Cameras, Cameras, Everywhere, and Not a Spot to Think (or If You Can See the Empire State Building, We Can See You)

In one of the more depressing developments of the late twentieth century, the same nation that gave us the Magna Carta also provided one of the most starkly Orwellian views of citizenship. In the mid-1990s, Conservative John Major based his campaign for reelection as British Prime Minister in part on a promise to install more video cameras in public spaces. Major promoted his proposal with a highly successful slogan: "If You've Got Nothing to Hide, You've Got Nothing to Fear." Following an upset victory over Labor leader Neil Kinnock, Major kept his promise and began a program (later aggressively continued by Tony Blair's Labor government) that has made Britons the most heavily watched and supervised people in the Western hemisphere, if not the world. In an October 2001 New York Times Magazine cover story, legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen (the author of The Unwanted Gaze) said that according to some estimates, there are more than 2.5 million surveillance cameras in Britain, and the average Englishman is photographed by over 300 different cameras each day.^[16]

Thanks to an absence of a constant physical threat like the Irish Republican Army and the strong protections laid out in the Bill of Rights (our list of written freedoms is noticeably absent from the English legal system), the use of public surveillance cameras has been slower to catch on in the United States. In 1997, for instance, Josh Quittner wrote in Time magazine that the average New Yorker could expect to be photographed by surveillance cameras a mere twenty times per day.

That estimate is now unquestionably low. Industry analysts predict that roughly $5.7 billion worth of surveillance cameras will be sold in the United States in 2002, a figure that is certain to rise steadily in the years to come. A large number of communities around the United States are starting to install the types of closed-circuit television systems that are so popular in England, and facial recognition software companies are reporting boom times.

As Rosen pointed out in his article regarding camera systems in England, the growth of public surveillance technology in the United States presents this country with a stark choice:

The promise of America is a promise that we can escape from the Old World, a world where people know their place. When we say we are fighting for an open society, we don't mean a transparent society—one where neighbors can peer into each other's windows using the joysticks on their laptops. ^[17] We mean a society open to the possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people can travel from place to place without showing their papers and being encumbered by their past; a society that respects privacy and constantly reshuffles social hierarchy.

The ideal of America has from the beginning been an insistence that your opportunities shouldn't be limited by your background or your database; that no doors should be permanently closed to anyone who has the wrong smart card. If the twenty-first century proves to be a time when this ideal is abandoned—a time of surveillance cameras and creepy biometric face scanning in Times Square—then Osama bin Laden will have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now imagine. ^[18]

Thanks largely to considerations of size and space, the United States may never experience the level of public video surveillance already being practiced in Britain. The real privacy threat in this country lies not so much in the existence of the surveillance cameras themselves (although that's bad enough) but in how and where they are deployed. Public surveillance systems are typically announced with large signs reading "CCTV in use" or something similar, in part to comply with constitutional requirements or public expectations (i.e., that the government will not conduct secret surveillance of us), and in part to oversell the capabilities of the surveillance system itself. (In his trip to England, Rosen found that a number of the CCTV systems in operation claimed more working cameras than were actually installed.)

In contrast to the general public, U.S. employees are already spending the better part of each day within range of visual surveillance systems that are not constrained by constitutional limitations.

Corporate security camera systems pose a much greater privacy threat to society as a whole and employees in particular because they are more consistently monitored (companies have both the resources and the financial motivation to do so), are more widely implemented, and are more frequently hidden. Nor are these new developments—Vance Packard identified the same issues back in 1964, when he included the rise of video surveillance by companies in his book The Naked Society. One New York company president, Packard said, had a hidden camera installed in a fake humidifier in the corporate board room so he could monitor meetings at which he was not present. Packard also quoted one installer of closed-circuit television systems as saying that "three-quarters of the name department stores in New York use television." ^[19]

The percentage of retail outlets that use video surveillance remains high. According to the University of Florida's 2001 National Retail Security Survey, nearly 75 percent of the retailers surveyed used live closed-circuit television (CCTV) as a loss-prevention system, and just under a third use visible, simulated CCTV (i.e., fake cameras). ^[20] Overall, the American Management Association reported last year that 15 percent of employers conduct general videotaping of their employees, although 38 percent said that they videotaped employees for security purposes.

As with other technologies, the main impediment to the widespread implementation of video surveillance systems has been cost, with the priciest components being the cameras, the monitors into which the cameras are hardwired, and the personnel required to operate and monitor the cameras. That impediment is rapidly vanishing: Camera costs are falling steadily, and more importantly, the images the cameras produce can now be fed directly into an office network or even onto the Internet. Thus, any computer can serve as a monitor, and a single individual can monitor dozens of cameras. In addition, images can be stored on a hard drive for later review, further minimizing the need for someone to do real-time surveillance.

