Watch out, Atlanta, Mayor Kasim Reed has his eyes on you when you step outside.
The all-seeing eye in the sky is not exactly Mayor Reed himself, as he stated in a recent interview. Reed said “I,” but he meant “we,” as in “the government.” And whether it is “I” or “we” or “they” — it all depends on your vantage point — well, they are getting very good at keeping an eye on us.
This month, Reed wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the future of cities and later expounded in an interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting: “I don’t want to be too spooky,” he told the radio network, “but between now and 2050 there is a very high likelihood, if you chose to, if you’re in a major metro, I could have eyes on you for 80 to 85 percent of the time that you move around, which significantly reduces the chance that anyone would be able to perpetrate a crime against you without being caught.”
A few things on that: One, yes that is more than a bit spooky. Two, just who is going to choose to be watched 85 percent of the time? And three, it’s going to happen a lot sooner than 2050.
Some see that as comforting. Others see Big Brother. But much of it is already here. In fact, Atlanta is on innovation’s cutting edge when it comes to public safety technology, according to Reed and the head of the Atlanta Police Foundation. There’s something called the “technology innovation lab,” which has teams of scientists, engineers, professors and police types figuring out all sorts of ways to integrate surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, enhanced resolution, crowdsourcing and analytical tools to constantly keep tabs on what’s happening. Kind of a 24/7 electro-cop on every corner.
The city already has 3,000 public and private video cameras linked together in a system monitored by APD and hopes to have 12,000 online by 2018. The network’s moniker, in true military speak, is “Operation Shield.”
“The Department of Homeland Security is seeing Atlanta as the model for this program” said Dave Wilkinson, president of the Police Foundation, a business-oriented group that aids the police department.
“When you’re out in a public space there will come a day when law enforcement can keep their eyes on you almost all the time,” Wilkinson said. “All of this has to be used with a measured approach. The news media can spin it to be conspiratorial or that Big Brother is watching.”
So, just by stepping outside, you become part of some analytic equation?
“But you’d not be part of that equation unless you committed a crime,” he countered.
Date with a stranger? Invite the police!
Reed, for his part, wants to be clear: He’s not calling for a computer tracking device implanted in each taxpayer. Instead, he said, many citizens will someday call for enhanced security in the form of a warm technological security blanket.
He discussed a theoretical young woman of the future who meets a man on a social media site, goes out on a date and uses an application on her phone that allows cops to keep tabs on her, even linking in with video cameras that she passes.
This scenario would theoretically keep her safe — or at least enable police to more easily find her body.
“As people increasingly move into cities,” Reed said, “a number of individuals will opt into that approach, as long as they have the ability to turn it on and turn it off.”
And, “for the 15 percent of the time that you weren’t covered by video, there’s an algorithm that can predict where you were.”
Yikes. I worry when my technology can rat me out — even when I’m not up to no good.
Exactly, said Dave Maass, an investigator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who coincidentally was writing about surveillance and San Diego’s police.
Maass says that Mayor Reed’s vision of the future will come a lot sooner than 2050.
An eye on everybody (except me, of course)
Computer geeks love to push technology and cops love new tools to catch bad guys. Put these together and you will have, in the very near future, a pretty terrific (or frightening) technological web to catch criminals (or track people and identify folks in crowds.)
“Policymakers have a hard time reining in policing practices because they don’t want to be seen as being soft on crime,” Maass said. “The direction they are going is to surveil everything and collect data on everything.”
Between omnipresent surveillance cameras, license plate readers, facial recognition devices and cellular technology, the government can use technology to catch burglars and muggers on one hand, and jaywalkers, red-light runners and speeders on the other.
In fact, on one not so far-off day, (and this is me surmising) your speeding ticket could be instantaneously emailed to your DMV account and your bank account debited before you ever put your car in park. Red-light cameras have been unpopular in Georgia in some quarters: people like technology that targets crime; they just don’t like technology that targets their own misdeeds.
Back to the mayor, who repeatedly said he wasn’t advocating the cameras-everywhere approach. He just wants to bring up the discussion “because we’re already past the second half of this conversation. All of this needs to be talked through.”
Asked about the impact of the cities of tomorrow with the 24/7, eye-in-the-sky, Reed said some of it makes him uncomfortable, and added with a chuckle, “I think it will cause a boom in farm ownership.”
