Reuters reports that the popular resort city of Virgina Beach has become the second city in the United States to begin operating video surveillance cameras with face recognition technology. The cameras may only be used to catch people wanted by the city on outstanding felony warrants and to find runaway children or missing persons. All the images captured by the cameras are immediately deleted from the system if there is no match. And a citizens’ auditing committee can perform unannounced spot checks on police headquarters to ensure the technology is not being misused. The system may eventually be linked to the databases of other law enforcement agencies to track criminals and suspected terrorists.
Civil liberties groups, however, fear an erosion of personal privacy and are concerned that this brings us yet closer towards Orwell’s novel “1984,” in which he imagined a totalitarian society with a “Big Brother” who kept all its citizens under constant surveillance. This technology, they say, has little or no effect on the crime rate but it does have an effect on peoples’ behaviour–people feel cowed. Such criticism also comes from the political right–lawyer John Whitehead, of the conservative Rutherford Institute, wrote that the technology threatens the right of each U.S. citizen to participate in society without the express or implied threat of coercion. “After all, that is exactly what constant surveillance is–the ultimate implied threat of coercion.”
Britain leads the world in video surveillance. The average Londoner has his or her picture recorded more than 300 times a day, and New York is not far behind.