Imagine strolling down a city sidewalk on a sunny afternoon in Washington, D.C., completely unaware that only minutes ago a surveillance camera ran the image of your face through a database of criminals and falsely identified you as a wanted parole violator who skipped town. Three men with guns suddenly jump from the bushes and wrestle you to the ground, locking you in jail until, hours later, they finally conclude you were the victim of false identification.
As unlikely as this may sound, it is a reality in major cities across the country. Technological advances have given way to great achievement, eliminating problems of the past, but with these advances new problems arise. Public surveillance cameras, facial recognition systems, and other invasions of privacy are being forced upon citizens across the country in the name of security.
Supporters claim they pose no threat to law-abiding citizens, suggesting that if a person is not engaged in illegal activities, he has nothing to hide from the government. Therefore, only criminals will oppose being systematically monitored. This is a ridiculous argument because the burden of proof for an investigation should be on the government.
That is why we have laws to make the government justify its invasions of citizens’ privacy instead of citizens justifying their right to privacy. That is why a right to privacy is implied in the first, third, fourth and fifth amendments.
Still many routinely trade privacy in the name of security; fear of crime or terrorism usually prevails over the concern for privacy. People tend to regard privacy they way they regard other civil liberties: they only support the ones that will be useful to themselves. However, once citizens forfeit privacy to the government, officials can use and abuse that power in any way they choose.
Some argue that a person has no expectation of privacy on a public street, but that’s not entirely true. A person doesn’t have the expectation of their picture being singled out among many others and being examined by suspicious officials.
So what do we lose when we lose privacy? We lose both liberty-the ability to be ourselves in public-and the ability to form a community. And if we can’t form a community, we can’t act collectively or politically. The loss of privacy could prevent the formation of political movements.
The threat to privacy that these cameras pose is reason enough for protest, but another is that they fail to improve security. Consider the false promise of facial recognition systems. A 2002 report by the American Civil Liberties Union stated that the widely publicized facial-recognition system used by the police on the streets in Tampa, Fla., “never identified even a single individual contained in the department’s database of photographs. The system made many false positives, including such errors as confusing what were to a human easily identifiable male and female images.” Errors can also be added through abuses of discretion. As the ACLU observed, in Britain, where electronic surveillance is more common, camera operators are prone to focus on racial minorities. They even abused their power to do things like using the cameras to peer up women’s skirts. According to a report published by the Detroit Free Press, police in Michigan used a database to intimidate other citizens and stalk women.
Given the way facial recognition systems have been used and abused so far, it’s fair to say they constitute a threat-to privacy, liberty and physical safety. Remember, the actions of the government are supposed to be entirely public in order to ensure that their power won’t be abused while we are the ones entitled to keep the secrets. If cameras are filming us every time we walk out the front door, that right to privacy will be completely stripped away.
Taylor Davis is a freshman English major.