Loss of Privacy

Two weeks ago, a little girl was murdered, presumably by her stepfather. He has, apparently, confessed to the crime and is awaiting trial. While this is a horrible tragedy, the local school districts have taken the knee-jerk response to solving a problem that does not exist.

The playground gates are locked, infrared cameras patrol 24/7 and two adults maintain vigilance while 220 Community Christian School children leave the grounds each day. Cedar Canyon Elementary School has 12 to 15 adults outside the school after every school day as children are picked up by parents or loaded onto buses. Cedar Canyon Principal Betty Smith locks the front gate to the schoolyard nightly.

The actions are not a response to any single incident but prudent precautions in a wayward world, Community Christian School Principal Chris Geary said.

“We know we live in a sin-sick world,” Geary said. “(The precautions) help our families feel secure. We just try to be vigilant.”

While the schools are responsible for students during school hours and it is good that the schools want to ensure student safety, doing something to make parents feel secure does nothing to actually make anyone more safe or more secure.

Being vigilant may be noble, but all the extra security since this little girl was murdered is still missing the point. She was never taken to school, so there was never a chance that school officials would have seen her on that fateful day. She also was not taken by a stranger as most people feared. The fact remains that children who are abused and/or murdered often find the perpetrator to be a family member or someone close to the family.

In the Minitare Public School District, they are going beyond vigilant and into the realm  of paranoia.

“The discussion at the developmental meeting next week will be to be aware, remember as many kids as you can and ask for help from other parents in being aware of surroundings.”

The district would like to install more cameras than it already has in place. Since much of the public funding has dried up for security cameras, Cody said he would welcome someone stepping forward to donate the equipment.

Asking parents to be aware of surrounds is akin to “see something say something.” It creates fear and panic when it isn’t necessary. Installing more cameras instills an atmosphere of distrust. It indicates that every single person who comes near the school is automatically a suspect whose every move must be watched and scrutinized.

“My concern as administrator is that situations will occur; we can’t control everything,” Cody said. “We’ll do the best we can do to keep students safe as long as they are on our property. We can only control the things we can control. That would go for all school districts.”

This is the sensible approach. Unfortunately, it’s buried at the end of the story where most people won’t see or read it because they’re too busy being afraid of the first part of the story. There is no way for a school district to control everything. You cannot predict how people are going to behave, nor can you completely control their behavior even when they are on your property. If this were possible, there would be no incidents of bullying, racism, or fighting at school.

Most adults know and understand when something is out of place and when it’s nothing to be concerned about. Creating a permanent atmosphere of fear and panic in people, particularly parents, only results in freedoms lost and innocent lives at risk. Protecting children is never a bad thing, but ignoring the facts of who really hurts children only results in adult lives being destroyed due to misguided accusations.

The city of Atlanta, Georgia is home to the Video Integration Center, allowing city police to monitor over a hundred public and private CCTV cameras. This isn’t enough, however, for the police. They want more monitoring.

Talks are underway to link up with more cameras at CNN Center, Georgia State University, the Georgia World Congress Center and MARTA, along with cameras in Buckhead.

Officials say hundreds or thousands more private-sector cameras will eventually feed into the center.

“This is just the beginning,” said Dave Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which helped raise money for the center. “This is going to grow by leaps and bounds over the years. The goal, of course, is to have the entire city blanketed.”

Officials insist cameras linked to the center will only watch areas the public could already see. The city’s law department is drafting rules for the center, Ferguson said.

Unfortunately, officials are not talking to each other as you cannot blanket a city yet only have cameras where the public can already see. The two statements are incompatible. Yet, city officials are okay with tracking innocent people as they go about their daily lives.

“I should hope the public is not okay with it,” said Brett Bittner, executive director of the Libertarian Party of Georgia. “We’re talking about filming every aspect of people’s lives once they step out of the house.”

This is never acceptable and it doesn’t help fight crime. One only need to look at the massive test case of the United Kingdom where people are already on camera once they leave their homes. Crime hasn’t dropped there as a result of intruding cameras at all.

Researchers at Cornell University have created an AI system based on the Kinect that can watch everything that is going on in a home.

What they have done is to take a standard Kinect with the open source drivers and the PrimeSense Nite software and created a program that can tell what you are doing. The Kinect mounted on a roaming robot or perhaps one in every room can monitor what you are doing – cleaning your teeth, cooking, writing on a whiteboard (the designer are academics after all) and so on.

At a less ambitious level you could use a Kinect to monitor patients say and make sure that they were drinking or eating etc. A more worrying application might be to make sure that workers were doing just that – working and doing the correct task.

This is not a good use of AI. It is intrusive and not at all helpful to the person it is watching. Human beings do not need to be monitored 24/7. It’s not natural. Yet, this is exactly what this system is designed for despite the effort to inform you otherwise.

Your employer will use it spy on you. He will make sure that you are monitored at all times so that you cannot steal anything, even a paperclip, and make sure you are working 100% of the time. This will only be the beginning. Everyone everywhere will be monitored. Threaten your children in the heat of the moment? You no longer have children because the state has taken them away. If you can think of it, there will be a way to watch you while you do it.

While you’re enjoying this video of a drunk British man, think about the fact that cameras are so ubiquitous in The United Kingdom that this is an every day occurrence. The cameras can easily watch anyone where ever they go.

As early as 2008, the federal government had been discussing the use of Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST). Similar to the thought crime of the movie Minority Report, FAST is designed to be able to detect if a person intends to commit a terrorist act. It is now getting its chance to prove itself as it has finally been tested in US airports.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person’s gaze, to judge a subject’s state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.

FAST has finished its first round of testing, but there is no report as to whether or not it has improved its lab test accuracy of an abysmal 70%.

While this is an invasion of privacy, it’s even more so when added to the fact that the airlines already keep a record of your race, sex, destination, length of vacation, what credit cards you use, and what’s in your luggage.  Now, you must ensure that you have the right emotions as you saunter through the airport.

Making people FEEL safe is not a good idea.  It’s security theater.  Invading people’s privacy only serves to piss them off.  We are guaranteed the right to be secure in our persons.  Using technology that may or may not detect perceived behavior is never a good idea.  Thinking something is not doing something.  If it were, I’d have murdered about 527 people by now.  I hate waiting on lines.  If I’m in line for more than five minutes.  The longer I wait, the angrier I get.  Every time I fly, I have about 15 people that I’d like to kill so I can get through the line quicker.

This program will, in the end, be used to profile “certain” individuals instead of being used for its intended purpose.  It’s just a way of hiding that fact.  A few drug traffickers are likely to be caught with this system and it will be hailed as a great device that everyone needs.  In the end, we’ll lose a little bit more of our privacy, having been subjected to naked xray body scans and behavioral scanning, but we’ll still believe we’re safe because nothing has blown up.  Using general measures to detect specific actions is flawed from the start and is why we should cut our losses while we can, lest we not learn from failed systems we’ve already spent millions on.

It is unfortunate that, after several years, the government continues to push for programs that won’t work, do not have acceptable accuracy levels, and only make people feel safe without any real safety measures actually put into place.