Surveillance and Super Databases
New Privacy Threats in the Information and Technology Age
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center warn of the potential for privacy abuses stemming from new systems and proposed methods.
"Video surveillance has doubled in the last five years, and will likely more than double again by 2010," says a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union. The report, entitled "Under the Watchful Eye," says video surveillance by itself is a big enough threat to our privacy. But that threat is multiplied when combined with emerging technologies, such as face recognition software, and expanding database access by law enforcement agencies.
"I think the biggest threat," says Michael Soller, spokesman at the ACLU of Southern California, "comes from the collision of government surveillance and private surveillance, in terms of databases, and in terms of American's willingness to hand over their private information, and be subjected to government surveillance cameras."
The United States' Real ID Act
Plans for super databases are well underway. Take the United States' Real ID Act, passed in 2005, which calls for a de facto national ID card, including digital photos, which would be issued by state DMVs, bringing the nation a hair's breadth away from a mega database interconnecting all 50 states. Several states have challenged the act, and the Senate recently rejected funding, but the Department of Homeland Security is still fighting for its implementation.
The DHS claims tools like the Real ID will make people safer, and cites a passage from "The 9/11 Commission Report": "For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons ... All but one of the 9/11 hijackers acquired some form of identification document, some by fraud."
But sacrificing more privacy isn't likely to protect society any better from terrorists. It wasn't a lack of information which kept America from preventing 9/11, but colossal mismanagement inside intelligence agencies. Upwards of 50 CIA agents had good reason to believe Al Qaeda operatives were in the country prior to the attacks, but failed to put the suspects on a State Department watch list, or share the information with the FBI.
Who Watches the Watchers?
Moreover, when that much information is gratuitously put into the hands of law enforcement, there's no knowing what they will do with it. Witness the reluctance of the FBI to discuss details of its surveillance efforts, even viewing the pesky formality of getting a warrant for email surveillance and wiretaps as a nuisance. The question is, who watches the watchers, making sure our data isn't used against us?
"One of the big concerns," says Guilherme Roschke, Skadden Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "is how we really are lacking in privacy oversight. It's hard to penetrate these federal agencies and find out what it is that they're doing."
Technological advances keep making it easier for the government to obtain and crunch data about us. Think of the potential combination of video surveillance with face recognition software. According to the ACLU, this could be used to track attendance at political rallies, for example, which could have an enormous chilling effect on our rights of free speech and free assembly.
Of course, the technological genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle. But it can be controlled better to safeguard civil rights. "When you create these tools of surveillance," says Roschke, "the tool is neutral. We need the laws to make sure they're used properly."
Soller agrees. "Even if we can't stop certain technologies," he says, "we can put protections in them. That's going to be the battle for the next 100 years."
The next 100 years?
"There are powerful interests," says Soller, "who are going to keep coming back to these technologies and they're going to keep selling them to the American public as things that will make us safer."
(To see how personal information is swapped around like trading cards by private companies, read: "Protecting Personal Information.")
