Casual surveillance


When watching you is too easy, the police assume you are guilty
I wish he wasn't, but Bruce Schneier is right.

Technology is fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance. Years ago, surveillance meant trench-coated detectives following people down streets. It was laborious and expensive and was used only when there was reasonable suspicion of a crime. Modern surveillance is the policeman with a license-plate scanner, or even a remote license-plate scanner mounted on a traffic light and a policeman sitting at a computer in the station.

It's the same, but it's completely different. It's wholesale surveillance. And it disrupts the balance between the powers of the police and the rights of the people.

Wholesale surveillance is fast becoming the norm. Automatic toll-collection systems record when individual cars pass through toll booths. We can all be tracked by our cell phones. Our purchases are tracked by banks and credit-card companies, our telephone calls by phone companies, our Internet surfing habits by Web site operators.

The effects of wholesale surveillance on privacy and civil liberties are profound; but, unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question about how much privacy we need to give up in order to be secure. This is wrong. It's obvious that we are all safer when the police can use all techniques at their disposal. What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse and that don't place an unreasonable burden on the innocent.

Somewhere we moved from the presumption of innocence to the presumption of guilt, and then to the casual assumption of guilt.

Because it is easy for the government to track our every movement and because statistically, someone somewhere is committing a crime, we've grown into a nation where privacy is very hard to come by.

I still blame the income tax. That is where both the presumption of guilt and all the general records started.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - January 12, 2007 at 04:52 AM  Tag


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