More cameras, less cops

New York's not the only city rolling out impressive camera networks, ala the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. Chicago is getting its CCTV on too, reports the New York Times.

Thanks to a $6-million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, Chicago is rolling out a vast network of public and private cameras to aid in its police and emergency response work. The article from the NYT has the usual structure for these types of stories: an example of the cameras at work -- e.g. capturing a Salvation Army kettle thief-- followed by news of how the system will be bigger and better in the future, with an ACLU spokesperson thrown in at the end to voice privacy concerns.

Wired noted a few months back that Chicago had hoped to have 2,000 cameras linked up by 2006, but was held back by a shortage of fiber. The city refused to tell the Chicago Sun-Times how many cameras they've got in action now, but officials do say they hope to have a camera on every street corner in Chicago. That sends a mild chill down our spine, bringing back memories of our father telling us as a child to behave because he knew everything that we would do before we even thought about doing it.

Of course, turning to cameras for effective law enforcement in these troubled economic times makes sense. The fiber may be expensive but is probably less in the long run than health benefits and pensions for police officers.

Wired reports that the NYPD is cutting back on officer deployment, but is trying its best to move full-speed ahead with putting 3,000 cameras online in the financial district.

If it'll keep the Salvation Army kettles safe, it can't be a bad thing, right?

Chicago Links Street Cameras to Its 911 Network [New York Times]
Surveillance cams help fight crime, city says [Chicago Sun-Times]
NYPD Cuts Cops, Keeps Spycams for Terror Defense [Danger Room/Wired]

Privacy and The Facebook and The Google

Two important technological events in privacy this week. One has made headlines many times over, and stopped qualifying as "news" about two days ago in the fast-paced Internet echo chamber. Facebook tried to roll out a new Terms of Service that would have given the company ownership over all things posted to the site by its 175 million users. Privacy rights be damned.

Folks weren't too happy to learn of the threat to their ownership of their photos, notes, videos, beings, etc. The mass Internet protests caused CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to cave. Privacy/ownership rights were reinstated, and a new Bill of Rights will be established for users. Any James Madison version 2.0's should surf over to Facebook and get involved in the drafting of the social networking site's Bill of Rights.

Privacy is still a major issue on Facebook. Check out this guide to privacy settings on All Facebook (The Unofficial Facebook Resource) to make sure that the things you want private stay that way. And the guide doesn't say it, but hide your birth date. Depending on your settings, your friends will still know to write on your wall on the big day, but pseudo-friends and scary strangers won't be able to use your DOB for bad things. (More on that in a future post.)

In privacy ebbing news, a less-reported story is Google's win in a privacy case over its Street View application. The application allows us to map an address and zoom in to street level-- you can see people on the street, the facade of homes, cars parked in front of houses... but not in real time. A couple in Pennsylvania, The Borings, had sued Google Street View for violating their privacy by putting photos of their house online, despite "private road" signs at the end of the street leading to their home. A judge dismissed the case. From CNet:

Google claims to be legally allowed to photograph on private roads, arguing that privacy no longer exists in this age of satellite and aerial imagery.

"Today's satellite-image technology means that...complete privacy does not exist," Google said in its response to the Borings' complaint.

Yep, that's right. The Google won. Because complete privacy does not exist.

Facebook Withdraws Changes in Data Use [New York Times]
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know [All Facebook]
Google wins Street View privacy suit [CNet]

Data Breaches Galore

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has the following quote leading off its About Us section:

The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.
U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977

Privacy protection is nothing new, but technological advances create many new challenges for protecting that privacy. The Clearinghouse, based in California (of course), is dedicated to raising awareness about the effect of technology on privacy, helping people protect their privacy, and advocating for greater privacy legislatively.

The organization keeps an incredible listing of data breaches, dating back to 2005. The total amount of records breached over the past four years is staggering: 252,387,509.

That includes the "biggest ever data breach" of 100 million credit cards by Heartland Payment Services last month. To see data breaches that have occurred in your state, check out this site.

Why are companies not doing more to protect our privacy and our financial data? We were speaking with a friend in finance in New York yesterday, and he casually said he had the ability to access the social security numbers of any of the clients of the bank that he works for. As do hundreds of his colleagues. And this is a Big Bank, of which you may just be a client.

Of course, it's hard to ask companies to be more careful with our data when we ourselves are so careless about it. Many people we know are happy to pirate wireless connections and surf the Net on a stranger's network. Oblivious to the security of the data they're transmitting.

Hmmm... all of a sudden, we're feeling a strong need to take advantage of our Free Credit Report.

Biggest Ever Credit Card Data Breach [Computerworld]

Privacy Prevails due to NYPD Budget Woes

In our last post, we mentioned the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. Here are details on the Initiative from the always-helpful Wikipedia:

The New York City Police Department and private companies intend to install over 3,000 new security cameras in Lower Manhattan, as well as 100 license plate-reading devices which are intended to scan plates and compare the numbers with information in a database. Additionally, the activities the cameras are programmed to pick up on include the delivery of packages. Other features of the system include mobile roadblocks, which could swivel into the streets and block traffic, and radiation detectors.

According to police spokesman Paul J. Browne, the footage from the cameras would be monitored from a center staffed by police officers and private employees.

As I understand it, Lower Manhattan=everything below Canal Street.

Though the operation officially launched in November, things are off to a slow start due to a budget shortfall. From Newsday:

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as it is called, is similar to the so-called Ring of Steel in London, where authorities use a network of cameras, security barriers and officers to guard against attacks by terrorists.

Kelly has warned for some time that budget woes would slow the department's plans to assign 800 cops downtown and to install 3,000 security cameras. About 300 cameras have thus far been installed.

Only 10 percent of the cameras in place. So privacy is still 90 percent intact?

According to an ABC-Washington Post poll [PDF] from 2007, almost three quarters of Americans support surveillance cameras to fight crime. Only one quarter were opposed, presumably for privacy reasons. There was an interesting breakdown for the respondents:

* Seniors are most apt to support the increased use of these cameras.

* Those under 30 are the most likely to oppose cameras.

* Republicans support cameras more than do Democrats.

* Women support cameras more than do men.

* Higher-educated people more than the less educated.

* Whites more than African-Americans.

Hmmmm. Do those who support cameras value privacy less... or trust the government more?

NYPD scales back ground zero security plan [Newsday]

Making the City more secure... but less private

Last Tuesday, we attended a presentation at the NYU Center on Law and Security: Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterrorism Force-- The NYPD, featuring Christopher Dickey, Newsweek editor and author of a recent book by the same name, and moderated by Dina Temple-Raston, NPR's national security correspondent.

Since moderator Temple-Raston covers the FBI, she kept steering the conversation in that direction, which we found a bit annoying, since we wanted to hear more about the NYPD. Given the name, we were hoping for some insight into what the NYPD does to protect the city (and the privacy trade-offs involved). There wasn't a whole lot of discussion of privacy trade-offs per se, but there was a lot of other information of interest to us.

Dickey touched on the NYPD's innovative (and recent) employment of public-private partnerships. One example is the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI). Of the 3,000 cameras used to create a CCTV network south of Canal Street, more than half are private cameras, operated by businesses in the area who are now feeding their camera footage to the NYPD.

Dickey chose to focus on the NYPD in his book because it's huge--dwarfing the LAPD, for example-- and because New York has been the focus of "terrorism" for much of its history. The JPMorgan building on Wall Street still bears shrapnel marks from a 1920 anarchist's attack that used explosives on a horse-drawn carriage to kill 33 people, said Dickey.

We had a chance to ask Dickey a question about LMSI and why the camera network launched so recently in New York (it is officially up and running as of November 2008, whereas London's Ring of Steel has been in place since the 1990s). Dickey says common knowledge among experts is that London's system doesn't actually work that well, and has had a minimal effect on crime. New York spent longer on theirs in the hope for a more effective system. The LMSI has all kinds of "razzle-dazzle technology," said Dickey, including software that recognizes packages that sit for too long in one spot and cars that circle an area repeatedly.

Tourists who get lost in Chinatown, beware!

The room was mainly full of security and counterterrorism experts, so the question at hand was not how privacy was threatened by advances in security technologies but rather how New York's safety is threatened by a lack of greater security measures.

Exhibitionism, 'Sexting' and Teens' Not-So Private Parts

We hope to move on to less salacious topics in the future, but this blog's second post will again touch on the topic of nudity. (What else might one expect from a blog with "private parts" in its title after all?)

The Aiken Standard reports on sex crime charges against two Ohio teens. The crime of one of the teens was taking a photo of herself naked with her cell phone (creation of child pornography) and sending the photo to her boyfriend (distribution of child pornography). The crime of the other teen, her boyfriend, was looking at the photo (consumption of child pornography). Apparently, "sexting" is all the rage at high schools these days. And, judging from the amount of hits resulting from a "sexting" on Google News, prosecuting the crime is all the rage across the country too.

The New York Post is on to the trend and even tracked down an image from a Manhattan teen's cell phone for its readers' viewing pleasure. The media sexting obsession seems to have been spurred by a few cases prosecuted nationwide, but also by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy's study, released last month, which found that 20% of teens have sexted. If we are really in a post-private age where exhibitionism comes naturally, our response is, "Only 20 percent?"

The sexual behavior of the young never ceases to shock the old. What seems novel to the older seasoned generations these days is how teens are using technology to enable their wild and sexually deviant ways. For example, see this recent article on teens and the "faceless and amoral world of cyberspace" in England's Daily Mail: Generation Sex.

That many a teen is hormone-charged and sexually irresponsible is not terribly shocking. That the hormone-charged teen taking a cell phone photo of herself undressed will face criminal charges is a bit shocking.

On the one hand, teens do shed their personal privacy by exposing themselves through naked images sent out into the world via text. But even if these "pornographers" are minors, it's amazing that some kind of privacy/ownership rights do not extend to their self-portraits. In the name of protectionism, authorities intervene, telling the kids, essentially, "It's true. No privacy for you. Those images are not private; they are illegal and prosecutable."

Police shocked by what they find on kids' phones [Aiken Standard]
SEX 'CELLS' FOR NAKED TEENAGERS [New York Post]
How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX [Daily Mail]