The Technology of Surveillance

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody at the same time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. ^[21]

In the nightmarish world created by George Orwell in his classic book 1984 perpetual surveillance was a given—the omnipresent telescreen was warning enough that you might be under the critical eye of the Thought Police. If Orwell were writing today, he might well equip his watchers with the latest in hidden video technology, on the theory that people are more likely to engage in illegal or subversive behavior if they don't think they're being watched. (Interestingly, as we'll see in more detail in Chapter 10, that's precisely the argument that various management and business groups have made in fighting workplace privacy legislation.)

The advances in camera miniaturization are truly startling. It's now possible to purchase a Sony CCD camera that is only 1.65 by 1.50 by .91 inches in size for less than fifty dollars. ^[22] The camera comes equipped with everything you would need to connect the camera to a television, VCR, or computer monitor. There is a host of companies on the World Wide Web that offer appliances such as lamps, clocks, air cleaners, smoke detectors, radios, and computer speakers with hidden cameras built in. In short, there is virtually no place where a video camera cannot be hidden these days.

At the same time that cameras are shrinking in size and cost, their capabilities are expanding. In early 1999, researchers at Johns Hopkins University announced that they had developed a low-power integrated chip with the ability to recognize and follow motion captured by a video camera. When hooked up to a motorized platform for tilting and panning, the chip would enable a video system to track and record the movements of an individual without human assistance. For instance, researchers say, when used in a video phone system, you would no longer have to sit still in front of the camera when talking on the phone; the chip would enable the camera to follow you as you moved around the room. ^[23]

If your employer is at all concerned that you might be suspicious about an extra wire sticking out of the back of an alarm clock or desk lamp, wireless versions of all of the products mentioned above are readily available. The cost is slightly higher, of course, since a transmitter needs to be incorporated into the hidden camera package, but the recent surge of interest in video surveillance is driving costs steadily downward.

The Security Guards Keep Smirking at Me

It's one thing when companies make no secret of their video surveillance of their employees, or even conduct hidden surveillance for strictly business purposes (something the courts have generally endorsed). It's entirely another when businesses become electronic Peeping Toms. There's a fairly thin line between legitimate surveillance and prurience, and it's all too easy for businesses (or more typically, rogue employees) to cross it, as in these examples:

• In January 2001, Suzanne Collard filed suit against her employer, Health Education Corp., when she discovered that company-provided massages were being videotaped. After a massage in the lunch room, Collard spotted a video camera hidden among food boxes on top of the refrigerator and discovered that it was attached to a running VCR. The tape showed full frontal nude shots of her after she had undressed, and then images of her being massaged.

• In a September 1998 Village Voice article, Mark Boal reported that in a California Neiman-Marcus, a female employee discovered that male employees were watching a women's changing room through a hidden camera in the ceiling. ^[24]

• In 1998, workers discovered that the Sheraton Boston Hotel was secretly videotaping the locker room of its male employees. The hotel paid $200,000 to settle claims by five workers captured on tape.

• At Salem State College in Massachusetts in 1995, an employee discovered a video camera hidden in an office closet. College officials told Gail Nelson, a secretary who used the office, that the camera had been installed to capture images of anyone sneaking into the office after hours. In fact, the camera captured all activity in the office, including shots of Nelson changing into exercise clothes at the end of the day. Nelson sued, alleging invasion of privacy and emotional distress; the College argued that she had no expectation of privacy in the office and that the videotaping did not violate any laws.

A number of factors are contributing to an increase in workplace voyeurism. First, as we've already seen, technological advances are making cameras cheaper, smaller, and more powerful, which means that more employers will use them.

The second factor driving workplace voyeurism is the growing popularity of hidden surveillance in general. While visible video surveillance remains the more popular option, hidden video surveillance is steadily catching up.

A third factor supporting hidden surveillance is the lack of legal restrictions on the activity. Only a few states have adopted legislation aimed at curbing video voyeurism, and even fewer have addressed the issue of voyeurism in the workplace. There have been some court decisions that have held that employers may not make audio- or videotapes of employees in areas of the business where employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but when employers make it explicitly clear to employees ahead of time that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy, then surveillance is generally permitted.

X-Ray Vision

If you took a poll of fourteen-year-old males around the country and asked them which of Superman's powers they most would like to have, odds are that x-ray vision would win in a landslide. Sure, being able to fly would be neat, and being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound might be exciting, but x-ray vision—now how cool would that be?

Lacking the positive benefits of interstellar mutation of our genes, however, our eyes remain stubbornly stuck in the visible light spectrum. But where nature has failed us, technology is stepping in.

