October 7, 2001
By JEFFREY ROSEN
A week after the attacks of Sept. 11, as
the value of most American 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 80 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 Sept. 11, the company sent
out an e-mail message to reporters,
announcing that its founder and C.E.O.,
Joseph Atick, "has been speaking worldwide about the need for biometric
systems to catch known terrorists and wanted criminals." On Sept. 20,
Atick
testified before a special government committee appointed by the
secretary
of transportation, Norman Mineta. 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,
which seemed ready to endorse his recommendations. "In the war against
terrorism, especially when it comes to the homeland defense," Atick
told
me,
describing his testimony, "the cornerstone of this is going to be our
ability
to
identify the enemy before he or she enters into areas where public
safety
could be at risk."
Atick proposes 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 are
not
on an international terrorist "watch list." More cameras unobtrusively
installed
throughout the airport could identify passengers as they walk through
metal
detectors and public areas. And a final scan could ensure that no
suspected
terrorist boards 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
Sept.
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 told me. "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 Sept. 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 in fact, over the past decade,
this
precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but
in the
United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in
Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American
future.
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."
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 at all 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
mad cows. In 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance networks; by 1998,
440 city centers were wired. By the late 1990's, as part of its
Clintonian,
center-left campaign to be tough on crime, Tony Blair's New Labor
government decided to support the cameras with a vengeance. There are
now so many cameras attached to so many different surveillance systems
in
the U.K. that people have stopped counting. According to one estimate,
there are 2.5 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 1990's, 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 300 separate
cameras
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 a
very different function. The cameras are designed not to produce
arrests
but
to make people feel that they are being watched at all times. Instead
of
keeping terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to
keep
punks out of shopping malls. The people behind the live video screens
are
zooming in on unconventional behavior in public that in fact has
nothing
to do
with terrorism. And rather than thwarting serious crime, the cameras
are
being used to enforce social conformity in ways that Americans may
prefer
to avoid.
The dream of a biometric surveillance system that can identify people's
faces in public places and separate the innocent from the guilty is not
new. Clive Norris, a criminologist at the University of Hull, is
Britain's
leading
authority on the social effects of CCTV. In his definitive study, "The
Maximum Surveillance Society: the Rise of CCTV," Norris notes that in
the
19th century, police forces in England and France began to focus on how
to
distinguish the casual offender from the "habitual criminal" who might
evade
detection by moving from town to town. In the 1870's, Alphonse
Bertillon,
a
records clerk at the prefecture of police in Paris, used his knowledge
of
statistics and anthropomorphic measurements to create a system for
comparing the thousands of photographs of arrested suspects in Parisian
police stations. He took a series of measurements -- of skull size, for
example, and the distance between the ear and chin -- and created a
unique
code for every suspect whom the police had photographed. Photographs
were then grouped according to the codes, and a new suspect could be
compared only with the photos that had similar measurements, instead of
with the entire portfolio. Though Bertillon's system was often
difficult
for
unskilled clerks to administer, a procedure that had taken hours or
days
was
now reduced to a few minutes.
It wasn't until the 1980's, with the development of computerized
biometric
and other face-recognition systems, that Bertillon's dream became
feasible
on a broad scale. In the course of studying how biometric scanning
could
be
used to authenticate the identities of people who sought admission to
secure
buildings, innovators like Joseph Atick realized that the same
technology
could be used to pick suspects or license plates out of a crowd. It's
the
license-plate technology that the London police have found most
attractive,
because it tends to be more reliable. (A test of the best
face-recognition
systems last year by the U.S. Department of Defense found that they
failed
to identify matches a third of the time.)
Soon after arriving in London, I visited the CCTV monitoring room in
the
City of London police station, where the British war against terrorism
began.
I was met by the press officer, Tim Parsons, and led up to the control
station, a modest-size installation that looks like an
air-traffic-control
room,
with uniformed officers manning two rows of monitors. Although
installed
to
catch terrorists, the cameras in the City of London spend most of their
time
following car thieves and traffic offenders. "The technology here is
geared
up
to terrorism," Parsons told me. "The fact that we're getting ordinary
people
-- burglars stealing cars -- as a result of it is sort of a bonus."
