| Main Feature Story - Friday, August 21, 2009
Feature: Shadow City
Tiburon takes 'neighborhood watch' to the next level...
by Joy Lanzendorfer
The fortress of Tiburon may be putting a new guard at the gate. An electronic one.
The affluent municipality of almost 9,000 people is considering putting cameras on the two roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors. Police think that the cameras will help them track down criminals. Since most crime in Tiburon is committed by people who live outside of town, if something happens, the police could quickly get a record of the cars that have passed through around the time the crime occurred and narrow it down to the likely culprit.
If the town council passes the measure, Tiburon would likely become the first town to record the license plates of every visitor. The measure is stirring up controversy from those who feel the idea of a camera tracking everyone's movements is too close to Big Brother from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
"It's totalitarian," says security expert Bruce Schneier. "It sounds like something the Soviet Union would try to do. It's the surveillance of everybody. It's not 'follow that car,' it's follow every car. The East Germans tried to do this same thing, but it eventually failed. Technology makes it easy."
Schneier is a cryptographer and author of several well-known books on security, including Secrets and Lies, Beyond Fear and Applied Cryptology. Like many people, he sees the cameras as a violation of personal privacy. Tiburon, however, is trying to minimize privacy infringements as much as possible. For one thing, the cameras can only photograph the license plate, not the driver or the interior of the car. For another, the police will delete the data after a period of time, most likely a month or two. And the cameras will only be used to track down criminals once a crime has been committed. The police will not be looking through lists of license plates on a daily basis.
"People seem to have a vision of a bunch of cops huddled around a computer watching second by second who is coming through the town," says Police Chief Mike Cronin. "I have no time for that, and no interest, on top of the fact that there is no legitimate police purpose for it. We will be using the cameras as a post-investigation tool only."
Tiburon is aware of the controversy the proposal is generating. The town is in the process of hammering out the details of the measure, including developing a privacy policy and deciding where funding will come from. Most likely the cameras will be paid for through federal grants and contributions from other affected jurisdictions, like the nearby town of Belvedere. The system would cost around $100,000 to install, plus additional costs for maintenance.
"We have some really big questions that we have to answer," says Mayor Alice Fredericks. "I don't see any constitutional issues here, but we do have some civil questions. We don't want to have everyone looked at when there is no legal basis for it, and this has to be addressed with good policy."
Reflections upon a golden eye
But the issue also begs the question: Why does the town want these cameras in the first place? Tiburon is a place where residents feel so safe that they leave their doors unlocked at night. In 2007 and 2008, Tiburon saw 196 thefts, 37 robberies and 12 stolen cars. That is not the kind of crime wave that usually brings on this type of measure.
"It's a bad investment," says Nicole Ozer of the ACLU Northern California. "These cameras are going to cost hundreds of thousands to install and maintain and all for about $200,000 in property damage. It doesn't seem like a very practical solution for solving crime, especially in these tough economic times."
The reason behind the cameras gets down to geography. Because there are only two roads into town, tracking those who visit is far easier than it would be for a city like San Rafael, which has multiple entrances and more traffic overall. And since most of the criminals come from outside the area, there is an added incentive for police to watch who is coming in.
Cronin can think of plenty of examples where the cameras would have come in handy for catching the culprit in cases of hit-and-runs, car thefts and burglaries. For example, in February 2008, Tiburon had a rash of identity thefts. A woman was running around stealing from mailboxes, particularly tax forms because they have private information like bank accounts and Social Security numbers on them.
"We had the license plate of the woman who was doing the mail thefts fairly early on, but we couldn't catch her when she was committing the crime," says Cronin. "In that case, if we had had the system alert us for when she came into town, we could have cut that crime off halfway through."
However, statistics suggest that cameras are not effective tools for reducing crime. For over a decade, Great Britain has spent millions of dollars installing so many cameras that it has contributed to the country's reputation as a "nanny state." Despite this, multiple studies have shown that the cameras have little effect on crime. In 2005, researchers from University of Leicester in England compared how 13 different surveillance systems around the United Kingdom affected the crime rate. They found that in some areas crime went up and in others it went down. The cameras didn't seem to make any difference.
One reason for this is that cameras are easy to fool. A common way people do it is license plate cloning—faking the number on the license plate to trick the cameras into thinking it is another car. Last year, teenagers in Montgomery County, Maryland, made a game out of printing fake license plates, putting them on their cars and tearing by a speed camera that was located close to the high school. The camera read the fake plates and sent speeding tickets to innocent people.
"There's some weird belief that these cameras make people more secure," says Schneier. "Anybody who wants to do a crime can obscure a license plate. Sure the police will notice, but by then it will be too late. This measure only traps the honest and the stupid. The dishonest people will still get away with the crime."
License plate technology has been around for years now. In fact, former Tiburon mayor Andrew Thompson first proposed putting the cameras on the roads to town way back in 1995. At the time, Thompson was proposing a map to encourage children to use the walking trails throughout town. He was surprised when people brought up kidnapping as the reason they wouldn't want their children to walk the trails alone. Polly Klaas had been kidnapped from a slumber party in Petaluma only two years before.
"I thought about the cameras because, if God forbid anything like that ever happened again, we would be able to track down the car quickly and get the child back right away," says Thompson. "The man who kidnapped Klaas was pulled over by a police officer while she was in the trunk of his car. The officer didn't know. It was a tragedy and we have to make sure nothing like that ever happens again."
