The Eyes of Chicago are on YOU

Mayor Daley of Chicago and Ray Orozco, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, announced that he would like to see CCTV cover the city.

What might come as a surprise, is my support of this plan. However, I have grave concerns over who has access to the system and retention of video.

As of now it appears only 911 dispatch operators have access to the network currently in place. As the system grows to cover the city, my concern is that other divisions will be granted access to the system and abuses will follow without strict legislation defining limits.

My next concern, peeked by a Facebook posting between Dr. Zimmer and Dr. Walker, both of UW-Milwaukee, relates to saved video. Will video of the system be archived or recorded. I am sure there is already in place an option to record video feeds to assist as evidence in court and review for further clues, if need be. However, will all video feeds be recorded? If so how long will the video remain archived?

In addition will the video be made available through Freedom of Information Act requests, it is after all a publicly created 'document' and as Illinois law says, "…it is declared to be the public policy of the State of Illinois that all persons are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government […] Such access is necessary to enable the people to fulfill their duties of discussing public issues fully and freely, making informed political judgments and monitoring government to ensure that it is being conducted in the public interest." (5 ILCS 140/1)

It has been many years since Katz v. United States where the "reasonable expectation" of privacy was born. But it is my opinion that an individual, even in public, has an expectation to not be monitored and recorded for their time in public spaces. Simply, I can agree that an expectation of privacy in public is non-existent. This is based partially on the thought that no one would follow all the actions of an individual, but the ability for the State to record the actions of anyone in public from the time they enter the public space until they leave amounts to nothing more than stalking.

Perhaps video surveillance, open to the public, covering all governmental offices is in order. (Slight joke)

Palin e-mail hack

ArsTechnica has another good bit of information on the Palin e-mail hacking case. If you are not aware of the newest updates, it is a quick read to catch you up.

Which brings me to my thought of the hour/day. Why is this such a big deal? If this were any other person, the FBI would surely not be 'raiding' an apartment already. Sure she is a governor mired in controversy and a vice-presidential candidate, but why all the hub bub, bub?

Now I can understand that this case might be of concern because she is a governor and there could be some very sensitive information in her e-mail account. However, no one is questioning why she was using an e-mail account other than her state e-mail account. The old cliche of you get what you pay for probably applies in this instance. What if, instead of Yahoo, Palin had been using GMail. Since GMail scans e-mails for advertising purposes (not a jibe at Google) conceivably Google would be going to the fighting ring. *side note: Which would be interesting since Google still has not been charged with copyright violations stemming from digital scanning operations*

This is case is incredibly whimsical in my mind. If this had happened to anyone else there would not be such an urgency to prosecute or rectify the situation. If, instead of Palin, a CEO or other higher up in an organization had use Yahoo for official organizational business they would have been fired by now. Maybe this is another way of showing there are two sets of laws in the US, one for the elite and another set for the rest of us which go unenforced. Most importantly this entire escape shows two things.

First, the US needs to implement better privacy standards for Internet users. When insurance companies are selling anti-identity theft insurance, you know the government has failed to protect 'our' personal information by lack of legislation.

Second, it shows that if you are important enough in some one's eye, the entire resources of the federal government will come to your aid. On a less satirical note, this shows that the tools are present for catching such privacy violations. It remains unclear how willing the government is to prosecute, but my guess is that since this is such a famous case, the defendant will be made very unhappy.