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After reading Natalie Solent’s article called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with this cautionary tale as a case in point. The camera does indeed lie.
I have read with interest your posts on security cameras, and the threat they represent. I was especially interested in your post on the idea that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from security cameras and other surveillance technology, because I was recently unjustly accused of vandalism due to security video.
I recently moved to Nob Hill in San Francisco. Nob Hill is justly famous for the lack of parking; After a few weeks of struggle, I surrendered, and chose to pay $255 per month to park in the Masonic Garage.
Purely by coincidence, my friend works in IT for the Masonic Center of San Francisco, which oversees the garage. Friday morning, he sent me an email: “Emergency: call me now! This is not a joke.” I called him, and he told me that the garage manager had asked for his help in emailing security camera video. The garage had caught someone keying a car on camera; they identified the suspect because he drove off a few minutes later, and they had his license plate number. They wanted to send the video to the owner of the car, so that the owner could take it to the police and file charges.
When he looked at the video, he was shocked to see that I was the suspect on the video. He did not think that I was the kind of person who would vandalize a car, but he thought I looked very suspicious on the tape. If he had not known me, he would have sent the video off without a second thought.
I told my friend that I have never keyed a car in my life. That was me on the tape, no question. I knew what I was doing when I was on the camera: I checked for my car on one level, but did not see it; I then turned around, thought about heading for the stairway, and then decided to take the elevator to the next level. I did all of this next to the car that had been vandalized.
At lunchtime, I went to the garage to speak to the garage manager. I told him that it was not me, and asked him to review the tape carefully. He replied that the garage had already reviewed the tape carefully, and they were convinced that they had the right person. He suggested that I call the car owner and try to work out a deal so that I would not be charged.
My friend believed me, and spent the rest of the day reviewing video. Two days after I was caught on video, he found video of a group of teenagers doing something to the car in question; when the teenagers noticed the security camera, they covered their faces and ran away. My friend took the video to the manager, and forced him to call me to apologize. His apology was grudging, of course: “Your friend found someone who was maybe more suspicious than you were.”
If it had not been for an incredible stroke of luck, I would have been in for a major headache, perhaps charged with a crime. The initial reviewers of the video tape were completely untrained in viewing video; they did not bother to review the tape carefully; the way they passed on their suspicions resulted in a psychological set that I was guilty; if I had not had a close friend in the process, it would have been very hard to convince anyone of my innocence. Lastly, the garage was going to pass the video on to the owner of the car without telling me; if the car owner had seen me in the garage and recognized me from he video, what would he have done?
Law-abiding people do indeed have something to fear from security cameras.
Matt Judson, San Francisco
David Sucher has another post on ubiquitous computing. He quotes from the sales puff for one manifestation of this stuff:
IntelliBadgeTM: Towards Providing Location-Aware Value-Added Services at Academic Conferences … The major characteristic of this project is the fusion of RFID technology, database management, data mining, real-time information visualization, and interactive web application technologies into an operational integrated system deployed at a major public conference. The developed system tracks conference attendees …
Sounds like another one for Natalie’s list.
In today’s Telegraph a reader comments:
Sir – The scheme for national identity cards that David Blunkett proposes (report, Sept 22) goes beyond the bounds of what is tolerable. The ordinary people of Britain are neither criminals nor potential terrorists, and will not be frightened into accepting this clampdown on our civil liberties. I, for one, will follow the lead of Nelson Mandela and the oppressed people of South Africa and burn my “pass”. I hope millions of Britons who cherish their freedom will do the same.
The Guardian’s Simon Jeffery explains some of the issues about identity cards.
I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
In an attempt to marshal my thoughts and arguments on the subject I’ve added some pages to my web site:
UK Compulsory National Identity Cards – The Case Against
Hopefully this’ll be of some use to those opposing Big Blunkett. There’s a load more that could be added (for example I haven’t even mentioned the problems with biometrics) but at least it’s a start.
It’s one thing to promise not to pass on data to other organisations, and it’s another thing again not to pass on data to other organisations:
JetBlue Airways passengers, more than a million of them, have been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a Defense Department contractor’s experiment in mining commercial databases to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist. The airline admits it violated its own privacy policy when it acceded to the Pentagon’s request to give passenger records to Torch Concepts, a private technology business that was ostensibly creating a program to enhance security at military bases.
