Reporter editorial: You’re being watched
The novelist/prophet George Orwell famously created a police state with an authoritarian dictator running a country where surveillance was a method to ensure total mind and body control of its citizenry. “Big Brother is watching you” was the catch-all phrase for the nightmare state depicted in Orwell’s “1984.”
It’s said that when he completed the novel in 1948, he reversed the last two digits of the title in a sly signal that the era of total surveillance — then approaching full speed in the Soviet Union — was already here.
Today Orwell would just be nodding along with reports that every Google search, use of a credit card, or mobile phone is discovering something about us to be stored and then used to sell us stuff, influence our opinions, and track us. Even scarier is the proliferation of CCTV cameras in our communities being greeted by most people as ho-hum, what else is new?
The trend is accelerating, with Flock license plate readers springing up in Suffolk County like mushrooms in fields after rain. Flock is just one of many Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) companies that have gone nationwide.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there are 120,000 Flock cameras on rural highways and neighborhood streets. The cameras record every car that passes. Then, using AI, it uploads not only the license plate number but the car’s manufacturer, the color and, the ACLU reports, even the bumper stickers into a nationwide data base that law enforcement agencies can access.
Why worry? Well, do we want the government to know where we’re going day and night, what church we attend, what physicians we’re seeing, what political demonstrations we attend, what nonprofits we support?
The motivation cited by the new Big Brothers is protecting the public. Compare that with the statistic that 1% of cars scanned by ALPRs are connected to any crime or wrongdoing.
Those in favor of ALPRS and CCTV cameras recording a community say it’s just the same as having a cop on the beat. Which is nonsense. No cop on the beat is recording everyone’s every move, following everyone, or asking everyone where they’ve been.
It’s also getting physically dangerous. The Flock camera at the corner of Manhasset Avenue and Main Road in Greenport was vandalized for the second time in the past two months, Southold police said. And more vandalism of the ALPR’s has occurred in communities up-Island.
Shelter Island is getting involved. At a recent Capital Planning/Grants Committee meeting, there were several requests for funds, but only one has risen to the top: license plate readers and cameras that would be installed at Crescent Beach. They already exist at both ferry sites, Police Chief Jim Read said, adding that they are excellent tools for crime fighting, but also for helping to track missing persons.
During summer months, Crescent Beach is one of the busiest areas on the Island, Chief Read added, explaining the choice of the site for additional readers and cameras.
Do we have a right to privacy? And if so, what exactly is “privacy?” As two of America’s most perceptive legal scholars, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, said: Privacy is simply the right to be left alone.
As the Suffolk Times reported, the debate has reached Albany. A bill introduced in the State Senate in April would restrict how government agencies can use and share ALPR data; generally require captured plate information to be deleted within 48 hours; and mandate annual public reports detailing camera locations, searches and access to the data.
It’s a start.
