CNN Proposal: Webcams to keep homeland safe

"Despite such skepticism, more than 10,000 people have visited USHomeGuard's new Web site, and Walker said he could get hundreds of thousands of Americans to sign up for home-based, work-when-you-can jobs.

"We like to think of USHomeGuard as a digital victory garden," Walker told a recent tech conference, referring to vegetable patches Americans planted to help ease food rationing during World War II. "It lets people be part of the solution.""

redux [10.07.02]
The New York Times Protesting the Big Brother Lens, Little Brother Turns an Eye Blind
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"Confronted with the unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras, Michael Naimark believes he can hide in plain sight with the aid of a $1 laser pointer."

"In his research, Mr. Naimark discovered that there was already military literature widely available about using lasers to blind sensors, and that it was relatively simple to become invisible in front the cameras that now watch over many public spaces in this country."

The Chicago Tribune Surveillance on rise, and so are concerns
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"I have lots of worries about how this technology is being used," said John Graham, who is the founder of BroadWare Technologies, a Cupertino, Calif., maker of software for video camera networks, and who was one of the first researchers to send audio and video over the Internet.

"I've become Big Brother, but I didn't mean to be," Graham said. "It's just that there's no money in education or scientific collaboration.""

redux [09.09.02]
SFGate Surveillance Society Don't look now, but you may find you're being watched

"These days, if you feel like somebody's watching you, you might be right.

One year after the Sept. 11 attacks, security experts and privacy advocates say there has been a surge in the number of video cameras installed around the country. The electronic eyes keep an unwavering gaze on everything from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Washington Monument."

redux [03.11.02]
Wired News Spying: The American Way of Life?

"In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places such as street corners.

Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward greater restrictions on individual liberty."

redux [02.25.02]
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 [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 [10.12.01]
The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
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"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 [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.""