The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age - Rilegato

Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at The George Washington University.

Chapter One

A Cautionary Tale

A week after the attacks of 9/11, as most ameri- can stocks plummeted, a few companies, with products particularly well suited for a new and anxious age, soared in value. One of the fastest-growing stocks was Visionics, whose price more than tripled. The New Jersey company is an industry leader in the fledgling science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning and quantifying their unique physical characteristics—their facial structures, for example, or their retinal patterns. Visionics manufactures a face-recognition technology called FaceIt, which creates identification codes for individuals based on eighty unique aspects of their facial structures, like the width of the nose and the location of the temples. FaceIt can instantly compare an image of any individual’s face with a database of the faces of suspected terrorists, or anyone else.

Visionics was quick to understand that the terrorist attacks represented not only a tragedy but also a business opportunity. On the afternoon of 9/11, the company sent out an e-mail message to reporters, announcing that its founder and CEO, Joseph Atick, “has been speaking worldwide about the need for bio- metric systems to catch known terrorists and wanted criminals.” On September 20, Atick testified before a special government committee appointed by the secretary of transportation. Atick’s message—that security in airports and embassies could be improved using face-recognition technology as part of a comprehensive national surveillance plan that he called Operation Noble Shield—was greeted enthusiastically by members of the committee. To identify terrorists concealed in the crowd, Atick proposed to wire up Reagan National Airport in Washington and other vulnerable airports throughout the country with more than 300 cameras each. Cameras would scan the faces of passengers standing in line, and biometric technology would be used to analyze their faces and make sure they were not on an international terrorist watch list. More cameras unobtrusively installed throughout the airport could identify passengers as they walked through metal detectors and public areas. And a final scan could ensure that no suspected terrorist boarded a plane. “We have created a biometric network platform that turns every camera into a Web browser submitting images to a database in Washington, querying for matches,” Atick said. “If a match occurs, it will set off an alarm in Washington, and someone will make a decision to wire the image to marshals at the airport.”

Of course, protecting airports is only one aspect of homeland security: A terrorist could be lurking on any corner in America. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Howard Safir, the former New York police commissioner, recommended the installation of 100 biometric surveillance cameras in Times Square to scan the faces of pedestrians and compare them with a database of suspected terrorists. Atick told me that since the attacks, he has been approached by local and federal authorities from across the country about the possibility of installing biometric surveillance cameras in stadiums and subway systems and near national monuments. “The Office of Homeland Security might be the overall umbrella that will coordinate with local police forces” to install cameras linked to a biometric network throughout American cities, Atick suggested. “How can we be alerted when someone is entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering Madison Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to create an invisible fence, an invisible shield.”

Before 9/11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways, and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But after 9/11, the fear of terrorism was so overwhelming that people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most reliable empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had “no effect on violent crime" or terrorism. In this regard, however, America was at least a decade behind the times. In the 1990s, Britain experienced similar public demands for surveillance cameras as a feel-good response to fears of terrorism. And in Britain, the cameras were implemented on a wide scale, providing a cautionary tale about the dangers of constructing ineffective but popular architectures of surveillance that continue to expand after the initial fears that led to their installation have passed.

At the beginning of September 2001, I had gone to Britain to answer a question that seems far more pertinent today than it did when I arrived: Why would a free and flourishing Western democracy wire itself up with so many closed-circuit television cameras that it resembled the set of Real World or The Truman Show? The answer, I discovered, was fear of terrorism. In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by the IRA 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 two-year-old boy named Jamie Bulger was kidnapped and murdered by two ten-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 boasted 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.”

Instead of being perceived as an Orwellian intrusion, the cameras in Britain proved to be extremely popular. They were hailed as the people’s technology, a friendly eye in the sky, not Big Brother but a kindly and watchful uncle or aunt. Local governments couldn’t get enough of them; each hamlet and fen in the British countryside wanted its own CCTV surveillance system, even when the most serious threat to public safety was coming from rampaging soccer fans. In 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance networks; by 1998, 440 city centers were wired, including all the major cities with a population over 500,000. By the late 1990s, as part of its center-left campaign to be tough on crime, Tony Blair’s New Labour government decided to support the cameras with a vengeance. Between 1996 and 1998, CCTV became the “single most heavily funded non-criminal justice crime prevention measure.” There are now so many cameras attached to so many different surveillance systems in the United Kingdom that people have stopped counting. According to one estimate, there are 4.2 million surveillance cameras in Britain, and, in fact, there may be far more.

As I filed through customs at Heathrow Airport, there were cameras concealed in domes in the ceiling. There were cameras pointing at the ticket counters, at the escalators, and at the tracks as I waited for the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station. When I got out at Paddington, there were cameras on the platform and cameras on the pillars in the main terminal. Cameras followed me as I walked from the main station to the underground, and there were cameras at each of the stations on the way to King’s Cross. Outside King’s Cross, there were cameras trained on the bus stand and the taxi stand and the sidewalk, and still more cameras in the station. There were cameras on the backs of buses to record people who crossed into the wrong traffic lane. Throughout Britain today, there are speed cameras and red-light cameras, cameras in lobbies and elevators, in hotels and restaurants, in nursery schools and high schools. There are even cameras in hospitals. (After a raft of “baby thefts” in the early 1990s, the government gave hospitals money to install cameras in waiting rooms, maternity wards, and operating rooms.) And everywhere there are warning signs, announcing the presence of cameras with a jumble of different icons, slogans, and exhortations, from the bland “CCTV in Operation” to the peppy “CCTV: Watching for You!” By one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by more than 300 separate cameras from 30 separate CCTV networks in a single day.

britain’s experience under the watchful eye of the CCTV cameras is a vision of what Americans can expect if we choose to go down the same road in our efforts to achieve homeland security. Although the cameras in Britain were initially justified as a way of combating terrorism, they soon came to serve very different functions: Seven hundred cameras now record the license plate number of every car that enters central London during peak hours, to confirm that the drivers have paid a £5 traffic-abatement tax. (Those who haven’t paid are charged a fine.) The cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel that they are being watched ...