As technology advances, the imagination can run wild with all of the ways information can be gathered electronically.
Some of the means by which the public and private sectors obtain information today are things we would’ve only expected in James Bond movies a few years ago. Accessing surveillance cameras via your iPhone, cameras so clear they can read the print from the book on the subway platform, and GPS darts that police can shoot onto moving cars are all things of today. So where does it go from here?
Orin S. Kerr, professor of law at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., wrote Use Restrictions and the Future of Surveillance Law for The Brookings Institution. In his piece, Kerr writes about an al Qaeda spin-off group targeting nation’s major subway systems in the year 2030.
In Kerr’s piece, the fictional government from 2030 responds to the terror threat by creating a system called MONITOR, or “Minding Our National-Interest Transit or Rail.”
“MONITOR worked by requiring all subway passengers to use a MONITOR card when they entered subway systems. Each card was activated by its owner’s fingerprints. The fingerprints identified the user and kept records of where the user had entered and where the user exited the system.”
Kerr writes that each person’s card scan would result in a green, yellow or red light. Green-lighted passengers would be free to ride the trains. Yellow-lighted passengers might be people-of-interest who law enforcement agencies might want to follow. Red-lighted passengers would be denied access to the trains.
These ways the government responds to protect its people might have seemed futuristic and far-off a decade or two ago. But now in today’s world of surveillance, it’s not too different than some of the things we are able to do now. So do our laws keep up with our technology?
Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York said that as technology changes, laws should be better defined. But Mark Rumold, an open-government legal fellow with Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that could be tricky.
“Technology changes rapidly and what we’ve found is that even well-intentioned privacy laws can become old and out of date really quickly,” Rumold said. “Any type of privacy policies would have to be very carefully considered.”
Kerr’s piece also brings up concern for human error – something that will still be a source of unease in the future. He writes:
“…an employee of Homeland Security lost a laptop computer that included a MONITOR database containing millions of datasets of fingerprints. The computer was never recovered. No one knows if it was destroyed, or if the information eventually made it into the hands of criminals or even foreign governments.”
So while technology changes, things like human factors don’t.
The privacy concerns that arise in Kerr’s piece are still the same issues that conflict with surveillance as a means of protection today. So can there ever be balance between security and liberties?
