The Road to Safety

The fallout from the Boston Marathon bombings didn't take long to settle upon all of us and begin to contaminate what remains of a free and open society.  This kind of a thing was inevitable and it would be a challenge to find anyone overly surprised by how it's played out so far.  What isn't inevitable is where it all ultimately goes.  We can buy into the panic or simply sit back and watch, both of which will ensure more paranoia and less freedom.  Or we can take on the frustrating and seemingly hopeless task of fighting the tide of hysteria that masquerades as common sense.  It's at precisely such times in history that opposing voices carry more weight, so we should embrace the challenge.

It took a shamefully brief amount of time for authorities to put forward specific plans for increased surveillance of the populace, almost as if they were just waiting for a weak moment where such ill-advised plans could gain traction.  We quickly heard talk of the need for real-time cameras throughout cities, drones to patrol from the skies, increased methods of monitoring communications, and the like.  New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly actually expressed his approval that "The privacy issue has really been taken off the table."  But not one bit of any of this could have prevented what happened in Boston.

The fact that we need to come to terms with - and it's one that has always been with us - is that bad things can be done by people with certain agendas even if we're all being watched all of the time.  Nothing short of constant thought monitoring can prevent them, and, if it were technologically possible, you can bet these same proponents would be telling us we couldn't possibly have a safe society without our minds being read.  We can appreciate that absurdity and the danger it would pose because it's such a clear invasion from our current perspective.  But what exists in our everyday lives today would have seemed just as offensive to our freedom mere decades ago.  We ought to step back and rethink developments from that perspective.

Do surveillance cameras prevent crime?  Not according to crime statistics.  They can, however, be quite useful in finding culprits after the fact, as they did in Boston.  But the cameras that did this were privately run, not government run.  The difference is significant.  A surveillance system run by a business or an individual is designed to record what happens in a specific area that is of interest to that entity.  One that is operated by the authorities is there to keep an eye on everyone and to link all of this information together, as well as interface with all sorts of databases and tracking technology.  One has a level of control while the other is out of control.  As mentioned, the latter would have done nothing to prevent the crime that took place in Boston, nor could it in the vast majority of cases.  What it could do, though, is track movements of all kinds of innocent civilians for all sorts of reasons, all without oversight or explanation.

There have already been numerous examples of this: patrons of a gay nightclub being identified and blackmailed by corrupt police (Washington D.C.), members of minority groups targeted and tracked at a level twice that of others (United Kingdom), countless incidents of women being spied upon by lecherous camera operators (too many to cite), and a great deal more.  And these are just the incidents that somehow were exposed.  So many others never will be, since these systems are run by the very authorities who abuse them.

This is a familiar pattern that holds true whenever some entity holds power over someone else.  System administrators violate user privacy, phone engineers listen in on customer conversations, police run license plates on anyone they want because they can, corporate executives pilfer funds due to the access they have.  In short, where there is trust given to authority, that trust will at some point be abused.  It doesn't matter how infrequently it happens; the fact is that it's inevitable.  And when this trust is given out on such a massive scale as to include our comings and goings, facial recognition, fingerprint scanning, monitoring of our Internet activity, at some point we're going to simply forget that it was ever any other way.  Abuses won't even be noticed because they'll become so pervasive.  That is when we lose for real, all without becoming any safer.  It's that pursuit of safety which is the key.  Remember, for these tactics to be accepted, we must have fear of what could happen if they weren't.

Then there is the potential for selective- or over-enforcement of minor violations.  Imagine being fined every time you went a mile above the speed limit or jaywalked.  Or if one of those new license plate scanners instantly nailed you for an overdue parking ticket or tax bill.  We would eventually be culled into a nation of obedient automatons, unable to violate any existing regulation and afraid of whatever new ones might come along.

If there's one thing we've learned from the Internet, it's that many voices are better than one.  The same holds true for eyes.  We are all watching and documenting in various ways.  When people work together, much can be accomplished.  When word went out in Boston on who to look for, it was that mass collaboration that resulted in information, not a centralized point of authority tracking everyone in real time.  It wasn't needed then and it won't be needed in the future, so long as people work together and we use technology intelligently.

Sure, the argument can be made that with all-seeing surveillance from the State, no stone will be at risk of being unturned.  After all, what would have happened had that initial image not been captured by a private security camera?  Odds are quite strong that it simply would have been caught through another source.  In this day and age, where you can't even trip on a sidewalk without someone capturing it on video, very little seems to go undocumented.  But having that information gathered and managed by members of society rather than government eyes makes it far less of a threat to our freedom.

Even the private surveillance scenario can be open to government abuse, as we recently saw in Philadelphia.  In that city, businesses were promised grant money for setting up their own surveillance cameras.  The catch?  The police had to be given remote login abilities so they could tap in anytime.  So even when people run their own systems independent of law enforcement, it won't stop those entities from trying to get access anyway.  This time it was an enticement.  Next time, it could easily be a threat.

Of course, this goes well beyond surveillance.  Emotional cries to bypass due process were heard since it risked making the investigation harder and since the good guys always get away with it on TV.  This same argument is used to justify torture, because sometimes our system is too slow and gets in the way of immediate answers and satisfaction.  And proponents of "shoot first, ask questions later," and "guilty until proven innocent" gained some real traction.

It's precisely when we feel most vulnerable that our system of justice should be most valued.  If it's only applied when things are going well and discarded when we grow impatient or feel threatened, then it will soon cease to exist altogether.  Any accusation that terrorists want to destroy the values that we hold dear can be overwritten by the fact that we managed to do it first.

We hope intelligent people don't fall into the trap of assuming that the rise of the surveillance state is a foregone conclusion.  One has only to look at the failed system of the United Kingdom to realize that sticking millions of cameras everywhere does precious little to stop crime and everything to make people feel more fearful and paranoid.

This battle is far from over, but it's vital that those who feel concern about this speak up and force the issue, rather than simply accept someone else's conclusion.  Inevitably, if surveillance does become a far greater constant in our lives, it will only be a stepping stone.  The background noise of fear will never dissipate and more sacrifices will have to be made to our freedoms in order to attain that level of peace that will never actually arrive.  Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, the use of encryption, anonymity - pick a basic value and it will most certainly be facing extinction.

Fear is one of the most powerful motivators there is.  Those who use it as such know exactly what they're doing.  They are either horribly misguided or are truly working against a free and open society.  Consequently, they do not have our best interests at heart.