Technology: Surveillance and the City

In September 1997, three young men kidnapped millionaire developer Nelson Gross from his New Jersey restaurant at gunpoint. They forced him to drive his BMW across the George Washington Bridge to New York City in a bid to withdraw $100,000 from his bank. The bank request was denied. The kidnappers, with Gross still driving the BMW, crossed back into New Jersey and successfully withdrew $20,000 from a bank branch there. They then crossed the bridge back to Manhattan, where, fearing Nelson would identify them, they killed him. They might have gotten away with the crime if they paid the bridge toll in cash, but they opted for convenience and used Gross’s EZ Pass, an electronic tag that allows cars to pass freely through tolls. Within days, the FBI cracked the case by reconstructing the evening’s travels using data left at the tollbooths by the EZ Pass transponder.

That’s good detective work, but the episode illustrates how smart urban initiatives designed to ease traffic might be appropriated for unrelated purposes. In a 1998 article in the International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, Stephen J. Fay named the phenomenon “function creep,” the process by which a tool designed for a particular purpose is used for another purpose. As innovative traffic schemes increasingly rely on cameras and surveillance, civil libertarians are reminding city dwellers and city planners that not all potential uses of the new technology are as savory as catching criminals. 

A host of initiatives, such as computerized tolls like EZ Pass, camera-based programs like New York’s live webcam Advanced Traveler Information System, or even local television traffic updates, are designed to make travel easier by using some sort of surveillance. When these systems are enlisted by law enforcement, however, they may end up undermining the very freedom they seek to encourage, with insufficient mitigating improvements in public safety.

Traffic control systems can make streets safer and travel smoother. According to the federal Department of Transportation, advanced traffic surveillance and signal control systems shorten travel times by between eight and 25 percent, while electronic toll collection increases capacity by 200 to 300 percent compared to attended lanes. A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that red light violations in Oxnard, CA dropped 42 percent after cameras were introduced at nine intersections. Crashes causing injury at intersections with traffic signals in Oxnard were reduced 29 percent. And front-into-side collisions–the crash type most closely associated with running red lights–were reduced 32 percent overall, and front-into-side crashes involving injuries were reduced 68 percent.

Adding law enforcement to this list of benefits may not seem inherently objectionable, especially given successes like the Nelson Gross case. If EZ Pass can smooth out tollbooth lines, increase revenues, and catch murderers all at once, so much the better. Indeed, electronic toll systems do not seem to have crept far beyond their original purpose. But the widespread use of remote-controlled cameras provides a clear picture of function creep in action.

In London and Atlanta, License Plates—and Faces—Scanned

This February, London launched Congestion Charge, a program intended to reduce what Mayor Ken Livingstone calls the city’s “chronic traffic congestion.” The eight square miles covered by the program make up only 1.3 percent of metropolitan London, but they are host to more than 250,000 vehicles each weekday. During rush hour, these vehicles had been crawling along at an average speed of just over six miles per hour. To dissuade people from driving into London—and to make money off those who do—Livingstone has established a high-tech toll. Over 800 high-resolution cameras scan about 50 arterial entryways into London, and roads throughout the congestion zone. The cameras snap a photo of every license plate entering the city, and drivers have until the end of the day to pay a £5 (about $8) fee (by phone, Internet, or at convenience stores) or they are charged fines. The mayor’s office anticipates a 10 to 15 percent drop in traffic, making the city cleaner, quieter, easier to drive through, and safer for pedestrians and cyclists. The program is expected to raise $235 million in tolls and an extra $50 million in fines annually.

Despite some snafus—a 105-year-old Daimler that has not moved from a London museum in decades picked up a fine in late February—Congestion Charge shows early signs of success. Traffic was down 20 percent at the start of the plan’s second week. Of the 34,000 penalties issued in the first week, fewer than one hundred have been challenged. Already, a host of smaller British cities are set to implement their own versions of the program. Cities in the U.S.—including New York and Boston— have also expressed interest.

But cameras turn out to be a restless technology, easily sliding toward another purpose: London’s Metropolitan Police and the MI5, Britain’s elite security service, have announced that they will appropriate the traffic cameras as surveillance devices for their own purposes to track suspected criminals or terrorists. They will analyze images using facial recognition software that automatically identifies suspects or known criminals. The congestion cameras are “part of the [crime-fighting] equation,” the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, told the Financial Times.

Though America does not yet have any London-style congestion management programs, it does have similar examples of traffic cameras being used for other purposes. The Atlanta suburb of Marietta has set up cameras to catch drivers running red lights. The digital snapshots go into a database, where they stay until drivers pay fines or appear in court. Despite their narrow function, the cameras have been found pointed at drivers’ faces instead of their license plates. Assistant city manager Warren Hutmacher told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Our position is, we have an absolute right to catch you, and you have no right of privacy… The only people who’ll wind up in the database are those who run red lights. It’s not our intent to create divorces or see what you’re doing while driving.”

You’re Being Watched

But whether or not law enforcement officers have voyeuristic intentions, many people feel watched. “It changes people’s behavior, it changes their perceptions of liberty and society,” says Barry Steinhardt, assistant director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

One group in New York has satirized the almost unavoidable security and traffic cameras by imagining what life would be like in the city if residents actively avoided cameras. The Surveillance Camera Players make use of a map of surveillance cameras prepared by the New York Civil Liberties Union Camera Surveillance Project by comically trying to walk through New York without being caught on video. They also play to the cameras, performing specially adapted plays in front of them. Their motto—”Completely Distrustful of Government”—is a play on Police Commissioner Howard Safir’s brush-off, “Only someone completely distrustful of all government would be opposed to what we are doing with surveillance cameras.”