As Thompson points out, daily life is already full of surveillance. Cameras are in every store and parking garage. FasTrak records every time someone passes through a toll booth on Bay Area bridges and sends a charge to the person's account. Cell phones connect to cell towers, which also record our locations. Facial recognition software is becoming commonplace in airports. The GPS in cars connects to satellites, which in turn can track vehicles' locations. Just this week the city of San Rafael announced it would begin the installation of red-light enforcement cameras at the intersection of Third and Irwin streets. If someone has the means and desire, the ways we can be tracked are endless.
"We are watched virtually everywhere we go now," says Thompson. "People forget that. So I don't see how the cameras in Tiburon are going to add any net additional loss of privacy, and it will add in safety, and in kidnapping and crime prevention."
Every breath you take, every move you make...
This new privacy issue even has a name—locational privacy. It is the "ability of an individual to move in public space with the expectation that under normal circumstances their location will not be systematically and secretly recorded for later use," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). There are two types of locational privacy violations: situations where we choose to give up our privacy, like carrying around a cell phone, and situations where we have no choice, like cameras that record your plates when you drive into town.
The number of gadgets that can track you, combined with how easy it is to search for you with new technology, is creating questions about how much privacy a person has a right to demand in a public space. Shoba Vaitheeswaran, spokesperson for Redflex Group, a company that makes cameras similar to the ones Tiburon is considering, feels that being in public automatically means sacrificing some privacy.
"You give up privacy whenever you leave your house," she says. "When you register your car with a license plate, it is identified with the state, and that is giving up some privacy. And there is no expectation of privacy on public roadways paid with taxpayers' dollars."
For other people, the cumulative loss of privacy is troublesome. It isn't that you expect to be invisible in a public space, but more that the technology makes it too easy for others to watch you without you knowing it. It is possible to be watched while going to sensitive locations like doctor visits, or churches or political meetings. And that is an issue even for people with nothing to hide.
"The fact that you are honest and are doing nothing wrong has nothing to do with privacy," says Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the EFF. "There's no reason to associate privacy with bad behavior. It's that 'it's not your business.' It's 'why should you know that?' There has been a shift where people think that if you want privacy, you must have something to hide. That's looking at it the wrong way. Let's reverse it so that people start saying, as they used to do in this country, 'It's not your business.'"
Most people surrender their privacy without thinking about it, or because they assume that it is a necessary tradeoff for the conveniences that technology offers. But it doesn't always have to be that way, according to the EFF. Many technologies, like FasTrak, could be revamped to do the same function without any sacrifice in privacy.
"It's wrong to think you have to trade privacy for convenience," says Tien. "You can do the whole thing without taking away privacy. It is often optional for the government or a vendor to have to track you."
And while Tiburon may become the first to record the comings and going of all its citizens and visitors, it is far from alone in utilizing this technology. And government surveillance is about to become a lot more common in California. The Department of Homeland Security, started by the Bush administration, offers grants for small towns to install surveillance cameras. Already 37 cities in California have video surveillance programs, 18 have surveillance in public streets or plazas and another 18 use police to actively monitor the cameras, according to the ACLU. And that number is growing. San Francisco has gone from two cameras in 2005 to 58 cameras today, with more to come. Santa Monica plans to put in a system for complete visibility in its outdoor public mall. Fresno just approved $1.2 million for the purchase of 73 cameras.
This could lead to new civil rights issues. Government surveillance often means discrimination. A study in the UK found that cameras were two-and-a-half times more likely to follow people of color over Caucasians. One in 10 women were targeted for voyeuristic reasons, meaning that the people running the camera were zooming in or watching their body parts.
I spy with Tiburon's eye
Since Tiburon's cameras will only be able to scan license plates, the town will not have these issues. But that doesn't mean that drivers are immune to other forms of discrimination, even if the police just use the cameras for investigations, according to Ozer.
"We need safeguards for ensuring the police aren't targeting based on ZIP codes of where people live or what color they are," she says. "If somebody comes in from Western Addition to enjoy the view of Tiburon, all of a sudden they are a suspect just because they came into Tiburon at a certain hour."
There is also the matter of how well the data will be protected. The database could be exploited, either by people in the police department who are not supposed to have access, or by people who gain access remotely, such as hackers. Even deleting information is problematic since it is difficult to completely erase data from a computer.
In other words, the cameras would have the same security problems that all other computers have.
"I can't think of a police database in the history of society that doesn't have some kind of unauthorized access," says Schneier. "Is there any magical reason this database is better than all the other databases out there? Probably not."
Of course, one small town is not going to have all of these problems. But the measure is part of the bigger question around the tradeoffs between privacy and security. It is a debate that started with 9/11 and was heightened by the Bush administration's Patriot Act, which includes other forms of surveillance, such as wiretapping.
Tiburon, like the rest of us, will have to decide where it stands.
"The idea that Tiburon is a fortress is a stereotype," says Thompson. "We are a welcoming community, and this measure is purely about public safety. Towns all over California are going to adopt it once they see its success. Cronin should be applauded for being brave enough to move forward with this experiment. All of California is going to be the beneficiary."
Keep an eye on Joy at joy@greenfly.net. | 
Send this story
Print this story
