Privacy is precious but sometimes cameras are the best witnesses
It all began decades ago, apparently, observation cameras installed in Germany where scientists were conducting V2 rocket experiments, their secret project recorded by a maniacally watchful and paranoid regime. That history might help explain why Germans are among the most vocally opposed to broad, undiscriminating surveillance systems. Privacy International, a global organization of privacy protection experts and human rights agencies from 40 countries, conducted a survey last year that rated the European Union plus 11 other nations to assess how privacy rights were being protected. Canada was second most vigilant behind only Germany. The United Kingdom is most enthralled with the practice of video-monitoring its citizenry, originally undertaken in response to IRA bombings. At last count, there were reportedly some 4 million cameras recording the population's activities, 400,000 in London alone. It was one such mall camera that captured an image I still can't bear to look at – the picture of 2-year-old Jamie Bulger being led away to his death, trustfully taking the hand of a youth who would, shortly thereafter, along with another teenager, murder the child so horrifically. The Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, were also captured on school cameras. Americans, though, are generally averse to video snooping. (When it was revealed that 300 public-location security cameras had been mounted around Manhattan, an ingenious group of civil libertarians plotted out a "MapQuest for dissidents and paranoids,'' providing routes of "least surveillance'' around the city.) A while back, there was a worldwide protest against pervasive public prying, the state all the time sticking its nose, and its lens, in. The funny part: Participants filmed themselves at it, and then swamped the Internet with the streaming images, turning the cameras on themselves. Privacy is precious. Our right to anonymity is a lot to sacrifice, especially since the jury is still out on whether CCTV helps reduce crime as a deterrent, which is distinct from identifying the culprits afterwards. There are legitimate concerns about abuse of surveillance power, the implied threat to rights of assembly – law enforcement monitoring completely legal demonstrations and the like (which they've always done anyway) – the misuse of databases, employers looking over the shoulder of staff, cops looking over the shoulder of everyone. It's creepy. But the endless watching cuts both ways and it was CCTV evidence that debunked police accounts of how Jean Charles de Menezes, wrongly flagged as a terrorism suspect in the panic after the London bombings, was shot to death in a tube station by police. The Yonge St. optical stalkers may be gone. But the cinéma-vérité continues in Toronto, as elsewhere. Every move you make, every breath you take.
Security News - Article 2
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