On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 03:26:51PM -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:56:14AM -0800, Greg Broiles wrote: | | According to the LA Times at | <http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/updates2/lat_cameras010201.htm>, | police used real-time face recognition systems to scan the faces | of about 100,000 people who attended the Super Bowl in person. The | cameras were hidden. 19 people with "criminal histories" were | identified, but no arrests were made. | | The article quotes usual suspects like Bruce Schneier, Cliff Stoll, | and Erwin Chemerinksy saying that the system is troubling, as well | as an Oakland Raiders official who views it positively.
One of the more troubling (to me) things is Chemerinsky's comment that people have no expectation of privacy in public. The idea that you may follow someone around with a video camera, take mm scale radar pictures through their clothes, etc, etc without their permission because they are in a public space is simply wrong.
I think it's important to flesh out what you mean by "wrong" - if you mean that he's misread US law on this topic, I agree with him, not you - the privacy and publicity (and 4th Amendment) cases have for the most part agreed that it's perfectly permissible to record (mechanically or electronically) whatever's perceptible from or in a public place. This summary of the legal and practical history of video surveillance may be of interest - <http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/> There are a few limited exceptions - as of Jan 1 2000, California criminalized surreptitious nonconsensual videotaping under or through another person's clothing for sexual purposes, where the victim had a reasonable expectation of privacy (CA Penal Code 647(k)(2)), but that's pretty limited. There's a table of state voyeurism statutes at <http://www.law.about.com/newsissues/law/library/docs/n98voyeurlaws.htm> but it's a few years old - of the 12 states listed there, I'd say that only two (AK and TN) appear to even potentially criminalize surveillance or recording in public places. I get the impression that other states may eventually criminalize sexually oriented surveillance - but I anticipate the statutes will be aimed at sexual or voyeuristic content, and won't touch garden variety baby-brother surveillance for behavior control.
The free-speech-chilling nature of this technology should be clear.
Yes, but that's a two-edged sword - the free press implications of limiting recording, depicting, and describing public content are also very serious - I think the people most likely to successfully use a law against public recordings would be police officers going after people like the ones who videotaped the beating of Rodney King. There's a persistent rumor that in CA, cops act very aggressively to prosecute people who surreptitiously tape encounters like traffic stops - I've got no idea whether or not that's true. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com PO Box 897 Oakland CA 94604