“Someone’s sitting behind these cameras,” Evan Hendricks, the publisher of Privacy Times, a Washington newsletter, reminded the New York Times. “I’ve seen it all,” Raymond C. Green, a police-camera operator in Tampa Bay, told the St. Petersburg Times. “Some things are really funny, like the way people dance when they think no one’s looking. Others, you wouldn’t want to watch.”

One Queens, New York woman who noticed a television traffic camera gazing at her apartment put it succinctly: “If a guy’s sitting there, and it’s 12 or 1 in the morning, he’s going to look,” she told the New York Times. “I would do it, and I’m not a pervert.”

Random videotaping can quickly turn into real surveillance, regardless of the cameras’ original purposes. “Private detectives and information brokers make their livings by knowing the existing systems. All they need to do is develop a source behind that camera,” said Hendricks. “And there’s no law saying that if a video surveillance system was created for traffic or security, it can only be used for that purpose,” he added.

The U.K. long ago introduced such use of traffic cameras for surveillance purposes. In 1973, Scotland Yard installed a video camera atop the Duchess of Argyll’s mansion at Grosvenor Square, telling the public it was there to monitor traffic. But Grosvenor Square was also home to the American Embassy. As the Duchess herself confirmed, the camera was really there “to help the police with the demonstrators.”

Nowadays, Britain has dropped even the pretext of traffic watching. Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen described in the New York Times Magazine how urban surveillance measures in Britain originally intended to stop terrorist attacks had fallen sway to function creep. “The cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel that they are being watched at all times. Instead of keeping terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to keep punks out of shopping malls,” he wrote. “And rather than thwarting serious crime, the cameras are being used to enforce social conformity in ways that Americans may prefer to avoid.”

“I am gay and I might want to kiss my boyfriend in Victoria Square at two in the morning,” one man told Rosen. “I would not kiss my boyfriend now. I am aware that it has altered the way I might behave.”

Possibly the worst case of function creep was documented in a 1998 European Parliament report called “An Appraisal of Technologies for Political Control.” It cites an “advanced traffic control system” of cameras set up around Tiananmen Square. “After the 1989 massacre of students, there followed a witch hunt when the authorities tortured and interrogated thousands… The [traffic control system was] used to faithfully record the protests. The images were repeatedly broadcast over Chinese television offering a reward for information, with the result that nearly all the transgressors were identified.”

There is no reason to expect that traffic cameras in the U.S. will lead to such vicious human rights abuses. And there are signs that Americans are increasingly accepting of surveillance. Polls, especially those taken after September 11, indicate that Americans are willing to have their cities monitored. In January and February 2002, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked residents of 15 metro-Atlanta counties asking people about the 850 state Department of Transportation cameras used to measure traffic speed and flow. Seventy-four percent of respondents were not bothered by traffic cameras. Twelve percent found them “annoying” and 13 percent called them an “invasion of privacy.”

“You Can’t Hide Those Lying Eyes”

But justifying the use of traffic systems for law enforcement rests on the assumption that the police tactics work. In an article in the magazine Reason last year, David Kopel and Michael Krause of the libertarian Independence Institute wrote about facial recognition technology of the sort that the police plan to use with London’s Congestion Charge cameras. One test administered over a week at a security checkpoint at Palm Beach International Airport recorded, on average, at least one false alarm every hour.

Florida construction work Rob Milliron was on the receiving end of one such false alarm in Tampa. The Tampa Police Department set up 36 cameras in the Ybor City neighborhood to scan pedestrian traffic and match images with a database of known criminals. The cameras caught Milliron anonymously walking down an Ybor City street and police released the picture to show off the sharpness of the technology. U.S. News & World Report picked up the image and published it under the headline “You Can’t Hide Those Lying Eyes in Tampa.” An Oklahoma woman alerted the police that the man in the photo was her ex-husband, wanted on felony child neglect charges. Three Tampa officers promptly tracked down Milliron at a jobsite and questioned him. He was, they soon found, the wrong man.

“I don’t think it’s right,” Milliron told the St. Petersburg Times. “They made me feel like a criminal.” A week later—just a month and a half after it started—the Ybor City project was abandoned. Even without the scandal, Tampa police would have been better off without the program—their technology wasn’t any better than Milliron’s accuser at recognizing faces. According to an ACLU report on the program, “Drawing a Blank,” the system never made a correct match with faces in the department’s database. But it did make a series of false matches. Just as worrying as the failure of the poor Ybor City technology is the fact that the image of Milliron—whom police had not even suspected of being a criminal—was leaked in the first place. The incident demonstrates how easily function creep turns into privacy invasion.

The benefits of surveillance-based traffic systems like London’s are tangible and enticing. But such systems are designed to ease movement, not to catch criminals. The Surveillance Camera Players are joking around now, but it only takes a few more Ybor City-type incidents before people start thinking twice about letting themselves be seen by city cameras. Instead of improving mobility throughout American cities, these systems, without strong limits on function creep, may make many people feel less free to move at all.