From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 10:33:26 MST
At the risk of pouring gasoline on a bonfire, I feel I should point out a
couple of real-world considerations that seem to be getting ignored in this
debate.
Any attempt to create a universal surveillance system faces a very
fundamental problem having nothing to do with technology: a majority of the
population will refuse to support such a system. Very few people would
consent to set up permanent public surveillance of their own bedroom,
bathroom, or other private spaces, and surveillance of corporate property
will also run into strong opposition. Needless to say, no one who has
anything to hide will go along with the idea either, and the fraction of the
population with something to hide is fairly large even in modern
democracies.
In order to build a universal system, then, you need a government willing to
ignore the wishes of a majority of the population and install a surveillance
system at gunpoint. It order to prevent civil disobedience from rendering
the system ineffective, it must also be willing to criminalize privacy and
impose draconian penalties on anyone who attempts to avoid surveillance.
The resulting struggle will be at least as bad as America's current drug
war, and the ultimate results are equally uncertain.
Historically, governments usually succeed at this kind of unpopular effort
only if they are willing and able to adopt very authoritarian approaches to
crime fighting. Essentially they have to dispense with the niceties of a
criminal justice system and simply shoot everyone they suspect of having
anything to do with the resistance. Then the population either rebels, or
is eventually cowed into submission.
Now, Zero, can you se why no one trusts that the system would actually
benefit anyone? You can't have universal public-access surveillance unless
you already have an authoritarian government to force everyone to
participate, and if you've got an authoritarian government it isn't going to
let ordinary citizens see anything it doesn't want them to.
There are only a few kinds of surveillance that avoid this problem. If you
want everything to be voluntary, you can either have:
1) Private Personal Surveillance - everyone carries a camera around and
records his/her own life, and everyone has surveillance inside their own
home. However, you can't compel someone else to hand over their tapes
(except possibly as evidence in a trial). This gives you most of the
crime-fighting benefits of transparency, but nothing else. In particular,
the fact that records can be erased and/or edited means you will never have
an infallible public record of events.
2) Public State Surveillance - you might get a majority of the population to
endorse publicly-funded surveillance of public areas in populated regions.
However, getting them to make the recordings public is going to be an uphill
battle, because you are fighting against the entrenched self-interest of the
bureaucrats. In any event, this is far cry from a transparent society,
because all the nasty business you would really like to catch will simply be
conducted outside the reach of the cameras. All the system really does is
reduce street crime a bit.
If there is another option that can be implemented without first becoming an
authoritarian state I don't see it.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
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