Have you caught any terrorists? I asked. "No, not using this
technology,
no,"
he replied.
As we watched the monitors, rows of slow-moving cars filed through the
gates into the City, and cameras recorded their license-plate numbers
and
the faces of their drivers. After several minutes, one monitor set off
a soft,
pinging alarm. We had a match! But no, it was a false alarm. The
license
plate that set off the system was 8620bmc, but the stolen car recorded
in the
database was 8670amc. After a few more mismatches, the machine finally
found an offender, though not a serious one. A red van had gone through
a
speed camera, and the local authority that issued the ticket couldn't
identify
the driver. An alert went out on the central police national computer,
and it
set off the alarm when the van entered the City. "We're not going to do
anything about it because it's not a desperately important call," said
the
sergeant.
Because the cameras on the ring of steel take clear pictures of each
driver's
face, I asked whether the City used the biometric facial recognition
technology that American airports are now being urged to adopt. "We're
experimenting with it to see if we could pick faces out of the crowd,
but
the
technology is not sufficiently good enough," Parsons said. "The system
that I
saw demonstrated two or three years ago, a lot of the time it couldn't
differentiate between a man and a woman." (In a recent documentary
about
CCTV, Monty Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics face-recognition
system that had been set up in the London borough of Newham by wearing
earrings and a beard.) Nevertheless, Parsons insisted that the
technology
will
become more accurate. "It's just a matter of time. Then we can use it
to
detect the presence of criminals on foot in the city," he said.
In the future, as face-recognition technology becomes more accurate, it
will
become even more intrusive, because of pressures to expand the
biometric
database. I mentioned to Joseph Atick of Visionics that the City of
London
was thinking about using his technology to establish a database that
would
include not only terrorists but also all British citizens whose faces
were
registered with the national driver's license bureau. If that occurs,
every
citizen who walks the streets of the City could be instantly identified
by the
police and evaluated in light of his past misdeeds, no matter how
trivial.
With
the impatience of a rationalist, Atick dismissed the possibility.
"Technically,
they won't be able to do it without coming back to me," he said. "They
will
have to justify it to me." Atick struck me as a refined and thoughtful
man (he
is the former director of the computational neuroscience laboratory at
Rockefeller University), but it seems odd to put the liberties of a
democracy
in the hands of one unelected scientist.
Atick says that his technology is an enlightened alternative to racial
and ethnic
profiling, and if the faces in the biometric database were, in fact,
restricted
to
known terrorists, he would be on to something. Instead of stopping all
passengers who appear to be Middle Eastern and victimizing thousands of
innocent people, the system would focus with laserlike precision on a
tiny
handful of the guilty. (This assumes that the terrorists aren't cunning
enough to
disguise themselves.) But when I asked whether any of the existing
biometric
databases in England or America are limited to suspected terrorists,
Atick
confessed that they aren't. There is a simple reason for this: few
terrorists
are
suspected in advance of their crimes. For this reason, cities in
England
and
elsewhere have tried to justify their investment in face-recognition
systems
by
filling their databases with those troublemakers whom the authorities
can
easily identify: local criminals. When FaceIt technology was used to
scan
the
faces of the thousands of fans entering the Super Bowl in Tampa last
January, the matches produced by the database weren't terrorists. They
were low-level ticket scalpers and pickpockets.
Biometrics is a feel-good technology that is being marketed based on a
false
promise -- that the database will be limited to suspected terrorists.
But
the
FaceIt technology, as it's now being used in England, isn't really
intended
to
catch terrorists at all. It's intended to scare local hoodlums into
thinking
they
might be setting off alarms even when the cameras are turned off. I
came
to
understand this "Wizard of Oz" aspect of the technology when I visited
Bob
Lack's monitoring station in the London borough of Newham. A former
London police officer, Lack attracted national attention -- including a
visit
from Tony Blair -- by pioneering the use of face-recognition technology
before other people were convinced that it was entirely reliable. What
Lack
grasped early on was that reliability was in many ways beside the
point.
