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Big Brother is Watching You

The International Business Times has an article today about surveillance cameras and face recognition. I thought this would be of interest given the ethical questions that it raises. (For folks in Public Rhetoric, this relates to the surveillance article we read) I think it's interesting that they are modeling these devices using the human eye-brain connection, which we've determined to be flawed in its ability to interpret and remember, to create the face recognition programming. Will (Do) the cameras "see" better than we do? Are they more reliable? What about cameras that snap shots of people running red lights, etc.? A photograph lacks a context without your memory (or another's memory) of the event

Even more interesting is the way that they have "taught" the cameras to look for suspicious activity. By programming "normal" parameters (e.g., the way a person should walk when carrying things versus not), the computer flags certain behaviors. In addition to analyzing gait, they also flag other "suspicious" activities such as: leaving a laptop bag unattended and looking into car windows in a parking lot instead of going straight into the building. I'm definitely a proponent of protecting the public, but does this cross a line? What about rights to privacy? The makers point out that the cameras aren't perfect, although they frame the problem as an issue of liability rather than civil rights. However, they seem confident that the technology will continue to improve its levels of accuracy and, in the most disturbing line of the article, they say:

And the cameras can only see so much - they can't stop some threats, like a bomber with explosives in a backpack. They can't see what you are wearing under your jacket - yet.

So, I'd like to raise two questions: 1. Would there be greater public resistance and government restrictions on such technologies before 9/11? and 2. How does this fit into visual rhetoric?

(Note: I apologize for my excessive use of quotation marks, but there are simply that many concepts that are questionable.)

Submitted by rhetoricat on Tue, 2007-02-27 07:42.
rhetoricat's blog

Watching Out for Us
Morgan R.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan R. on Tue, 2007-02-27 10:52.

How do we construct what guilt looks like, and what a "normal" (verses dangerous) body posture is... the decontextualization of it gives me the willies.  I think that the rhetoric (both visual and non visual) employed after 9-11 made this kind of technology feel like it was more okay.  When will the next attack come, and how can we stop it?  Seeing the burning buildings, and hearing about the aftermath of 9-11 can make one wonder about the need for survallience: when the subways were attacked in London they certainly had a better time finding the attackers then we did.  Visually, there would be that component of being watched all the time, and likely not being able to see the watching.  The cameras are hidden, for optimum effect, and we are left wondering who is watching who.  How is this different then google saving our internet searches, or the government scanning emails?  How is this differntly voyeristic?  There was little resistance to these forms of watching "out" for us...Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)


Behavior
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Tue, 2007-02-27 09:48.

Cat,

This is interesting (again for those of us in Public Rhetorics) in light of Paul Lynch's comments on profiling behavior (as opposed to race, ethnicity and nationality). These cameras appear to focus on behavior (visual manifestations). We have discussed at earlier points how body language is connected to visual rhetoric (the Bernhardt piece in particular). What we do in public (our behavior) has ramifications for how we are perceived. We are interpreted based on our movements and activities. In particular contexts (an airport or a mall) these behaviors come under different sorts of scrutiny. These technologies (successfully operated of course) avoid the typical "he looks guilty," to given this context and the normally parameters of human behavior in this context (looking into car windows in mall parking lot vs. at a car lot) this fellow is worth watching so more. For sure, these are both "blinks," in Gladwell's sense of the term, but they could also be seen as the blinks of the physicians with their algorithms.