War is Peace, Freedom
is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength
The
land of the free, the country where dreams come true, the place where human
rights are protected and respected. Those were the slogans that brought
millions of people to America. Was it a true description of the country? Part
of it was. You certainly had opportunities and you still have. Freedom and the
respect of the human rights however weren’t always the strength of the American
system. Throughout the history there were plenty of examples of violating
people’s rights, but let just talk about a specific one: the right for privacy.
In the last and the present century wars abroad and violence inside the country
made certain officials think about how they could control and raise the level
of safeness. They were searching for ways how they could stop any violence
before it’s too late, or at least have a clue who committed a crime. And then was born the genius idea: to ensure
safety, they have to find the way to survey public places. Since the middle of
the 90’s there is a trend of installing surveillance cameras at traffic lights,
in buildings, in parks or in shopping malls throughout North America and Great Britain.
The happenings of September 11th also had a big impact on the future
of surveillance. The security checkpoints on airports are designed to find any
possible threats. Though the benefits of using these cameras and other devices are
obvious, I think invading privacy to ensure safety is unethical and
unacceptable. Here are my reasons:
Most
of us want to be alone sometimes. Normally those are the days when you stay at home,
in one of your room or your own corner and try to avoid any conversation or
activity with others. But there are other people who are not so lucky to have
that place, or it is impossible to have that little privacy at their own house.
So they like to go out to parks, to bars or just wonder around on the streets.
They don’t want to be bothered; they don’t want to be watched. That’s the
reason they left from home. Would they feel comfortable if meanwhile driving
around some policeman was stopping them for a random reason? Or let’s say
sitting in a park, some camera just turns towards them and recording what are
they doing? I found a very good example in a Toronto Star article about this.
In London, a man tried to attempt a suicide. A public camera took footage of
the attempt, which later was given to TV stations. However the image had been
blurred, the man was still identifiable and now he’s suing. He had enough problems
already, what lead him to that decision. He luckily didn’t manage to kill
himself, but his problems just multiplied. Nobody wants to become famous this
way!
In many
states of North America thousands of photo ticketing devices were being
installed at intersections regulated by traffic lights. A 2007 Washington Post
article sais: “Although - in the identification of license plates - errors has
been made, there is a presumption that any photographed vehicle’s registered
owner is guilty of running a red light.” So is the law changing? We have to
prove our innocence before we have been proven guilty? AAA has revealed that
thousands of motorists have been wrongly accused of speeding because of
glitches in the controversial speed camera system. Mistakes range from
registration numbers being misread to the dates and times of the alleged
offence being wrong. There are lots of calibration mistakes as well. Occasionally,
these accusations go even further. I remember reading it in a newspaper a
couple of years ago that once in Arizona the police have arrested a man, for
speeding based solely on the evidence of its photo radar machines that
registered his vehicle traveling at an impossibly high speed of 147 MPH. That
poor man had to prove it in court that, his car - according to the manufacturer
- has a drag-limited top speed of 137 MPH. This man has not only been invaded in his
privacy, but a false device took his freedom away. Here I should mention the
movie I have recently seen: The Minority Report. In the movie, which plays in
the near future, the whole city built on the new system, called Pre-Crime. With
the help of certain individuals, called the pre-cogs, who are able to see who
will commit a murder in a future, crime rate sank to a very law level. But their
prisons are full with people who are actually innocent. They were going to
commit murder but they actually didn’t. They have been imprisoned for a crime
they were just thinking about. Their freedom had been taken away without having
the right to defend themselves. The identifications and scanning of people’s
mind made possible by infrared cameras. Those devices are monitoring people, following
them everywhere, invading their privacy constantly. I wouldn’t want to live in
a world like this.
I
have a personal reason as well, why I think it is a wrong approach to ensure
safety by violating privacy. I travel enough to see how humiliating can be to
go through an airport security checkpoint. Meanwhile I understand the
government’s reasoning why they had to set up those stations to ensure some
kind of security measures, I totally disagree with how they disgrace people
during the check-in. That is a real invasion of privacy. Just think about how
they are searching through your bag with an X-ray machine or with their hands.