Lack installed his first CCTV system in 1997, and he intentionally
exaggerated its powers from the beginning. "We put one camera out and
12
signs" announcing the presence of cameras, Lack told me. "We reduced
crime by 60 percent in the area where we posted the signs. Then word on
the street went out that we had dummy cameras." So Lack turned his
attention to face-recognition technology and tried to create the
impression
that far more people's faces were in the database than actually are.
"We've
designed a poster now about making Newham a safe place for a family,"
he
said. "And we're telling the criminal we have this information on him:
we
know his name, we know his address, we know what crimes he commits."
It's not true, Lack admits, "but then, we're entitled to disinform some
people,
aren't we?"
So you're telling the criminal that you know his name even though you
don't,
I asked? "Right," Lack replied. "Pretty much that's about advertising,
isn't it?"
Lack was elusive when I asked him who, exactly, is in his database. "I
don't
know," he replied, noting that the local police chief decides who goes
into the
database. He would only make an "educated guess" that the database
contains 100 "violent street robbers" under the age of 18. "You have to
have
been convicted of a crime -- nobody suspected goes on, unless they're a
suspected murderer -- and there has to be sufficient police
intelligence
to say
you are committing those crimes and have been so in the last 12 weeks."
When I asked for the written standards that determined who, precisely,
was
put in the database, and what crimes they had to have committed, Lack
promised to send them, but he never did.
From Lack's point of view, it doesn't matter who is in his database,
because
his system isn't designed to catch terrorists or violent criminals. In
the three
years that the system has been up and running, it hasn't resulted in a
single
arrest. "I'm not in the business of having people arrested," Lack said.
"The
deterrent value has far exceeded anything you imagine." He told me that
the
alarms went off an average of three times a day during the month of
August,
but the only people he would conclusively identify were local youths
who
had
volunteered to be put in the database as part of an "intensive
surveillance
supervision program," as an alternative to serving a custodial
sentence.
"The
public statements about the efficacy of the Newham facial-recognition
system
bear little relationship to its actual operational capabilities, which
are rather
weak and poor," says Clive Norris of the University of Hull. "They want
everyone to believe that they are potentially under scrutiny. Its
effectiveness,
perhaps, is based on a lie."
This lie has a venerable place in the philosophy of surveillance. In
his
preface
to "Panopticon," Jeremy Bentham imagined the social benefits of a
ring-shaped "inspection-house," in which prisoners, students, orphans
or
paupers could be subject to constant surveillance. In the center of the
courtyard would be an inspection tower with windows facing the inner
wall
of the ring. Supervisors in the central tower could observe every
movement
of the inhabitants of the cells, who were illuminated by natural
lighting,
but
Venetian blinds would ensure that the supervisors could not be seen by
the
inhabitants. The uncertainty about whether or not they were being
surveilled
would deter the inhabitants from antisocial behavior. Michel Foucault
described the purpose of the Panopticon -- to induce in the inmate a
state
of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning
of
power." Foucault predicted that this condition of visible, unverifiable
power,
in which individuals have internalized the idea that they may always be
under
surveillance, would be the defining characteristic of the modern age.
Britain, at the moment, is not quite the Panopticon, because its
various
camera networks aren't linked and there aren't enough operators to
watch
all
the cameras. But over the next few years, that seems likely to change,
as
Britain moves toward the kind of integrated Web-based surveillance
system
that Visionics has now proposed for American airports and subway
systems.
At the moment, for example, the surveillance systems for the London
underground and the British police feed into separate control rooms,
but
Sergio Velastin, a computer-vision scientist, says he believes the two
systems
will eventually be linked, using digital technology.
Velastin is working on behavioral-recognition technology for the London
underground that can look for unusual movements in crowds, setting off
an
alarm, for example, when people appear to be fighting or trying to jump
on
the tracks. (Because human CCTV operators are easily bored and
distracted, automatic alarms are viewed as the wave of the future.)
