Be careful with cameras

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September 8, 2012

Be careful with cameras

-- The Daily Star The Daily Star Mon Sep 10, 2012, 10:03 AM EDT

Anyone who has seen the TV show “24” is familiar with the scene: A high-tech control room where state-of-the-art computers track people’s movements using satellite imagery, closed-circuit cameras and other surveillance tools.

Although the Counter Terrorism Unit portrayed on “24” is fictional, some of the surveillance equipment seen on the show has entered our daily lives.

In Oneonta, an additional 16 cameras are now trained on Main Street, feeding real-time images to the Public Safety Building for police review.

As Oneonta Police Chief Dennis Nayor put it, with the cameras in place, police “don’t have to wait for a phone call” to know if something is going on downtown that deserves their attention.

Also in Oneonta, and throughout the region, police officers and sheriff’s deputies are using another type of camera, this one mounted on a patrol car, to scan images of license plates.

The technology can automatically alert officers to a plate associated with a stolen vehicle, Amber Alert, expired registration or other issue.

The benefits of these technologies are clear. Simply put, they empower law enforcement to catch more bad guys. If a camera helps police break up a fight before it becomes deadly, or catch an kidnapper, it would easily prove its worth.

But any time you are monitoring and recording people’s movements, and storing that data, it raises some very serious issues about privacy.

Nayor pointed out that “When people are in public, there’s no expectation of privacy.” And he’s absolutely right. A person walking (or driving) down Main Street can be seen by anyone, camera or not.

But technology that can provide data stretching over hours, days, weeks or even months can paint a very different picture than what any individual could hope to create with his or her own observations.

If the data recorded by these cameras is archived for any substantial period of time, and if it becomes part of the public record, the possibilities are chilling.

What if an abusive ex-husband could file a Freedom of Information request to find out where his former wife’s car has been recently?

This is, of course, a worst-case scenario. But it is just the sort of scenario the American Civil Liberties Union envisioned when it sent requests to police departments across the country, seeking information about how plate-reader data is stored.

We believe that the good of these technologies can outweigh the bad if they are used responsibly.

We encourage our local law enforcement agencies to seek a reasonable balance between these concerns and their own needs when determining how to catalog and store the data collected by these devices.