ACLU Offers Viable Way Forward for Chi-Town Surveillance

In a recent report on the City of Chicago, the ACLU has called for a moratorium on new camera deployments and requested a public review of Chicago’s camera policy. Specifically, the organization is citing concerns over “unaudited” use of video analytic and facial recognition technologies.

While the report significantly overstates Chicago’s current surveillance capabilities, it does raise very legitimate privacy concerns and manages to take a much more moderate tone than past ACLU reports on city surveillance. Clearly, the group is seeking to find the right balance between security and privacy. For instance, while the ACLU maintains that cameras do not provide a statistically significant reduction in violent crime, they do acknowledge that in many cases cameras significantly reduce property crime.

The ACLU’s primary concerns with Chicago's video surveillance system centers around the glaring lack of auditing and review. In other words, they want to know "who watches the watchers?" Current surveillance systems are little more than windows on the world that grant their users an unrestricted ability to pan, tilt and zoom around their environment. 

Surveillance voyeurs often engage in activity that has very little to do with security. For example, in my hometown of San Francisco,  a police officer was suspended in 2005 for tracking women’s breasts and butts around the city for three hours using surveillance cameras.

The ACLU wants to require probable cause for active tracking and searching of city residents. The group recommends ongoing audits to ensure this is the case. Unfortunately, the current generation of surveillance equipment used by cities like Chicago does not have this functionality. There is no way to track where security operators are looking in their giant Pantopticon-style control rooms. Since raw surveillance video has no meaning and can convey no real information until it is reviewed by human eyes, cities must cast a very wide net, pulling as much video as they can to central control rooms and giving their staff a wide degree of discretion in their use.

New technologies, however, make audited and directed searching possible. For example, 3VR Security Inc. replaces those massive, unconstrained video walls with Google-style directed searching. Not only is this approach radically more effective than traditional surveillance, it affords unique benefits like auditing and access control. Cities like Chicago would be well-served to consider this technology because increased effectiveness and privacy protections like auditing help address the public’s concerns over creeping, intrusive surveillance.

3VR and other “searchable surveillance” technologies also address the ACLU’s other fundamental concern with Chicago’s thousands of cameras: their cost. For instance, the ACLU report reveals that the more than 1,000 cameras deployed by the Chicago Transit Authority cost the city $42 million. That’s a lot of money for 1,200 cameras. The most expensive PTZ cameras on the market cost only $5,000, for a total of $6 million. Where did the other $36 million go?

The truth is that much of this money went to purchase the massive networking and storage capacity required to backhaul all of the camera’s raw video to a central monitoring facility. That requires lots and lots of very expensive fiber. 

Searchable surveillance works in reverse: Video is stored and indexed closer to the cameras themselves, eliminating then need for costly fiber trunks. And directed searching focuses on specific cameras only when there is cause. Instead of the massive investment required to backhaul all cameras simultaneously to a central site, directed searching and monitoring consumes only a fraction of the bandwidth.

All in all, I have to applaud the ACLU for writing a very thoughtful report that takes a balanced position on the choice between our privacy and security needs. In that debate, we need to choose both. A city without surveillance is exposing its residents to unnecessary risk, but a city without meaningful privacy protections causes just as much harm. Thankfully, technology today is not what it was 30 years ago when the first surveillance cameras and monitoring facilities came into existence. New approaches like searchable surveillance and other privacy technologies offer cities like Chicago a way forward to protect themselves and their citizens' inherent rights and quality of life.