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item0049C 794, 795
794
25 August 2003
Improper surveillance
Nobody could have guessed that the process of re-stacking Tesco's shelves
would constitute the latest threat to our civil liberties.
Yet that is
what has happened. A new
chip-controlled system for verifying shelf stock-levels
involves photographing the actual removal of items from the shelves - and could
easily be used to track people rather than products. Liberty is
protesting against this further erosion of personal privacy.
Electronic surveillance is expanding apace.
By what principles should its growth be regulated? At every turn,
new
surveillance technologies pose new issues of principle for
"society", in particular for societies with strong conventions of
individuality and privacy. For my part, I have formulated the
following principles, and I propose them for debate.
I Management, not Prevention
Now that the genie of electronic micro-surveillance is out of the bottle,
there is no question of its general prohibition. Advertisements abound
for tiny webcams which can be installed anywhere - electronic surveillance
of public places and highways, for crime prevention purposes is widespread -
private deployment in property protection is endemic - webcam websites offer
much harmless enjoyment - deployment for tracing and detection is bound to
proliferate. The problem is not with its physical deployment, but with
the abuse of power which can so
easily be entailed in the use of this technology.
II State use, or "private"?
Our first task is to regulate the abuse of power by the State - by organs of
the state, Police, military intelligence, tax authorities, local
authorities, health and social services. Such abuse may be deliberate
or accidental, and may occur in several different ways - by misapplication,
mistake, accumulation or negligence. A policeman on surveillance of a
building may use the resultant information for his own ends, whether private
manipulation or blackmail. Survey results, collected secretly, may be
inadvertently released or publicised.
Two systemic precautions
should be in place. First,
abusive conduct of all kinds by state officials should be prohibited, and
the ban enforced by way of discipline and the criminal law, as with
comparable conduct.
Second, at the level of
"system", surveillance should be installed only when there is a specific
substantive purpose for it. For my part, for example, I am
not satisfied that the London
congestion charge constitutes a sufficiently weighty purpose for the whole
network of Central London highways to have been subject to 24-hour
electronic surveillance - for the purposes of charge collection. A
system of paper tickets should have been tried first. The indications
are that the electronic system was adopted for
anti-terrorism purposes, and not for charge-collection -
indeed, an expensive face-recognition system has been added to the
camera-system used to pick up vehicle registration data. Reports
suggest that the system is now used by the Police for routine law
enforcement purposes. This form of State-sponsored
surveillance drift, is profoundly
threatening to individual freedom.
III Avoid permanent installations
We should insist that, wherever possible, the State should deploy temporary
surveillance, rather than install permanent systems. Ironically, as
the technology improves, cheapens and miniaturises, temporary deployment
becomes more practicable. Older, bigger, more expensive cameras seem
to have justified permanent deployment, in many of our high streets and
public places. We should require public authorities to justify
specific installations, for specific purposes, at specific times. A
public right of challenge should be created, entitling citizens to challenge
the utility of all installations, before the Courts.
IV "Private" Installations
Given the dominance of the corporate sector, there is a gradual
differentiation to be drawn between the public and the private realms.
The cameras which picked up up James Bulger was a private camera, in a
Liverpool shopping-centre. Our legal conventions will make it much more
difficult to protect ourselves by legislation against
surveillance drift and
abuse in the private sector. Equally, the character of
private surveillance is immensely variable - for example, you can check
on the state of the waves at my local Langland Bay this morning, by clicking
through to "Webcam" from here - and it is conceivable that such a webcam
picture could prove intrusive to an individual caught upon a secret personal
assignation on the beach at the time when the photo was taken. But the
threat to personal freedom is minimal! Even the BBC runs webcams, for
example of the Promenade
at Aberystwyth although not one likely to trouble the civil rights lobby...
Private sector surveillance is
likely to prove problematical in the scrutiny of staff by employers,
although I am not aware of any causes celebres in this sector, as
yet. Locker searches, E-mail surveillance, telephone-tapping - these
have all caused difficulty, however, and electronic surveillance is bound to
generate difficulties in this relationship.