"Imagine
you see a piece of unattended baggage which might contain a bomb,"
Velastin told me. "You can back-drag on the image and locate the person
who left it there. You can say where did that person come from and
where
is
that person now? You can conceive in the future that you might be able
to do
that for every person in every place in the system." Of course,
Velastin
admitted, "if you don't have social agreement about how you're going to
operate that, it could get out of control."
Once thousands of cameras from hundreds of separate CCTV systems are
able to feed their digital images to a central monitoring station, and
the
images can be analyzed with face- and behavioral-recognition software
to
identify unusual patterns, then the possibilities of the Panopticon
will
suddenly
become very real. And few people doubt that connectivity is around the
corner; it is, in fact, the next step. "CCTV will become the fifth
utility:
after
gas, electricity, sewage and telecommunications," says Jason Ditton, a
criminologist at the University of Sheffield who is critical of the
technology's
expansion. "We will come to accept its ubiquitousness."
At the moment, there is only one fully integrated CCTV in Britain: it
transmits digital images over a broadband wireless network, like the
one Joseph Atick has proposed for American airports, rather than
relying
on
traditional video cameras that are chained to dedicated cables. And so,
for a
still clearer vision of the interconnected future of surveillance, I
set
off for
Hull, Britain's leading timber port, about three hours northeast of
London.
Hull has traditionally been associated not with dystopian fantasies but
with
fantasies of a more basic sort: for hundreds of years, it has been the
prostitution capital of northeastern Britain.
Six years ago, a heroin epidemic created an influx of addicted young
women
who took to streetwalking to sustain their drug habit. Nearly two years
ago,
the residents' association of a low-income housing project called
Goodwin
Center hired a likable and enterprising young civil engineer named John
Marshall to address the problem of under-age prostitutes having sex on
people's windowsills.
Marshall, who is now 33, met me at the Hull railway station carrying a
CCTV warning sign. Armed with more than a million dollars in public
financing from the European Union, Marshall decided to build what he
calls
the world's first Ethernet-based, wireless CCTV system. Initially,
Marshall
put up 27 cameras around the housing project. The cameras didn't bother
the prostitutes, who in fact felt safer working under CCTV. Instead,
they
scared the johns -- especially after the police recorded their license
numbers,
banged on their doors and threatened to publish their names in the
newspapers. Business plummeted, and the prostitutes moved indoors or
across town to the traditional red-light district, where the city
decided
to
tolerate their presence in limited numbers.
But Marshall soon realized that he had bigger fish to fry than
displacing
prostitutes from one part of Hull to another. His innovative network of
linked
cameras attracted national attention, which led, a few months ago, to
$20
million in grant money from various levels of government to expand the
surveillance network throughout the city of Hull. "In a year and a
half,"
Marshall says, "there'll be a digital connection to every household in
the city.
As far as cameras go, I can imagine that, in 10 years' time, the whole
city will
be covered. That's the speed that CCTV is growing." In the world that
Marshall imagines, every household in Hull will be linked to a central
network that can access cameras trained inside and outside every
building
in
the city. "Imagine a situation where you've got an elderly relative who
lives on
the other side of the city," Marshall says. "You ring her up, there's
no
answer
on the telephone, you think she collapsed -- so you go to the Internet
and
you look at the camera in the lounge and you see that she's making a
cup
of
tea and she's taken her hearing aid out or something."
The person who controls access to this network of intimate images will
be a
very powerful person indeed. And so I was eager to meet the monitors of
the Panopticon for myself. On a side street of Hull, near the Star and
Garter
Pub and the city morgue, the Goodwin Center's monitoring station is
housed
inside a ramshackle private security firm called Sentry Alarms Ltd. The
sign
over the door reads THE GUARD HOUSE. The monitoring station is
locked behind a thick, black vault-style door, but it looks like a
college
computer center, with an Alicia Silverstone pinup near the door.
Instead
of
an impressive video wall, there are only two small desktop computers,
which
receive all the signals from the Goodwin Center network. And the
digital,
Web-based images -- unlike traditional video -- are surprisingly fuzzy
and
jerky, like streaming video transmitted over a slow modem.
