The Night Chicago Spied

Interesting article here from the May issue of Wired by Noah Shachtman, "Spycam Force," about the introduction of surveillance cameras to the streets of Chicago. Just consider the opening paragraphs:

"On a warm afternoon on Chicago's West Side, a young African-American man leans against the wall of the One Stop Food and Liquor store at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Homan Street. His puffy black jacket is so oversize that the collar hangs halfway down his back. Thirty feet up, a camera mounted on a telephone pole swivels toward him.

Three miles away, in a bunkerlike, red granite building near Greektown, Ron Huberman watches the young man on a PC screen. "You see that guy?" asks Huberman, the 33-year-old chief of Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications. "He's pitching dope - you can tell. Fucker."

The corner of Chicago and Homan used to be a haven for dealers slinging heroin and rock cocaine, the heart of a gangbanger free-fire zone. In 2003, the Windy City had 598 homicides, making it the country's murder capital.

"We've gotta figure out where's he keeping the goods," says Huberman, his voice breaking from a bout with the flu. "We're gonna go on the air" - call for a police car - "and bust him."

With a move of his mouse, Huberman pans to the right. We're looking down at a second man, in a beige coat. He has a brown paper bag in one hand and a wad of cash in the other. "He's involved," Huberman says, staring hard at the screen. No cop, even undercover, could ever get this close for this long. But the cameras - housed in checkerboard-patterned, 2-foot-tall boxes the police here call pods - can zoom in so tight I can see the wisps of a mustache. Huberman decides not to have his suspected dealers picked up; too much of an Enemy of the State move to pull with a reporter around, perhaps. But the footage will be stored for review by antinarcotics teams. "Now you see the power of what we're doing?" Huberman asks, still staring at the screen."

Indeed, I think we do. You've just made a strong case for free provision of hoodies to anyone who wants to walk the streets.

In their book The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong report that in their study of monitoring in the UK, during 592 hours, 698 people were surveilled as being of primary concern, of which 7 percent were women, the majority were young white men, and there was an overrepresentation of black youth and the "scruffy" or "subcultural." (Perhaps less surprising was the revelation that many surveillers, from private security firms, used the cameras to ogle women in the street and even brought in videos from home to watch).

Couple this attitude with the late-20th-century turn to the "punitive state" outlined by David Garland in his book The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society and you can see where this is leading. The notion that crime can never be eradicated, because the poor and indolent are always with us, but they can be caught and locked away, providing all of society is willing to be surveilled, and you have a world in which it's safe to walk the streets only because privacy in the public sphere has been entirely surrendered.

Shachtman at least acknowledges some concern:

"All this technology has some longtime Chicago community activists squirming. History has provided several reasons to mistrust the police. Former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley's notorious Red Squad snooped on such groups as the League of Women Voters and the American Jewish Congress, and kept files on 200,000 Chicagoans. The unit was officially disbanded in 1981, but in 2002, the police infiltrated five antiglobalization protest groups and then undertook four more unspecified "spying operations" a year later, according to the Chicago Tribune. Reports of corruption on the force are still all too common. "It's almost inevitable, considering the nature of the Chicago police, that we're going to hear about abuses regarding this technology," says Representative Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who has represented the South Side in Congress for 13 years."

And not only in Chicago, I suspect.

Related tangentially to this, I was interested to read this snippet in the latest issue of Lobster (linked left):

According to the Copenhagen Post of February 20, 2004, during the early years of the cold war,

" . . .the CIA was provided with a complete copy of all Danish archives, which was transported over the Atlantic in the form of 244 spools of 16 mm film and 8 spools of 32 mm film containing over 400,000 pages of sensitive and top-secret information about hundreds of thousands of Danish citizens, enabling the American authorities to reject "unsuitable" individuals applying for visas.""

Never could trust those Danes.