Realtime facial recognition cameras used at Super Bowl

[Adam Shostack]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 02:34:17PM -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
| > 
| > 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.

I mean wrong as in unethical, not illegal.

More comments to follow, if I can find some free time. ;)

Adam


| 
| 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.


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume