Chicago’s Surveillance System Raises Privacy Concerns … Again

It’s official: No other U.S. city has such an extensive and sophisticated video surveillance system as Chicago. According to CBS News, the network of an estimated 10,000 cameras also includes innumerable private cameras and may grow to encompass tiny “covert” cameras in the future:

While critics decry the network as the biggest of Big Brother invasions of privacy, most Chicago residents accept them as a fact of life in a city that has always had a powerful local government and police force. Chicago police point to 4,000 arrests made since 2006 with the help of cameras. And, [a recent study] found crime in one neighborhood—including drug sales, robberies and weapons offenses—decreased significantly after cameras were installed.

Regardless of what the critics say, municipal surveillance is here to stay and will only become more prevalent, as even more cities begin to use cameras for everything from capturing and prosecuting criminals and exonerating the innocent to detecting parking violations. Privacy will continue to be an issue only because most surveillance systems are ineffective, even in Chicago, and certainly not private.

Despite how far surveillance has come, many cities still use technology from the 1980s. At the center of these archaic systems are giant video walls that require far too many employees to monitor. A network of 10,000 cameras may sound impressive, but pinpointing a certain event within that amount of data is nearly impossible without the right intelligent technology. This gap in turn creates an all-or-nothing situation in terms of privacy. The cameras and software can’t narrow in on a particular person, so review requires an overly wide net and involves too many innocent people.

There’s no denying that the world needs both security and privacy; the trick is to find a balance between the two. With so many current surveillance systems falling back on dumb cameras—and requiring an army of people to watch them—we get neither. The only way to bridge the security-privacy gap is with new technologies that enhance monitoring and visualization capabilities. Intelligent search allows officials to focus on particular people and make use of privacy protections like access control, encryption and face blurring.

Once we move past '80 technology, it's not only possibly to balance security and privacy concerns; more than that, we can actually acheive both.