Long before planes slammed into the World Trade Center and anthraxed mail snarled Capitol Hill, privacy mavens had worried that a terrorist attack would spur Congress to approve invasive new laws.
Then came Sept. 11’s deadly attacks, followed by President Bush signing the USA PATRIOT Act the following month.
Others, predicting that music and video could be locked up in ways that prevent legitimate backups as well as illicit copying, had fretted that Congress might make such protections mandatory.
Then an influential senator proposed doing just that last month.
These are trying times for technology activists, lawyers and other random savants who gather each year for the ritual of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, which pits them against their ideological foes in government and the entertainment industry.
Last week’s summit, which ended Friday, comes at a time when Hollywood is eager to restrict technology in hopes of restricting privacy, and governments are becoming positively entrepreneurial in testing new technologies of surveillance and eavesdropping.
Take face-recognition cameras, an awkward phrase describing closed-circuit cameras tied to computers that attempt to match your face against existing images in a database.
The upside: Miscreants could be arrested, assuming the technology works as described. The downside, depending on how the system is programmed: A record of what you do in public for the rest of your life could be compiled, sorted, and kept on file for police perusal.
Public outcry over such facecams prompted the Winter Olympics and the National Basketball Association to pledge not to install them. But after last September, a nation newly-conscious of security began to install them in airports and some city streets.
A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, who spoke at the conference, said facecams simply don’t work.
“It has utterly failed, sometimes in astounding ways,” said ACLU associate director Barry Steinhardt. “When a technology demonstrably does not work, we ought not to use it. We don’t even have to debate the privacy issues.”
In January, the ACLU released a report saying that in Tampa, Florida — the first city to adopt the surveillance system — the facecam network never ID’d a single person present in the database.
Another panel pitted a Justice Department attorney, Chris Painter, against activists and a representative of UUNet, the network provider. Painter said that criticisms of the USA PATRIOT Act, which handed police unprecedented surveillance power, were misguided and/or based on a misreading of the complicated law.
During an “award ceremony,” Privacy International announced that Attorney General John Ashcroft would receive one of this year’s not-very-coveted awards: a golden statue of a jackboot crushing a human head.
Ashcroft, who once likened criticism of the Bush administration to treason and lobbied for the USA PATRIOT Act’s wiretapping expansion to have no expiration date, received “Worst Government Official.”
Wired – Apr. 22, 2002