During my time in the control room, from 9 p.m. to midnight, I
experienced
firsthand a phenomenon that critics of CCTV surveillance have often
described: when you put a group of bored, unsupervised men in front of
live
video screens and allow them to zoom in on whatever happens to catch
their
eyes, they tend to spend a fair amount of time leering at women. "What
catches the eye is groups of young men and attractive, young women," I
was
told by Clive Norris, the Hull criminologist. "It's what we call a
sense
of the
obvious." There are plenty of stories of video voyeurism: a control
room
in
the Midlands, for example, took close-up shots of women with large
breasts
and taped them up on the walls. In Hull, this temptation is magnified
by
the
fact that part of the operators' job is to keep an eye on prostitutes.
As it got
late, though, there weren't enough prostitutes to keep us entertained,
so we
kept ourselves awake by scanning the streets in search of the purely
consensual activities of boyfriends and girlfriends making out in cars.
"She
had her legs wrapped around his waist a minute ago," one of the
operators
said appreciatively as we watched two teenagers go at it. "You'll be
able
to
do an article on how reserved the British are, won't you?" he joked.
Norris
also found that operators, in addition to focusing on attractive young
women,
tend to focus on young men, especially those with dark skin. And those
young men know they are being watched: CCTV is far less popular among
black men than among British men as a whole. In Hull and elsewhere,
rather
than eliminating prejudicial surveillance and racial profiling, CCTV
surveillance has tended to amplify it.
After returning from the digital city of Hull, I had a clearer
understanding
of how, precisely, the spread of CCTV cameras is transforming British
society and why I think it's important for America to resist going down
the
same path. "I actually don't think the cameras have had much effect on
crime
rates," says Jason Ditton, the criminologist, whose evaluation of the
effect
of
the cameras in Glasgow found no clear reduction in violent crime.
"We've
had a fall in crime in the last 10 years, and CCTV proponents say it's
because of the cameras. I'd say it's because we had a boom economy in
the
last seven years and a fall in unemployment." Ditton notes that the
cameras
can sometimes be useful in investigating terrorist attacks -- like the
Brixton
nail-bomber case in 1999 -- but there is no evidence that they prevent
terrorism or other serious crime.
Last year, Britain's violent crime rates actually increased by 4.3
percent,
even though the cameras continued to proliferate. But CCTV cameras have
a mysterious knack for justifying themselves regardless of what happens
to
crime. When crime goes up the cameras get the credit for detecting it,
and
when crime goes down, they get the credit for preventing it.
If the creation of a surveillance society in Britain hasn't prevented
terrorist
attacks, it has had subtle but far-reaching social costs. The handful
of
privacy
advocates in Britain have tried to enumerate those costs by arguing
that
the
cameras invade privacy. People behave in self-conscious ways under the
cameras, ostentatiously trying to demonstrate their innocence or
bristling
at
the implication of guilt. Inside a monitoring room near Runnymede, the
birthplace of the Magna Carta, I saw a group of teenagers who noticed
that
a camera was pivoting around to follow them; they made an obscene
gesture
toward it and looked back over their shoulders as they tried to escape
its
gaze.
The cameras are also a powerful inducement toward social conformity for
citizens who can't be sure whether they are being watched. "I am gay
and
I
might want to kiss my boyfriend in Victoria Square at 2 in the
morning,"
a
supporter of the cameras in Hull told me. "I would not kiss my
boyfriend
now. I am aware that it has altered the way I might behave. Something
like
that might be regarded as an offense against public decency. This isn't
San
Francisco." Nevertheless, the man insisted that the benefits of the
cameras
outweighed the costs, because "thousands of people feel safer."
There is, in the end, a powerfully American reason to resist the
establishment
of a national surveillance network: the cameras are not consistent with
the
values of an open society. They are technologies of classification and
exclusion. They are ways of putting people in their place, of deciding
who
gets in and who stays out, of limiting people's movement and
restricting
their
opportunities. I came to appreciate the exclusionary potential of the
surveillance technology in a relatively low-tech way when I visited a
shopping
center in Uxbridge, a suburb of London. The manager of the center
explained that people who are observed to be misbehaving in the mall
can
be
banned from the premises. The banning process isn't very complicated.
