What Philadelphia residents have to know in regards to the 7,000-camera surveillance system

What can these cameras do?

The Surveillance camerasor CCTV, cameras that almost all Americans walk past on daily basis may look interchangeable, but behind the lens quite a bit has modified lately. As video surveillance cameras have develop into cheaper and ubiquitousThey have also develop into more powerful – with ever higher resolution images and the flexibility to Pan, tilt and zoomBut essentially the most significant change in cameras as utilized in Philadelphia is the Networks arrange by police authorities To aggregate these countless images of the each day lifetime of city dwellers.

Various AI tools can even collect this data in recent ways in which some may find troubling.

Software for automatic license plate readers can track drivers in real time across town and create a long-term log of their cars' movements. Want to know where a driver is now or where they parked two years ago? Just check the database.

And pedestrians are not any less vulnerable to surveillance. Facial recognition software can scan images to mechanically discover people and Follow them throughout town.

How widespread is that this technology?

According to the Investigator's investigationPhiladelphia's camera network has grown at a staggering pace. Over the past decade, town has grown from 216 cameras to a network of greater than 7,000 cameras operated by police and transit officials.

However, these are only the cameras that city officials directly control and may access in real time.

In addition, the police commonly use images from private surveillance cameras. These include multi-million dollar, internet-enabled camera systems in large shops, offices and universities, in addition to individual cameras The Homeowners or Small business owner screwed into door frames or external partitions. The public simply has no idea how lots of these private cameras are in operation or how often their data is accessed.

What is the difference from traditional police video surveillance?

Traditional cameras provided a narrow, grainy perspective of a single, fixed location. Not only did these systems collect far less data than modern cameras, in addition they stored far less.

A single surveillance camera in a bank might help police discover a suspect in a robbery, but beyond that poses no privacy threat. It is restricted to a small area where privacy concerns are minimal and security concerns are high. Mass deployment of cameras, however, creates a fundamentally different model that collects much more details about all of us and has far greater potential for abuse.

Police have tried these techniques for many years, however the technology was simply lower than the duty. When the City of London Police launched its so-called “Steel ringIn the Nineteen Nineties, fewer than two dozen cameras attempted to trace cars entering a tiny a part of the British capital, monitoring a few square kilometre of town's financial centre. Officers manually recorded vehicles' number plates and monitored drivers' profile photos.

It was unattainable to scale this labor-intensive exercise.

To deploy such a system across a whole city would likely have required every cop in town and more. Through automation, technology enables this mass surveillance by lowering the marginal cost of tracking and allowing police to increase surveillance much more widely than would have previously been financially or pragmatically possible.

What data protection concerns are there?

A single camera can capture our image; a citywide camera system can reconstruct our lives. Networked camera systems just like the one in Philadelphia, combined with smartphones and other internet-enabled devices, allow officers to reconstruct an individual's movements for days or even weeks – without judicial oversight.

While it takes a warrant to place a GPS tracker on a citizen's automotive, police can recreate GPS-like tracking methods with out a warrant, all due to mass camera systems. And facial recognition in city cameras threatens the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. Police are equipped with a technique that permits them to trace almost any person at a political protest, abortion clinic, or house of worship. Such surveillance makes the Anonymity, which is important for an open society.

Are there other risks or unintended consequences?

I’m convinced that giving 1000’s of city employees the keys to a mini-surveillance state is a recipe for disaster.

The Philadelphia Inquirer found that town has policies prohibiting zooming in on residents for pleasure, spying on people by zooming through their window, or blatant racial profiling. What the Inquirer didn’t find, nevertheless, was evidence that these safeguards are enforced.

When 1000’s of employees can spy on their neighbors, partners and business partners at will, the query arises: who’s monitoring the observers?

At least for now, the grim answer is: no person.