In 1998, Sony Corp. answered the silent prayers of thousands of adolescents (most disguised as forty-year-olds) by inadvertently introducing x-ray vision to the consumer market. Sony released a line of video cameras with a feature called NightShot, an infrared option similar in some ways to military night vision technology, that allowed camera users to shoot footage at night. According to Sony spokeswoman Dulcie Neiman, "[NightShot] was intended for such nighttime activities as a baby sleeping, or children out on a Halloween night, or carolers at Christmas time." ^[25]

But Sony apparently forgot to test what would happen if the NightShot option was activated during the daytime. It turned out that when the NightShot technology is used during the day in conjunction with an infrared black filter, the video camera can effectively see through the top layers of thin clothing. This discovery proved particularly attractive to voyeuristic beach-goers, since the NightShot technology is especially effective at seeing through wet bathing suits. NightShot images quickly became a popular subcategory on voyeurism websites.

Despite the fact that a NightShot-equipped video camera retailed for between $700 and $1,500, news of the NightShot technology's hidden capabilities caused a sharp rise in the sale of Sony video cameras. Dismayed by the unwanted publicity, Sony announced that it was discontinuing sale of the cameras until it could figure out how to eliminate the x-ray capabilities of the NightShot technology. The company ended up modifying NightShot so that when it is activated during the day, the video camera simply shows a blank white screen. However, like mushrooms after a rain storm, numerous websites and online postings have popped up to offer helpful advice on how to get around the Sony fix.

Prurience aside, the nearly miraculous ability of x-rays to peer through otherwise solid objects has made them a popular field of study for security firms. One of the chief drawbacks to traditional x-rays, of course, is their tendency to damage the tissue through which they pass, resulting in either genetic mutations or cancers. The tremendous potency of x-rays makes their use in medical situations a reasonable trade-off for the risk, particularly now that we've figured out how to guard ourselves against the worst of exposure risks. But medical x-rays are an impractical tool in the fight against terrorism, since few travelers would be willing to subject themselves to repeated full strength x-rays just to fly from Boston to New York.

Thus, when it came to adopting x-ray technology for security work, less proved to be more. A low-power x-ray beam, it turns out, penetrates only a few millimeters into the body and is reflected outward. A detector can collect the back-scattered x-rays and construct a remarkably sharp image of the object reflecting the x-rays.

One of the leaders in this area of research is American Science & Engineering, Inc. (AS&E), a Billerica, Massachusetts-based company that has specialized in the development and production of scientific instruments for the last forty-five years. In November 1999, AS&E installed its first Body-Search device at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. The $125,000 machine consists of a twelve-foot-tall, rectangular cabinet, with a scanning panel and platform at one end and a viewing screen and controls at the other. ^[26] Screening agents instruct passengers to stand on the platform, and the x-ray image of their body is displayed on the viewing screen. If the screening agent sees something strapped to the traveler's body, he is asked to submit to a more thorough, hands-on search.

The images produced by the back-scatter x-ray are startlingly clear. In addition to showing any contraband, the x-rays make it possible for a screening agent to see virtually every detail of the traveler's body, even to the point of determining whether a male traveler has been circumcised. Privacy advocates, needless to say, are horrified. As David Banisar, the deputy director of Privacy International, told the Associated Press, "This is a very intrusive thing. It has been installed with very little discussion ... about whether this is a good idea or not." ^[27]

Government-run facilities remain the chief buyers of the BodySearch machine; by August 2000, AS&E's device was in use at five other airports—Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York's JFK—and six prisons across the U.S. To date, the only private organization reported to have installed the BodySearch was a gold mine in South Africa. Given the increase in security concerns in this country, however, it is unlikely that the machine's price (roughly $200,000) will pose much of a barrier for larger businesses.

As prices for back-scatter x-ray technology inevitably fall, the question will be how many employees will be required to stand naked, even briefly, before their employer each day?

^[16]Richard Pollack, employee for Metro Networks, quoted in an article by David M. Halbfinger, "Spread of Surveillance Cameras Raises Prospect of Prying Eyes," The New York Times (February 22, 1998).

^[17]An idea espoused by writer David Brin in detail in his book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom? (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 1999).

^[18]Jeffrey Rosen, "A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance," New York Times Magazine (October 7, 2001).

^[19]Vance Packard, The Naked Society (New York: Van Rees Press, 1964), pp. 77, 85–86.

^[20]Richard C. Hollinger and Jason L. Davis, 2001 National Retail Security Survey—Final Report, University of Florida Security Research Project (2002). Available online at web.soc.ufl.edu/SRP/NRSS_2001.pdf.

^[21]George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 6–7.

^[22]"CCD" stands for charge-couple device.

^[23]Kristen Philipkoski, "'Eye' Chip Tracks Movement," Wired.com (April 10, 1999).

^[24]Mark Boal, "Spycam City," The Village Voice (September 30, 1998).

^[25]Chris Reidy and Hiawatha Bray, "Camera can bare too much; Sony calls halt to shipments," Boston Globe (August 13, 1998).

^[26]David Heinsmann, "Customs Agent at Chicago Airport Get Better Look with Body Scanner," Chicago Tribune (November 23, 1999).

^[27]Lisa Lipman, "Airport Searches Reveal More than Passengers Know," Associated Press (August 21, 2000).