Surveillance and Government
I found two recent columns on surveillance and government interesting. The first is by Lorne Gunter and offers a fresh perspective on the role of surveillance cameras. I really like this quote:
I enjoy as much as the next person television shows such as 24 and the BBC’s excellent equivalent MI-5, but I am under no illusion that super agents using super computers are able to monitor terrorists in real time as they make their way through city streets and malls so they can be interdicted before they carry out their plots. The best that can be hoped for from cameras is that they deter would-be terrorists. But cameras cannot actually prevent terrorism, unless a perpetrator is very dumb and slow and authorities are extraordinarily lucky.
Another useful observation:
In the 1990s, New York City made great strides in cleaning up its subway system and streets. But it did so by putting more officers on platforms and trains. Police can see what cameras cannot, and they can respond immediately, rather than waiting to be summoned by those monitoring cameras. Cameras are a sop, a symbolic reaction that merely enables timid politicians to say, “Look. See? We’re doing something.”
A second column I found interest is by Julian Sanchez on wiretapping. This is an issue of great contemporary political import. The core of this debate has implications for the use of surveillance cameras by government. Read the column, but here are some key insights:
Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can — and repeatedly have — abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters. The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.”
. . .
In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.
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