BEING WATCHED: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance

[Steve Schear]

BEING WATCHED
A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
By JEFFREY ROSEN
October 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07SURVEILLANCE.html

<snip>
I had gone to Britain to answer a question that seems far more
pertinent today than it did early last month: why would a free and
flourishing Western democracy wire itself up with so many
closed-circuit television cameras that it resembles the set of ''The
Real World'' or ''The Truman Show''? The answer, I discovered, was
fear of terrorism. In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by
the I.R.A. exploded in London's financial district, a historic and
densely packed square mile known as the City of London. In response to
widespread public anxiety about terrorism, the government decided to
install a ''ring of steel'' -- a network of closed-circuit television
cameras mounted on the eight official entry gates that control access
to the City.

Anxiety about terrorism didn't go away, and the cameras in Britain
continued to multiply. In 1994, a 2-year-old boy named Jamie Bulger
was kidnapped and murdered by two 10-year-old schoolboys, and
surveillance cameras captured a grainy shot of the killers leading
their victim out of a shopping center. Bulger's assailants couldn't,
in fact, be identified on camera -- they were caught because they
talked to their friends -- but the video footage, replayed over and
over again on television, shook the country to its core. Riding a wave
of enthusiasm for closed-circuit television, or CCTV, created by the
attacks, John Major's Conservative government decided to devote more
than three-quarters of its crime-prevention budget to encourage local
authorities to install CCTV. The promise of cameras as a magic bullet
against crime and terrorism inspired one of Major's most successful
campaign slogans: ''If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing
to fear.''

<snip>

The ideal of America has from the beginning been an insistence that
your opportunities shouldn't be limited by your background or your
database; that no doors should be permanently closed to anyone who has
the wrong smart card. If the 21st century proves to be a time when
this ideal is abandoned -- a time of surveillance cameras and creepy
biometric face scanning in Times Square -- then Osama bin Laden will
have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now imagine.