I suggest that, without attempting to create an absolute bar of any kind
(which would be impractical, and would fail) we should at all times
apply the three principles of -
- appropriate purpose,
- proportionate deployment
and
- minimal intrusion
in both the public and private sectors.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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795
25
August
2003
For
original RWE article Click Here
Hello Roger
Concourses for our Teens
Your idea
of "concourses" for teenagers would probably not be feasible for the 12 -15
age-group. Further, it may work only for specific neighbourhoods in a town
or city: I'm thinking here obviously of class and socio-economic factors.
 I gave much thought to this issue, when I was a Councillor for Caerphilly
CBC. I found that you could break up this age range in to three age-bands
-: (a) 12-to-15 (b) 16-to-18 and (c) over-18. The needs and wants of each
group are different. I think this is why “community centres” so often fail
– they are perceived as the preserve of the over 50s - some “classes” may be
run for younger people, but they are not centres for “hanging out'”…
Your proposals would probably work best when applied to cyber-cafes -
up-dating coffee bars and milk bars.
I
have done my own vox-pop on this, and what the young seem to want is a place
to 'hang out' without interference from the adult world. You could call it “contained
irresponsibility”. The 12-to-15 age band is fickle - as a
Councillor I received more complaints about noise and anti-social behaviour
from this age-group than any other. Their favourite places for "hanging out"
are bus shelters, public benches, sopping-areas. street corners or
cul-de-sacs; especially where there is street-lighting. For this
age-band, my idea was to erect structures shaped like mushrooms - built like
modern bus-shelters with an overhanging roof and seats, using vandal-proof
materials.. Each "mushroom" would be provided with several power-points and
lighting. There would of course be the vexed issue of location: modern
housing developments have very little amenity space. Such "mushrooms" could
be made a condition of any residential planning consent.
For the other age-bands - we come back to class and socio-economic factors.
Working class kids are too much of an amorphous mass for your idea of a
concourse to work. Your idea may work for middle-class kids, as well as
some of the kids from working-class homes.
Back to you, Roger - regards,
Peter FitzGerald
Solicitor, Caerphilly, South Wales, UK - former Labour Councillor
====================================================================
Dear
Peter
“Concourses” for Teenagers
Great to hear
from you
– and of your experience as a Caerphilly Councillor. And I am very
attracted by your “mushrooms”, even if their precise location would be a
planning nightmare! They would be Rolls-Royce bus-shelters without
disruptive buses, and would retain some of the attractions of a teen-age
world, with real elements of escape and independence of the adult world.
And the 13/14 age-group might well prefer to hang-out there than to come
into a concourse. I accept that.
We agree,
also,
on the need for a sense of independence and distance from the adult world –
adult “supervision” (as in the Scouts, or Church or Police youth-clubs)
would be anathema, and kill off any major initiative. That is a key thought behind the
concourse concept: the adults would withdraw to the neutral/distant role of
“landlord” – like leaving the house to the kids for a birthday-party… There
would be no question of trying to combine a concourse with an “adult”
community centre.
 The
question is “ Could our teenagers actually run a concourse-club for
themselves?” Would the older teenagers be willing/able to manage provision
for the younger teenagers, or is the divide too great? And you are right to
high-light “class differences”, however idealistic we all like to be about
universal potential – my only reply is that I believe that, in each
eight-year youth “cohort” (i.e. age 13/20) one would find enough individuals
with the ability and inclination to take up the organising opportunities
which a concourse would offer – the probability is that the Directors and
managers would in practice be drawn from the 16/18 age-group, with personal
involvement falling off after 18. I have always been deeply impressed with
the success of Young Enterprise, the teenage business charity which
promotes the formation of teenage business projects, for training purposes.
And while it is true that “middle-class schools” tend to do well in the
Young Enterprise stakes, they have no monopoly of success!
Only
time, and experience, would tell. If any reader has any thoughts about the
location of –
Concourse
I hope
they will let us know!
Yours sincerely
Roger WE
What do you think? Any ideas? Drop me a
line
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