By Charlie Meyer
“When you least expect it, you’re elected. You’re the star today. Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”
In the 1960s, the late Allen Funt hosted a television show called “Candid Camera.” Unsuspecting people were placed in fictitious scenarios, all recorded by a hidden camera. Viewers were in stitches as the subject made laughs at their own expense. Finally, Funt would appear and show the unknowing subject the hidden, or “candid” camera.
In a free society, surveillance cameras strike most of us as so-very-George-Orwell-1984 intrusions of our privacy. Very “Big Brother.” Surveillance cameras are found just about everywhere. Governments use them for anti-terrorist and law enforcement purposes. Companies use them to detect employee theft and shoplifting. We even have “nanny cams” to check up on child care workers and babysitters. How much privacy can we expect? Let’s just say it isn’t exactly virgin legal territory.
I imagine those constitutional “strict constructionists” are only “rah-rah” about surveillance cameras when they’re focused on the “bad guys.” Never mind that video cameras didn’t appear until the better part of two centuries after the Constitution. Fortunately, the Framers of the Constitution made provisions to keep pace with the times and technologies. The Constitution didn’t require formal legal training to be a legislator or President; Bush wasn’t smart enough to be a lawyer, and Dick Cheney even shot an attorney. We have an independent judiciary to protect us from flawed products of legislators who were non-practicing doctors, businessmen, and even farmers. The late Republican Congressman Sonny Bono was a 60s sidekick singer. This gene pool needs a lifeguard: the courts.
In 1947, back when Allen Funt produced a radio show called “Hidden Microphone,” the enabling authorization for the National Security Agency had safeguards against domestic eavesdropping. We had just defeated the Axis powers in World War II, and remembered the Nazi Forschungsamt, an eavesdropping brainchild, along with the Gestapo, of one Hermann Goering, Chief Hunter of the Reich, German Poster Child for Jenny Craig, among other things. The Russians had internal paranoia down pat. This sinister legacy was fresh enough to be an aversion.. We wanted neither.
In the 1920s, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson closed down the so-called “Black Chamber,” where cryptologists broke enemy codes in, and after, the First World War, saying “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” Even Republicans can learn, as Stimson would find himself as Secretary of War in 1941, under President Roosevelt. The attack on Pearl Harbor showed the dire need for more effective intelligence gathering, analysis, and distribution to “save blood and treasure”, as the late former CIA Director William Casey wrote nearly a half-century later. We would learn to appreciate the value of intelligence. Our history shows that knowing is far less bloody for us than not knowing. The challenge is to get the intelligence information we need to defend ourselves without forgetting the precious liberties that makes America the freedom-loving nation it is.
I’m old enough to remember black & white television cameras; big, heavy, and expensive in those days. Want to keep tabs on your babysitter, or kids, for that matter? One can go to the store or on the Internet these days and get all the surveillance equipment you want without a second mortgage, or skill sets found in the National Reconnaissance Office (they’re the ones looking down on earth with highly classified satellites.) Despite the protests of your children, you are generally free to spy upon your own home, perverts excepted. Moms have eyes in the back of their heads.
Locally, the City Council discussed using surveillance cameras to prevent and detect vandalism in our parks. I hope City Attorney John Athey was consulted beforehand. It’s always easier and most often cheaper to talk to your lawyer first to get it right the first time (Happy Holidays to the Mineral County Bar Association.) Our volunteer firefighters and EMS personnel take enough risks protecting us; a surveillance camera at major intersections would be acceptable to nab those who are too self-centered or “busy” to yield to emergency vehicles. The key is a compelling public need that would pass muster with our courts. I don’t have a problem with that. We have an independent judiciary to protect our freedoms.
Believe it or not, your house is pretty much your castle (and your mortgage banker or landlord can let you say that), Outside, there is a public need to ensure the rights and safety of others. We elect officials to write and enforce laws, subject to review by the courts. If the government wants to look into your home, they are subject to either compelling probable cause or having to sell the idea and a warrant to a judge. We are fortunate to have a fine police force, but they can’t be everywhere. Public cameras can and do help protect us. At work, our employers can and often do monitor us with video cameras; I happen to be making faces at the one on the wall across the bar. If it was too objectionable, I could always quit, but manna in the form of Purina Dog Chow and Jerry Castiglia’s pizza isn’t exactly raining down my chimney.