That’s paragraph one of a New York Times story today. This is the final para:
This misstep only feeds legitimate consumer fears that companies and governments are too quick to use private data in unauthorized ways. It is worrisome, in this regard, that the Homeland Security Department has already backtracked from its original vow to use its passenger-profiling program only to fight terrorism. There is now talk of turning it into an all-purpose law-enforcement tool. For its part, in addition to ascertaining what actually took place, Congress may also need to consider new legal protections for consumers’ privacy.
Mission creep, in other words.
I really don’t know how all these so-called ‘civil libertarians’ can possibly live with themselves. Don’t they care about the children?
Children are frightened of speeding traffic and want more measures to make roads safer, a survey has suggested.
Three-quarters of children questioned said they wanted more speed cameras.
About 70% thought drivers should go slower near their school, with almost as many wanting drivers to slow down near their house.
Half of the 1,500 children surveyed wanted safer places to cross the road.
The findings of the survey of children aged 7-14 in city schools by road safety charity Brake were released to coincide with the annual Road Safety Week.
A good friend of mine who has been professionaly engaged in market research has provided me with chapter and verse on just how ludicrously easy it is to get the answers that the researcher wants. Quadruple the easiness when the views being solicited are those of children.
A ‘road safety charity’?
David Sucher has news of a conference, and reckons that White Rose ought to be monitoring what was being talked about.
Says David:
“Ubiquitous Computing” means “computing technology that migrates beyond our desktops onto our hands, heads and clothing, and becomes increasingly embedded in a wide variety of other objects, such as walls, cars and appliances.”
Following his Radio 5 Live spot about ID cards last night (see the post below for links and email info), another email from Sean Gabb arrived, to the effect that the programme went well:
… All I had to do this evening was state the main heads of opposition to compulsory identity cards, and then sit back and listen to the callers as they made their own points.
All but one of the callers was against the idea. I spoke to one of the production people, who told me about a flood of e-mails and text messages that ran 20-1 against. …
Sean says he was particularly grateful to the lady who …
… gave me the point about perfect copies of ID cards on sale in Lagos weeks before the real ones had begun dropping through letter boxes.
He continued:
Quite plainly, the speakers for the scheme were drunk on technology that they didn’t understand. None of them could answer the often fierce questioning from the callers about how retina eye scans could be made secure against forgery.
I said less than I normally do. I didn’t get properly on to the civil liberties aspects. But it was the callers who made all those points, and with impressive fluency and conviction.
I was unable to hear this programme myself, but it sounds like it went well, doesn’t it? Sean is working on a system to have all such broadcasts up at the Libertarian Alliance website.
Good show.
Email from Sean Gabb:
I have just been contacted by BBC Radio 5, to go on air tonight (Sunday 21st September, 10-11 pm BST) on “Late Night Live”, to discuss the principle of compulsory identity cards. I am not sure yet if the discussion will go ahead, or with me taking part. However, people often complain that I do not give enough notice, so I am sending this out as soon as I can.
You can find Radio 5 at 693 and 909 Khz on the AM band. Otherwise, it is available as streaming audio from this this website.
If you want to contribute with moral support – and this is one reason I am sending this message out! –you can telephone the studio on: 0500 909 693
You can text messages to: 85058 (search me what these digits mean)
Or you can e-mail questions and comments via this web page.
Needless to say, I do welcome support. I shall probably be faced with dozens of the usual sheeple, insisting that they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. You may not be able to get on air, but if you can send supportive e-mails, the weight of these will be measured.
I will make a recording of the debate, and in due course make this available as a sound file from my web site and that of the Libertarian Alliance.
By the way, the Tony Martin broadcast will go up, I hope, in the next five days.
Many regards,
Sean Gabb
Director of Communications
The Libertarian Alliance
Sunday 21st September 2003
sean@libertarian.co.uk
Despite recent cabinet setbacks, Big Blunkett is determined to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens.
The BBC Reports that he intends the legislation to be announced in the next Queen’s speech.
When pressed about whether they would be compulsory he said: “my own view is that the minimum is you can’t actually work, or draw on services unless you have the card”
That sounds compulsory to me.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
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