Public Surveillance:
Acceptable Usage Guidelines Now Sorely Needed From the ACLU
The City of Chelsea, MA is about to take a bold step. It will become the first city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to install wired and wireless digital surveillance cameras. Upon the initial implementation to be completed later in 2005, the city’s police department will be able to continuously monitor the city’s entire 1.8 square mile area.
The City of Chelsea made this announcement on June 3, 2005 weeks before the London terrorist bombings on July 7. At that time, the Boston Globe report of the city’s surveillance camera announcement also included a statement from Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Massachusetts. She warned that without written rules limiting who has access to the cameras' images and for how long they will be stored, “we’re going to a pure surveillance society where the government is watching your every move. I don't think that's good law enforcement or consistent with American values."
The London terrorist bombings really serve to place the issues in this debate into bold type. Law enforcement officials around the world can now observe the swiftness with which London police detectives are discovering the identities of these terrorists in spite of the fact that four of them were suicide bombers whose physical remains have all but vanished. They are doing so with the help of stored images captured by surveillance cameras installed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York City.
Now that we’ve witnessed the horror of the London terrorist attacks, we as a democratic society concerned with personal privacy and security should now determine how to use digital surveillance technology to secure pubic safety without sacrificing personal privacy and security. The alternative security measures available to those people we have made responsible for our public safety include racial profiling – a practice the ACLU would find equally reprehensible.
It is no longer enough for the ACLU to “just say no” to the use of advanced public surveillance technology. It could be a powerful, lifesaving protector. What the ACLU should now do is establish guidelines for the acceptable use of this technology by a democracy that is equally concerned with personal privacy as it is with public safety. Don’t wait for local law enforcement officials to do this. That will only result in a patchwork of potentially conflicting rules and regulations. The ACLU have the legal resources to do so. We would be happy to publish such guidelines to this blog.
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Privacy
Surveillance
ACLU
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