Modern Whaling

If you live in Lan­caster, PA, some­one is record­ing you when you go to your doctor’s office.  Your lawyer’s.  There are tapes of your com­ings and goings at Planned Par­ent­hood.  At the gay bar.  At the adult book­store.   It’s not the police.  It’s not the FBI.  It’s a pri­vate group with no account­abil­ity, no over­sight, and no trans­parency.   The tapes belong to them, and the only way to get them is through a sub­poena.  And the per­son watch­ing the screen could be your stalker, your ex, or a preda­tor learn­ing your patterns.

Lan­caster, the town where I live, work, and make art, is rapidly becom­ing the most-watched city in Amer­ica.  This is dis­turb­ing enough, but the worst part is who’s doing the watch­ing.  It’s not the police, it’s not the city’s red-shirt secu­rity force.  It’s a pri­vate orga­ni­za­tion with no appar­ent gov­ern­men­tal over­sight.  Soon, there will be 165 cam­eras around my city, or about 40 cam­eras per square mile.  Accord­ing to the LA Times, that’s more cam­eras than Boston or San Francisco.

Here’s the LA Times arti­cle that’s bring­ing it to everyone’s atten­tion.  Please read this first.

Here’s the web­site of the Lan­caster Com­mu­nity Safety Coali­tion, the group respon­si­ble (although account­able to no one)

Some quick points:

1. A pri­vate orga­ni­za­tion spy­ing on an entire city with­out ANY pub­lic account­abil­ity or trans­parency should be ter­ri­fy­ing to you.  Imag­ine if your neigh­bor video­taped your front door 24/7.  Now imag­ine that your neigh­bor refuses to hand the tapes over to you.  Now imag­ine your neigh­bor refuses to even show you what’s on the tapes.  Now imag­ine that your neigh­bor refuses to tell you what he/she is doing with the tapes, or what they’ve done with them.  Now imag­ine that it’s not your neigh­bor who’s doing this– it’s a per­son who you’ve never met, whose face you’ve never seen, and whose name you don’t know.  Now imag­ine you tell the cops and they say there’s noth­ing they can do.
2. I have con­tacted the LCSC for a list of the cam­eras (installed and planned) loca­tions.  I have not yet received a reply.
3. Steven Ressler sits on the board of direc­tors for the LCSC, and he is Man­ager of Pur­chas­ing and Qual­ity at Bosch Secu­rity.  Bosch Secu­rity sold the cam­eras and infra­struc­ture to the LCSC.  The LCSC claims in a press release that the cam­eras were sold (at a dis­count) for $2000 each.  While I couldn’t find the exact model of the cam­era used, it appears to be sim­i­lar to Bosch’s Envi­roDome series, which is adver­tised here for $2333 as of this writing.
4. A study in San Fran­cisco found that their CCTV cam­eras did not deter vio­lent crime, only relo­cate it.  It seems that the cam­eras did not pre­vent any­one from killing any­one else, it just made them re-think where to com­mit their mur­der and/or rape.
5. The evi­dence is anec­do­tal, but I have seen no proof that the cam­eras help pre­vent or solve prop­erty crime in Lan­caster.  At my pre­vi­ous address, my room­mate had his car van­dal­ized and robbed, and his bike stolen (on seper­ate occa­sions).  The CCTV cam­era in place not 15m away clearly did not deter the per­pe­tra­tors (despite the “CCTV Cam­eras in Use” sign directly above his car at the time), and the crimes remain unsolved.

Even if it can be proven that sur­veil­lance pre­vents crime, I would still be against this.  This is an orga­ni­za­tion that is made up of unelected offi­cials, none of whom report to an elected offi­cial.  As of this writ­ing, LCSC does not pub­lish its ros­ter of watch­peo­ple, or records of who/what/where they are watch­ing.   As it stands, you have no way of know­ing if you are being exces­sively watched, and even if you did, you would have no one to file a griev­ance with.  If you feel you are unjustly han­dled by the police, you have access to publicly-funded orga­ni­za­tions to help you, and access to all police records to help you make your case. There are no such pro­tec­tions from the all-seeing eye of the LCSC.

Please stick with me as I fol­low this story and see what we can do to dis­man­tle this.

[image cour­tesy LA Times]