supervised, even restrained. Why the qualification?  Because a strong case can be made for another point of view , one I  lean toward.  A camera on every street corner to monitor traffic, can readily lead to cameras everywhere to monitor you and me. That’s a major matter we often don’t recognize.. Prolific reliance on cameras in public spaces can lead to something worse. As many privacy advocates observe,  the science of surveillance is developing in ways so intrusive George Orwell could not have imagined it. Consider the technological process called, “biometric identification.” It will allow cameras, say in a shopping plaza, to record and compile you and your facial characteristics. That, in turn, can be stored in a “data base,” for retrieval, examination and identification purposes, some of them commercial or nefarious. (Some video firms that do this have the audacity to say that once they have your likeness on file in their database, they regard you as having been “enrolled.” (Talk about Orwellian.)

      So if this takes place, personal privacy– – the precious right to be left alone — is virtually past.  No wonder  a privacy rights scholar in San Diego, Beth Givens, put it so bluntly a week ago in The Los Angeles Times:   “ I’m looking forward in horror,” she said, “to the day when security cameras are equipped with facial recognition  biometrics.  When that day comes, there will be no anonymity in public spaces.” Should there be anonymity?  Most people would  or should  say yes.  Not just because they might be filmed entering a strip bar, but because they don’t want Big Brother overseeing  their  rather routine lives day after day after day.  Forever.

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