Do you really want them or anybody else to see what are you carrying with you?
Then you have to take off half of your clothes, your shoes in front of
everybody. What if you’re choice of clothing or your pants falling off without
your belt making you a subject of ridicule? Then you have to stand in the
middle of this unit with arms wide open, meanwhile a machine scans you’re
entire body to find out if you carry anything illegal. How do we know how safe
these machines really are? I really feel sorry for my Mom, and I’m kind of
outraged by the way of the security system is checking her out when she
travels. She has got a knee replacement a couple of years ago. So any time she
goes to the airport she shows them her papers why the X-ray machine will give a
sound. They still make her go through it several times. Furthermore, they
usually take her to a private office, where an officer scans her from head to
toe. Is that right, she has to go through all these procedures at the age of
72? Does she really look like a terrorist? One thing is sure; we don’t have a
choice now. You obey the rules, because you have to go, you have to reach your
destination. I assume 95 % - if not more - of us are just regular travellers,
who have not even got a bad thought trying to endanger our fellow people, but
because of that possible 5 %, we have to suffer as well.
Advocates
of this kind of surveillance say that, there are plenty of benefits of using
these devices. Let’s say the red-light cameras are needed to deter red-light
running and reduce accidents. Cameras set up in public parks and streets or in
subway stations can help to stop a crime or at least help to catch the
criminals by recording the assaults or robberies. It is true. By the end of the
90’s in New York City, police say a surveillance program has already resulted
in a 44 percent reduction in offences such as drug dealing, vandalism and
sexual assault. In one world criminal acts are declining. There are other
benefits as well. They have been able to help when someone goes down ill in a
public place or it also helps to find runaway kids. The operators of these
cameras and devices usually have to follow a strict code of practice that
limits how they can move and position the cameras so as not to violate people’s
privacy on their own property. Footage is never given out, supposedly. But do
these cameras actually stop the crimes or just move them to another location? Criminals
can destroy those cameras, before they record anything, can’t they? Are those
images clear enough for certain recognition? There are a lot of possibilities
for computer or human errors. Cameras can be miscalibrated, the pictures has
been taken by them could be blurry. They can be very effective in catching crimes
but they can be abusive in lots of ways. They can be used for evil reasons as
well. George Orwell wrote his famous fiction, 1984 about the possibility how the bad way of using surveillance
can turn the world to a hellish place. In 1984, London is a dystopian place
where the government, Big Brother is always watching and the Thought Police can
read your mind. Winston, his main character and all the citizens in grave
danger simply because they have to control all their thoughts. Any idea
crossing their mind, questioning the ruling party can put them in jail, where
they will either be reformed or disappear. On page 90 he wrote: “The telescreen
was received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above
the level of very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as
he remained within the field of vision, which the metal plaque commanded, he
could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether
you were being watched at any given moment. It was conceivable that they
watched everybody at all the time. You had to live in the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment
scrutinized.” And on page 145 it gets worst. “It was terribly dangerous to let
your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within a range of a
telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away: a nervous tic, an
unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that
carried with the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any
case to wear an improper expression on your face was itself a punishable
offense. There was even a word for it: facecrime,
it was called.”
Of
course Orwell’s world is just a fiction, but violating our rights to privacy is
already happening for a while. Meanwhile no one can except full privacy in a
public space, people still have a right not to be subjected to surveillance at
all the time. People should have some influence over this. We have the right to
live our lives in anonymity. The more that cameras have been put up there, the
less you enjoy that right. In the Toronto Star article, I mentioned before, Richard
Skinulis, editor of a Canadian Security magazine said that: “One way or the
other, we are going to become a more closely watched society. But people should
be wary when police ask for the right to watch on an ongoing, rather than an
incident-linked basis! I don’t like the idea of everyone being monitored.” That
article was written in 1998. Think about what had happened since and you can
decide which side you are in. There is a major difference in between somebody
is watching out for us, or somebody is watching us!
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