Keep Watching the Watchers

Big Brother lives next door, and he loves playing online games for cash. Next month, a British firm will launch a website that allows people to win money for reporting crimes recorded by private security cameras. Businesses who own closed circuit television equipment can pay a fee to include their video feed in the game, and those fees get redistributed as prizes to players who report a crime in progress.

There are lots of things wrong with this picture. The most obvious critique of the game is that opening up private cameras to public viewing is a gross invasion of privacy. Since anyone can “play,” it gives carte blanche to snoopers to keep tabs on their neighbors and relatives as they go to the bank or the grocery store and opens up a world of possibilities for stalkers. It could easily lead to harassment, enabling perverts to ogle attractive women, racists to target minorities, and reactionaries to sniff out atheists or communists. It’s only a matter of time before footage of an embarrassing moment, or, worse, someone flashing her social security number, ends up on YouTube.

The game’s website alleges that players will not get to choose their camera feed and have no way of knowing the location of a particular camera. However, it’s likely that determined hackers will be able to tease more information out of the server—especially since the venture was launched by a former restaurant owner rather than a seasoned Internet-technology security veteran.

It is possible that this “game” will actually increase crime. Savvy players may realize that they could score a far greater reward by individually blackmailing the criminal they caught rather than reporting her to authorities for the reward. Drug dealers and gang leaders could use the video feeds as a way to recruit hoodlums hanging out in a particular location. Experienced thieves would get a gold mine of information about the businesses themselves, such as when employees shift in and out, that could help them commit robbery.

But even if the game runs without a hitch, there are deeper ethical problems that arise when companies encourage citizens to treat each other as potential transgressors and reward people for reporting their neighbors.

As the number of CCTV cameras has skyrocketed in recent years, civil libertarian groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union and its counterparts in other countries, have argued against their spread as a matter of principle. Britain now has more cameras per person than anywhere else in the world, and certain areas of the U.S. are not far behind: New York City now uses thousands of public cameras, and residents have become more receptive to surveillance after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.

But the cameras themselves aren’t the problem. Like most technologies, the ethics of CCTV equipment don’t concern the technology itself, but how humans use it. Machines don’t have morals—we do. For instance, cameras have indeed been marginally useful in solving British crime, although a few high-profile cases such as the London Underground bombing in 2005 have given the public the false impression that the cameras are some kind of silver bullet. A UK police chiefs’ report in 2008 alleged that only three percent of crimes were solved through CCTV footage.

Supporters often push public cameras as a way of reducing crime, acting as a cheaper alternative to a police force. In reality, while CCTV shows some ability to deter premeditated property crime, such as thefts in parking lots, it can’t prevent more serious transgressions. A recent study by the University of California suggests that San Francisco’s $700,000 program to install public cameras has had no effect on violent crime since they were installed in 2005.

Therefore, it is wrong to frame the debate in terms of a tradeoff between privacy and security. Take, for example, the London police reviewing the subway footage to identify suspects after the 2005 bombing. This had a minimal effect on privacy and served a purpose far different than providing security: administering justice.

By contrast, the online game that enables players to snitch on criminals in the act is a particularly pernicious use of the technology. Naively, it may seem that having fellow citizens behind the video screens would be preferable to anonymous government bureaucrats or corrupt policemen. But if we encourage average citizens to start treating their neighbors and coworkers as suspects before a crime has even been committed, it undermines the natural trust that allows society to function. At the extreme, we will become like Congress in the ’50s, Germany in the ’30s, Salem in the 1690s, or, most appropriately, George Orwell’s dystopian vision of 1984.

So far, Harvard’s approach to CCTV ranges from mundane uses like identifying which delivery truck is at a docking bay to productive crime-solving like reviewing tapes after a theft. But given that CCTV is here to stay, we all have a duty to ensure it continues to be used responsibly on campus and that the world follows suit.

Adam R. Gold ’ 11, a Crimson editorial editor, is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.