Imagine a medium-size American city where every street is dotted with closed-circuit security cameras. Where citizens, or anyone with an Internet connection, can log online to view video feeds showing their neighbors, or strangers, walking to the grocery store or getting in their cars. Where police officers deputize the public to assist them by watching over the city and reporting any suspicious behavior. It sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, but it’s a reality for residents of Newark, New Jersey, The New York Times reports. The program, called Citizen Virtual Patrol, began in April with 62 cameras placed in locations with heavy foot traffic (nearby signs alert pedestrians, “This Area Is Under Video Surveillance”); eventually, there will be more than 100 additional cameras installed around the city, with video footage accessible from anywhere with a smartphone app.
Newark officials are hoping that the program will help improve strained relations between the city’s minority communities and law enforcement. (A 2011 federal investigation found that police use of force had been underreported, minorities were stopped by Newark police more often than whites, and the majority of those stops were unjustified.) “We want to give residents the opportunity to look with us,” Newark mayor Ras Baraka told the Times. “It gives the community an opportunity to be engaged in police work and create a better relationship between the police and the community.” So far, 1,600 people have logged into the Web site, and authorities say residents have asked the department to add more cameras in their neighborhoods.
The program is also deeply controversial. “It’s free security,” one local business owner, Latoya Jackson, told the Times, “but it’s not good for me as a civilian person.” The same video feeds that can be used by well-meaning neighbors to watch over their streets can also be abused by stalkers or home invaders to track subjects and keep tabs on their whereabouts. “The decision to make this massive amount of sensitive data public is an interesting one,” Evan Greer, the campaign director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization concerned with digital rights and privacy, told me. “At first pass, it seems better to have it in the hands of everyone, rather than only in the hands of the government. But the bottom line is that real-time video footage of an entire city should not be collected in the first place. It could easily be used by a domestic abuser to track down their spouse, or by an authoritarian government to round up immigrants and political dissidents.”
The intent behind Citizen Virtual Patrol may be positive, said Steven Renderos, the organizing director for the nonprofit Center for Media Justice, but the end result could be the opposite of what authorities planned. “Historically, programs that encourage citizens to surveil each other, like ‘See Something, Say Something,’ have led to racial profiling of individuals who have done nothing wrong, and it’s very likely to happen in Newark,” Renderos told me. “Newark is a city undergoing gentrification, as younger white residents are moving in, and its historically black community is moving out. New luxury housing developments are being built, while poor people struggle for access to jobs and affordable housing. If this initiative is supposed to make the city safer, we have to question, ‘For whom?’”
The tech industry, it seems, rarely stops to consider those sorts of questions. Amazon recently found itself in hot water after selling its A.I.-powered face-recognition technology to law-enforcement agencies, allowing police to identify and track people in real time, matching surveillance footage against any database of photos or videos. Paired with a public panopticon like the one that was just created in Newark, it is easy to see how the technology could be misused. When JPMorgan Chase partnered with the data-mining firm Palantir, for example, it wasn’t long before the bank’s executives found that the head of the special-ops team they had empowered to monitor traders for misbehavior had gone rogue and was spying on them. Even public data can become dangerous in the aggregate—look no further than Facebook, where information that was surrendered by users was transformed into political weapons.
To be sure, surveillance cameras are inescapable anywhere in public; they’ve long been used by law-enforcement agencies and private-business owners to monitor people on streets or store customers. But recent technological advances open a whole new realm of possibilities, or danger, depending on how that footage is used, and by whom. Americans have already become de-sensitized to some aspects of state surveillance: despite Edward Snowden’s disclosure in 2013 of a previously unknown global-surveillance apparatus that allowed the government to spy on citizens online, most people have continued to go about their lives unperturbed, trading privacy and personal data for free access to social-media networks like Facebook.
Society has recoiled some, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In Europe, lawmakers recently imposed stringent new restrictions on what kind of information technology companies can gather on people without their affirmative consent. But in other, smaller ways, the experience has ground us down, normalizing mass surveillance as a fact of life. Already, we have adapted to the knowledge that what we search on Google, or what we view on social media, is recorded, analyzed, and stored in some distant server bank, the better to serve us advertising. Or, perhaps, to be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
There is no doubt that internalizing the feeling of being watched has had a chilling effect—first online, where the erosion of privacy first began in earnest, and now in real life, as the digital and material worlds become intertwined. “People should be able to leave their homes and move about freely, without the feeling that someone is constantly watching them,” Greer told me. “Without privacy, there is no progress. That’s why mass surveillance is a sinister form of censorship.” Newark’s choice to couple government surveillance with viewing online for the public seems like another step in the slippery slope of trading privacy for a hollow promise of security.
