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Courtesy of the Off the Hook radio show, I heard about this news story from Philadelphia regarding surveillance cameras that just goes to show how people / society can get so worked up about something that they end up fighting for / demanding things that might not be in their best interests if they really thought about it.

I’ll chop the quoted story up here and comment as it goes.

Malfunctioning Crime Cameras Spark Protest, Confrontation
WYNNEFIELD - July 24, 2007 - Plagued by a litany of problems, the surveillance camera program set up by the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation is once again coming under scrutiny. Residents staged a protest calling the program a joke and calling for an investigation.

Members of the Philadelphia Alliance Against Drugs and Violence as well as others at the rally were outraged to learn that once again the five surveillance cameras set up to monitor crime were down and none of them recorded the shooting death of 23-year-old Charles Tunstall early Sunday morning.

“A man got shot in the head in front of the Chinese grocery store. There’s a camera there. Why is there no surveillance there? Why wasn’t it caught on camera? i don’t understand,” said Kathy Dennison of Wynnefield.

“For the murder to happen and the cameras weren’t working, you know that really says something. It’s not right,” said Mia Waters.

OK, hold on a second. Shouldn’t we be asking some fundamental questions about why there are cameras everywhere recording everything “just in case”? IMHO, the complaint should be that the cameras exist in the first place, but since the need for privacy invasion (among other things) is often couched in an implication that such measures are necessary to provide us “security”, we now have people who are actually upset and demanding that they make the surveillance work better, instead of protesting that it’s there in the first place.

The new executive director of PCDC blamed a lightning strike and hackers for the cameras not working since May 30.

Icing on the cake, and standard operating procedure - instill as much fear as possible.

“The fact that someone would basically try to tamper with a camera that’s designed to assist the community speaks very badly of the concern that the individual would have for the residents,” said Aquil Sabur of the PCDC.

Residents weren’t buying the hacker story.

“Why would somebody hack the camera’s in Wynnefield all of a sudden?” wondered Sheila Wilson.

Well, that’s encouraging. At least some people may be taking the first step in the right direction - identifying where the source of concern in this matter should be: the people in charge of running the cameras, and their apparent ineptitude, which only makes the privacy concerns that much worse.

As Action News reported back in March, the surveillance program has been plagued with problems. Back then, the cameras had been down for 18 days and PCDC didn’t even know it until we began asking questions.

Curtis Jones, then president of PCDC, announced the surveillance cameras with great fanfare back in the fall. They were secured thru a half-million dollar grant from the justice department.
…
District Attorney Lynne Abraham said if those cameras had been working, we would know the identity of the murderer. She said there’s no acceptable excuse for those cameras not working. PCDC is already under investigation by the city’s inspector general’s office.

There are so many holes in this position, it would be laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that someone died, and that the tragedy is being used to press the PCDC’s pro-surveillance stance.

For one thing, the five cameras that were installed in the area that were supposed to have caught the crime in progress obviously did nothing to act as any sort of deterrent to the crime. The criminal would have no way of knowing that the recording was not functional, but apparently decided to shoot the guy in the head anyway.

The other obvious concerns about privacy invasions, such as who may get access to those records now or in the future, for purposes that may not have anything to do with preventing crime, are not addressed at all. The traditional answer to such questions is that you have to trust the government and/or law enforcement officials to carefully guard the data and only use it for legitimate purposes, which is total BS.

For one thing, that’s why we have things like the fourth amendment - because it’s recognized that limits need to be in place and enforced, otherwise they will be disregarded. But even if you totally trust those agencies to have the most noble of intentions, and never succumb to the temptation to skirt those rules in order to do their jobs “better”, you also have the demonstrated incompetence of the people in charge of operating them. If they were totally down for weeks at a time without anyone noticing, I find it hard to believe that their data security policies are rock solid and will do anything to prevent the information falling into the wrong hands. I think it’s only a matter of time before we hear the next “stolen laptop with tons of private data” story, and eventually it will be this particular video footage that leaks out.