NPR: Morning Edition The Video Surveillance Debate

"It hangs over Times Square, looking more like a street lamp than what it really is: a police video surveillance camera that can swivel 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to read a Broadway ticket in a scalper's hand 50 feet away.

As Jad Abumrad reports for Morning Edition, the camera and thousands of others like it in New York City and millions across the country are at the center of an escalating debate: is the use of such devices to combat crime and terrorism worth the loss of privacy and other guaranteed constitutional freedoms?"

redux [02.15.02]
The New York Review of Books The Threat to Patriotism

"What has al-Qaeda done to our Constitution, and to our national standards of fairness and decency? Since September 11, the government has enacted legislation, adopted policies, and threatened procedures that are not consistent with our established laws and values and would have been unthinkable before."

"The Justice Department has now detained several hundred aliens, some of them in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. None of them has been convicted of anything at all, and many of them have been charged with only minor immigration offenses that would not by themselves remotely justify detention. It has refused repeated efforts on the part of journalists, the ACLU, and other groups even to identify these detainees. So our country now jails large numbers of people, secretly, not for what they have done, nor even with case-by-case evidence that it would be dangerous to leave them at liberty, but only because they fall within a vaguely defined class, of which some members might pose danger."

Reason Are You Camera-Ready?

"The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Washington Metropolitan Police Department plans to monitor people through hundreds of cameras on streets, in subway stations, and possibly in shopping malls and other businesses. "In the context of September 11," said Stephen Gaffigan, the official in charge of the surveillance network, "we have no choice but to accept greater use of this technology."

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that we do have a choice. Fighting terrorism may have replaced protecting children as an all-purpose excuse for expanded government, but there is still something undeniably creepy about ubiquitous, centralized surveillance of public spaces.

Admittedly, this vague uneasiness, even if it's backed up with references to 1984 and Enemy of the State, is not enough to trump fears of terrorism. So what, exactly, is the problem with using cameras to enhance the police presence in our nation's capital (and soon, perhaps, in your town)?"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"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."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""