The Legal Satyricon comments on a story out of Maryland:
The high school kids [in Montgomery County] decided that it would be funny and/or great revenge to make fake license plates and speed through known traffic cameras.
From the local newspaper there:
[One] parent said that “our civil rights are exploited,” and the entire premise behind the Speed Camera Program is called into question as a result of the growing this fad [sic] among students.
Indeed. But one commenter to The Legal Satyricon post disagrees that traffic cameras impinge on our civil liberties:
While the cameras might be obnoxious, and they may well cause more accidents than they prevent, they do not interfere with any liberty or privacy interest that I can identify. When you’re out in public, people can see you. You never had a right to speed through an intersection or run a red light in the first place.
Sure, traffic cameras may not interfere with any liberty or privacy interests that have already been identified, but you might say they challenge or bedevil the fundamental idea of privacy interests. The problem with traffic cameras is not that they see things that were already observable in public, but that they contradict our ancient and deeply-rooted sense that observations require individual, subjective observers.
Anyone who sits to think about privacy for just a few moments will realize that “privacy” is really a fragile concept. For example, we all imagine that we have “privacy” in our own homes, but homes are not black holes: they emit all kinds of information, through windows, other members of the household, sound waves traveling through the walls, or by whatever information can be gleaned from careful, deductive observers on the street or next door. But we don’t use that as an excuse to infiltrate the perceived privacy of people’s homes on behalf of law enforcement. Privacy is really a sense of distance from other humans, that they can’t see you when you don’t want to be seen, and there is a way to hide from their prying eyes.
(Note to nit-pickers of the black hole analogy: yes, I know about Hawking radiation.)
And while, as the commenter quoted above points out, we generally don’t afford people a privacy right to exceed the acceptable boundaries of their liberty interests (by, for example, breaking the law when no one is looking, or because no one is looking), our civil liberties are a little like the temperature outdoors, where there’s a thermometer temperature and a “feels like” temperature that is created by other factors. When we change the societal observers—the ones catching people in the act of breaking the law—from individual police officers or vigilant fellow citizens to always-on cameras that capture everything “objectively,” which here I mean as “without cognitive biases in perception” (like unconsciously assuming that a lawbreaker is a member of a particular race), we don’t change the privacy and liberty interests already identified, but we act in a way that is contrary to our deeply rooted human nature and sense of privacy.
To put it another way, yes, people can always happen to be around when you run a red light. They might be in the crosswalk, on the side of the street, in another car, and so on. Those people can always observe you running the red light and you don’t think, “No! Don’t look! I’m in private here!” But an electronic observer, one who is always there, who sees from a perspective fundamentally unlike those of your fellow citizens, who has, in a sense, a God’s-eye view, that observer creates a problem. It makes you feel watched, and your “feels like” right of privacy slips away.
Everyone knows, intuitively, what it feels like to stand in a crowd and feel like nobody knows you’re there. We can have intensely “private”-feeling moments when we are immediately surrounded by thousands of other people. That comes instinctively. But adding surveillance cameras into the mix confounds our instincts. Even people who are religious, who believe there really is a God’s-eye view on them at all times, from some undisclosed divine location, should be disturbed, because an electronic God’s-eye view, one in the control of the police or some other governmental, corporate, or otherwise more-powerful-than-you entity, creates a social imbalance. It means that what once was only the territory of your omniscient God has now become the territory of the local police force. That should disturb you. It makes that “feels like” right of privacy dip down pretty low.
So I think people like the commenter I quoted above, while they are technically legally correct, are being much too formalistic. They are not taking human nature into account, and they are not considering the fact that what people really want is not necessarily actual freedom, but the feeling of freedom. People need the psychological sensation of believing they have certain liberties. When you take away that sensation, without actually taking away the liberties, people are still going to be upset. And why shouldn’t they? Can’t we figure out better ways to manage our society without destroying our sense of freedom?
For those reasons, I have to applaud the teenagers in Montgomery County, Maryland. They are causing mischief, and they are annoying people, and they are probably breaking the law, but they are engaged in civil disobedience, or even performance art, that induces people to think a little harder about what is happening in their community. Ultimately, any gains derived from that behavior are likely to outweigh the consequences from their technical breaches of the law.
A nitpick or request for clarification.
You say, “without cognitive biases in perception” regarding the placement of traffic cameras. Though I see what you mean, isn’t there a bit of that in the people that decide where and how to place said cameras?
For example, camera use for “objectively” deciding things in sports games is ever on the rise. Now they’re being used in professional baseball and all manner of challenges can be made in professional football (the American version that is). And yet, the zoom, angle, and placement of those cameras is still controlled by humans with cognitive biases in perception.
Granted, I don’t think any of this takes anything away from you basic premise or conclusion. Those I agree with.
While I can agree with most of what you wrote, I do take exception to applauding those people running through red lights on purpose. How do you explain the gains of that to likely outweigh the consequences, when a very likely consequence is to kill an innocent “bystander” before too long.