"Because this isn't public property, we have the right to refuse entry,
and if
there's a wrongdoer, we give them a note or a letter, or simply tell
them
you're banned." In America, this would provoke anyone who was banned to
call Alan Dershowitz and sue for discrimination. But the British are
far
less
litigious and more willing to defer to authority.
Banning people from shopping malls is only the beginning. A couple of
days
before I was in London, Borders Books announced the installation of a
biometric face-recognition surveillance system in its flagship store on
Charing
Cross Road. Borders' scheme meant that that anyone who had shoplifted
in
the past was permanently branded as a shoplifter in the future. In
response
to
howls of protest from America, Borders dismantled the system, but it
may
well be resurrected in a post-Sept. 11 world.
Perhaps the reason that Britain has embraced the new technologies of
surveillance, while America, at least before Sept. 11, had strenuously
resisted them, is that British society is far more accepting of social
classifications than we are. The British desire to put people in their
place is
the central focus of British literature, from Dickens to John Osborne
and
Alan Bennett. The work of George Orwell that casts the most light on
Britain's swooning embrace of CCTV is not "1984." It is Orwell's
earlier
book "The English People."
"Exaggerated class distinctions have been diminishing," Orwell wrote,
but
"the great majority of the people can still be 'placed' in an instant
by
their
manners, clothes and general appearance" and above all, their accents.
Class
distinctions are less hardened today than they were when I was a
student
at
Oxford at the height of the Thatcher-era "Brideshead Revisited" chic.
But
it's
no surprise that a society long accustomed to the idea that people
should
know their place didn't hesitate to embrace a technology designed to
ensure
that people stay in their assigned places.
Will America be able to resist the pressure to follow the British
example
and
wire itself up with surveillance cameras? Before Sept. 11, I was
confident
that we would. Like Germany and France, which are squeamish about
CCTV because of their experience with 20th-century totalitarianism,
Americans are less willing than the British to trust the government and
defer
to authority. After Sept. 11, however, everything has changed. A New
York
Times/CBS news poll at the end of September found that 8 in 10
Americans
believe they will have to give up some of their personal freedoms to
make
the
country safe from terrorist attacks.
Of course there are some liberties that should be sacrificed in times
of
national emergency if they give us greater security. But Britain's
experience
in
the fight against terrorism suggests that people may give up liberties
without
experiencing a corresponding increase in security. And if we meekly
accede
in the construction of vast feel-good architectures of surveillance
that
have
far-reaching social costs and few discernible social benefits, we may
find,
in
calmer times, that they are impossible to dismantle.
It's important to be precise about the choice we are facing. No one is
threatening at the moment to turn America into Orwell's Big Brother.
And
Britain hasn't yet been turned into Big Brother, either. Many of the
CCTV
monitors and camera operators and policemen and entrepreneurs who took
the time to meet with me were models of the British sense of fair play
and
respect for the rules. In many ways, the closed-circuit television
cameras
have only exaggerated the qualities of the British national character
that
Orwell identified in his less famous book: the acceptance of social
hierarchy
combined with the gentleness that leads people to wait in orderly lines
at taxi
stands; a deference to authority combined with an appealing tolerance
of
hypocrisy. These English qualities have their charms, but they are not
American qualities.
The promise of America is a promise that we can escape from the Old
World, a world where people know their place. When we say we are
fighting for an open society, we don't mean a transparent society --
one
where neighbors can peer into each other's windows using the joysticks
on
their laptops. We mean a society open to the possibility that people
can
redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people
can
travel from place to place without showing their papers and being
encumbered by their past; a society that respects privacy and
constantly
reshuffles social hierarchy.
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.
Jeffrey Rosen is an associate professor at George Washington
University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.
He writes frequently on law for The Times Magazine.
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