When there is a compelling public safety need, I don’t have a problem with video surveillance in public. There are such needs, despite those with the every-man-an-island, inDUHvidualist mindset. We couldn’t possibly afford a cop on every street corner, nor would we want it. We have courts to appeal to and protect us if government gets too intrusive. We can and do balance the rights of the individual with the needs of all of us as a society. I have yet to find anywhere else on the planet that does it better.
By Stephen Smoot:
“I am the eye in the sky/Looking at you/I can read your mind/I am the maker of rules/Dealing with fools/I can cheat you blind.” Allen Parsons Project "Eye in the Sky."
Like the irresistible and relentless current of the Mississippi rolling down to the Gulf of Mexico, the Western democratic world inches closer and closer to a surveillance society. Imagine a world where cameras watch every street corner, tracking each individual’s every move. Technology allows computers to instantly match each face with a driver’s license image on the state database so names can appear as well. Anything you do, whether you purchase an ice cream cone, meet with an illicit lover, or simply walk the streets at night is carefully digitized, recorded, and filed away.
Great Britain, the modern cradle of the idea of rights and liberties, already lives in this state. The average citizen of this kingdom appears on no less than three hundred cameras per day, according to police sources reporting to the Associated Press. The "Spectator" magazine warns that Britain is “sleepwalking towards a Big Brother society, not in one fell swoop, but by stages. There is no boot stamping in the faces, just an ever insistent foot in the door.” According to Privacy International, Britain joins Communist China and Russia as the world’s only complete surveillance societies. It even has microphones and speakers attached to some cameras. A disembodied voice will suddenly shriek at someone to pick up their litter or clean up after their dog. Shouldn’t this strike people as being extremely creepy?
It can’t happen here, right? Not in West Virginia, right? You would be wrong. The Charleston mayor, an alleged Republican, has heartily endorsed for at least two years the video surveillance of West Virginia’s state capital. He eventually wants hundreds of cameras around his city that cost taxpayers about $2,000 a piece. Jones issued a chilling statement to the "State Journal" in 2007, jauntily claiming “We are not listening to their every move. We are just watching their every move.” Oh, that makes me feel much better, Mayor Jones.
As soon as I told people I would be writing on this subject, I even heard from some libertarian minded people, “what’s the problem? If you are not doing anything wrong, why worry? Are we not safer?” Timothy Garton Ash originally achieved fame by covering the old Communist police state of East Germany. Several years ago he wrote a book about that country’s "Stasi" and its dossier on him and his activities while reporting as a journalist from that country. Now he writes about the increasing trend of surveillance in democratic societies. He explained in the "Hoover Digest" that “a compulsion to legislate ever more restrictions is combined with paroxysms of staggering inefficiency. Can anyone think of a better formula for sacrificing liberty without gaining security?” In other words, do we really want to trust a government that screws up “cash for clunkers” with a digital dossier on our every move and has such a wonderful track record of keeping e! mployees’ social security numbers secure? Ash’s worries were reflected by the statements of teenagers living near one of the cameras in Charleston who claimed that crime had not been affected, but they felt less free.
The issue here is not the criminality of the subjects watched, but what will the government do with the information. The makers of rules know that information is power. J. Edgar Hoover kept illegally
made tapes on figures such as Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. that could easily have been used for blackmail purposes. An incumbent governor or mayor could track a challenger’s movements, or some of them anyway, and reveal potentially damaging personal information during a campaign. Hackers or thieves could illegally gain access to files and use them for their own purposes. Accumulation of this information creates an ever increasing potential for abuse. The makers of rules can combine the tracking of your movements with other information, such as purchases on a credit card (was it George Will that said “cash is freedom?”), social networking posts, and an almost endless amount of digitized material to create a complete picture of you and your life filed away on a computer. Isn’t that wonderful? Do you feel more secure yet?
The scariest part of this entire trend lies in public acceptance of it. Italy did not become an authoritarian state immediately under Mussolini. He carefully guided that country towards total dictatorship inch by inch over a long stretch of years. If you take away freedom bit by bit, people do not tend to notice. Two roadblocks should have stood in the way of this increasingly pervasive problem of surveillance. The Fourth Amendment claims that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. Earl Warren’s Supreme Court drew from this and other parts of the Bill of Rights to define a constitutional right to privacy. Certainly living outside of one’s home exposes one to some public witnessing of their actions. However Americans need to draw the line on privacy in public places somewhere. The feeling of eyes on you all the time creates an atmosphere of restraint th! at freedom loving people should find terrifying. Take down the cameras. A little added security is not worth the liberty lost.