On another note of being watched by cameras, how about all those cameras in space constantly taking pictures of us. After seeing what can be seen just from Google pictures made public, there must be much more detailed pictures available to certain people with the right access.
Dad
Adam:
I know what you mean, and I was thinking about those things. That’s why I added the word “cognitive,” to specify the particular type of biases, and then gave an example of a bias that has been studied.
I don’t think placement or physical perspective differences would correctly be categorized as cognitive biases. Instead, a cognitive bias (if I am deploying the term correctly) would be something like a witness who observes something that looks like a purse-snatching, then assumes that the item stolen must have been a purse, that the victim must have been a woman, and that the perpetrator must have been a man. In other words, a cognitive bias is how a person perceives things through social and cultural lenses.
That said, when surveillance cameras are used in a way that is not fully automated, the way traffic cameras are, for instance in the ways you suggest, it’s entirely possible that people viewing the video feed can still insert their cognitive biases (though I suspect the effects would be reduced).
It would take a different kind of situation, one that I can’t think of right now, to make the physical placement of the camera the result of a cognitive bias, with all the attendant adverse effects. You would need a situation where viewing a certain event from a certain angle would be caused by some social or cultural factor that the person positioning the camera would not consciously recognize and where the nature of the placement would bear on how any observations gleaned from the camera could be used. For example, if you have someone with a cognitive bias that causes her to think that all street criminals are black males, and the police interview her after she witnesses a crime, then the police will be on the lookout for black males, when maybe the actual perpetrator was an Asian female, thus causing profiling or harassment of black males for no reason. I’m having a hard time imagining a situation where you could get a similar effect from nothing more than a camera angle.
The best I can think of is that you might have cameras set up at a sporting event designed to observe faces coming through turnstyles, but then have a crime committed in an area of view where the lens causes some distortion, thus limiting the value of the images. That would complicate things, so far as using the footage as an investigatory tool or for evidentiary purposes, but I don’t see how you could really call that a “cognitive bias.” It would really just be using a camera intended for one thing to obtain information arising from another thing.
Dad:
As far as weighing the potential effects of the kids’ conduct, I would look first to the kinds of things that are likely to happen because they broke the law. First, while the local newspaper article I linked noted that some people are concerned about the kids’ speeding, it doesn’t look like anyone has been harmed yet. The bigger concern, I would think, should be that they are in the intersections when they shouldn’t be, to trigger citations. But nobody seems to be worried about it. It’s hard to say, without knowing much about the area.
But it doesn’t sound like local people are really concerned with the dangerousness of what they’re doing. They’re more concerned with people getting traffic citations when they don’t deserve them. And if that’s the case, there will not likely be any substantial consequences, because, as the commenter at The Legal Satyricon pointed out, based on his experience as a judge pro tem in traffic court, there are mistaken-identity cases with traffic cameras all the time, and those people generally get off without a citation.
So what’s the cost? A risk of harm that nobody seems to be truly worried about, probably because of the nature of the area, which is not fully described in the newspaper area—otherwise, I expect that would have been a much better part of the newspaper story, and maybe the extra cost to a few citizens and to the local court system for having to deal with these mistaken-identity citations. That all seems pretty minor.
On the upside, however, you can already see in that local newspaper article that people are questioning the efficacy of traffic cameras, which is a good thing, particularly because traffic cameras tend to cause more accidents, so getting rid of them is probably a good thing. At the same time, it sparks a discussion (of which this is part) about whether these things are really a good idea. That, on the whole, is much more valuable than the costs I’m considering above.
As for the satellite photos, I don’t see them the same way, as I suspect most people don’t, except maybe for governments, because those don’t generally observe our specific conduct (unless you are, say, building missile silos). As the technology improves, that will likely become an issue. But I don’t think it’s an issue yet.
The real question is probably not “How can we get rid of these cameras?” but “How can we manage the data recorded by these cameras to ensure that people retain their sense of freedom?”
It was interesting that this afternoon at the family gathering Gary mentioned that he had talked to a military person who told him they can zoom in and read car license numbers with those satalite cameras, and can look into your windows and see what you are doing inside. Frankly that is frightening when also considered with the abuses that have taken place with our current administration.
Dad
I’ve heard people say things like that for years, but I’m still skeptical that satellite cameras have those capabilities. From what I’ve read, I gather that even the military, when it monitors its operations on the ground for tactical purposes, uses high-flying aircraft equipped with cameras. Why would they go to that trouble if they could just use satellites that stay in orbit and need no refueling?
I would imagine that the technical problems of getting really high resolution imagery from orbiting satellites should be not much different than the problem astronomers have getting really good pictures from ground-based observatories. When you shoot through lots of atmosphere, you get lots of distortion. Maybe I’m estimating incorrectly, but I would think that picking up something like a license plate number from an orbiting satellite would require about as much focus and precision as picking up a distant galaxy from a ground-based observatory.