Legal eagles set their sights on security cameras

Volume 1, Number 33 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 4 - 10, 2007

Chelsea Now photo by Lindsay Beyerstein
New York City Councilmember Alan Gerson, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, Norman Siegel, former president of the NYCLU, and attorney Anthony Soudatt discuss the proliferation security cameras in the city at a panel discussion hosted by the New York County Lawyers’ Association last Wednesday.

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Legal experts joined City Councilmem-ber Alan Gerson and political reporter Sandra Endo to discuss the proliferation of security cameras in New York City at a panel discussion in Lower Manhattan hosted by the New York County Lawyers’ Association last Wednesday.

Gerson, a member of the Lawyers’ Association, pledged to follow up the discussion with official hearings and possibly legislation to better balance security and privacy concerns.

Nobody knows exactly how many cameras there are in the city, but experts estimate that there may be as many as 10,000 cameras tracking the residents of the five boroughs as they work, commute, shop and socialize.

The number of cameras below 14th Street quintupled between 1998 and 2005, according to a recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union. In 2005, N.Y.C.L.U. investigators found 4,176 cameras below 14th Street, up from 769 cameras seven years earlier.

Many cameras are concentrated in the Financial District and Chinatown. The proliferation shows no signs of slowing down.

Several factors account for the massive proliferation of video surveillance, including post-9/11 security concerns and increased federal funding for surveillance technology in public places. Insurance savings may also spur some businesses to install cameras.

Civil libertarians have been calling for greater oversight for years, but the debate over congestion pricing has sparked renewed interest in the video surveillance issue. If congestion pricing is implemented, as per Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 plan, a network of cameras will photograph the license plates of cars entering the city. Cars whose drivers use E-ZPass ostensibly will already be tracked.

As Councilmember Gerson observed, a lot has changed since the first cameras were installed in Washington Square Park about 15 years ago. “Imette’s Law,” named after former John Jay College student Imette St. Guillen, made security cameras in bars mandatory in 2006.

Proponents argue that cameras deter crime, help catch criminals and reassure the public. However, privacy advocates are concerned that there are few safeguards to protect citizens from excessive government scrutiny of legal activities.

“As I walk the streets of New York City, as I meet my political opponent or my mistress on a Central Park bench, or when I go to a gay or a straight bar in Lower Manhattan, who is recording my movements,” said Norman Siegel, a panelist and former president of the city’s civil liberties union. “What are they doing with the tapes?”

Siegel called for legislation to limit the amount of time the city can keep video footage on file. He suggested that the footage be archived for no more than 72 hours unless a crime was reported.

Panelist Heather Mac Donald, a fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute, said that requiring the city to delete footage would be like making the police “wipe down a crime scene” after they finished their investigation.

Siegel also urged the city to create a registry of all public and private surveillance cameras. A registry would enable victims to find out if a crime was caught on video and use the footage to track down attackers.

“If someone is mugged on the streets of New York City, that person should have an opportunity to find out if there was a camera around,” Siegel said. He also supports mandatory signage to alert the public that they are being monitored.

Siegel also suggested tough penalties for leaking footage. He cited a case where the video of a suicide in a public housing complex ended up on the Internet because the tape was just “sitting on a bookshelf” where anyone could get at it.

Panelist Anthony Soudatt, an attorney and technology consultant, explained that advances in digital surveillance are posing new legal and policy questions.

“The camera isn’t as inert as you might think,” Soudatt said. Video surveillance technology is about 30 years old, but the technology has become much more powerful in the digital age.

Previously, video footage would just sit in the camera, or a shelf, until a human being decided to review it. Most footage was never analyzed at all. Today’s cameras are more likely to be hooked up to the Internet, making the data potentially accessible to a wide variety of public and private stakeholders.

Earlier generations of video surveillance technology also had more limited privacy implications because there was no efficient way to analyze or index the information. It simply wouldn’t be practical for authorities to watch all the footage collected in a park. However, if a computer can automatically match a frame in a video stream to a set of arrest records in a database, it becomes much easier for the authorities to track persons of interest.

According to Soudatt, the smartest cameras can be programmed to tag images for easy searching. He added that technology is being developed that would allow cameras to automatically look for people matching a certain description, such as “man in a red shirt.”

As several panelists noted, the mayor’s congestion pricing plan would create a daily record of every vehicle entering the restricted areas of Manhattan. The system would record every license plate number, look up the address of the license-holder and send a monthly bill to that person’s home. As Soudatt, Gerson and Siegel noted over the course of the discussion, it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where the government might use this information for something other than billing.

Soudatt explained that advances in biometrics and database technology could enable a computer to recognize people from video and track their movements in real time.

Older technology imposed practical limits on how much footage could be recorded and stored, and for how long. Videotapes degrade over time, but digital video can be stored indefinitely without degradation.

All the panelists agreed that video surveillance is here to stay, and that governments and corporations that monitor public places are within their legal rights to do so: It is well-established that anyone may photograph anyone else in a public place, including the police, journalists and private citizens. “We’re not talking about cameras in people’s homes,” Mac Donald said. What the panel debated was the merits of allowing the government to compile information on ordinary people without probable cause.

In an extended exchange with Siegel, Mac Donald said that a camera trained on a park bench records what a police officer patrolling the park would observe.

Siegel countered that a permanent database was different from an officer on patrol because police officers walking their beat are not mentally cataloging the associations and activities of each person in the park without probable cause.

“A permanent database is a potential political, economic and social weapon against those who are outspoken, and those who are not in the mainstream,” Siegel said.