Who's Watching You?

About 2 years ago, I went to our mailbox to retrieve our mail and discovered a letter from the Washington D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. I thought "Okay, this is kind of odd. We have never lived in D.C. so this must be some kind of solicitation of support or some error." The letter was addressed to my husband, a person who never reads mail because he has delgated that job to me, his personal secretary. So, I opened the letter and to my surprise there is a partial picture of the back of his truck fit into the outline of a triangle. There was his license plate and smaller, bits of image of the street and traffic signs where he had been driving. As I scanned the rest of the letter, I discovered the time in which the picture had been taken and the speed at which my husband had been driving. There was a notice in bold type indicating that my husband had been caught speeding on camera and instructions for payment such a traffic violation was also included. "Wow! I can not believe this!", were the first words I uttered.

Now, we were already aware of cameras being installed at traffic lights to monitor traffic violations, catch the offenders, and of course generate more revenue for those states or districts that had deployed them. Yet, it was still shocking to have it happen to us because no one else we knew, despite being aware of their frequent offenses, had ever been sent a ticket in the mail for a traffic violation. At that very moment, we began to take it very seriously that not only were our driving habits being monitored, but that all of our daily activities were also under surveilence.

When my husband and I began discussing the details of the ticket, he recalled just where he was heading that day and what he was doing at the light. Yet, he was never aware that his quick trips to get lunch, gas, or gum from a convenience store might actually be monitored. We begin to explore all of the possibilities for problems this could cause anyone who is being watched whether they are on their best behavior or not.

We imagined what this could mean for someone who might be driving the company car and just happened to get caught speeding. This information gets sent to the employer in the form of a ticket. Now, before the cameras and this type of information sharing among agency databases it might have been something that an employee could have handled discreetly while maintaining what appeared to be a good driving record on the surface---at least that is until the employer updated the data it stored on its drivers via regular DMV background searches. All of a sudden it becomes more than just a traffic violation that the employee has to worry about, but perhaps conditions of continued employment or reprimands on the job. If that is not enough, consider the possibilities of an area caused by two cars travelling a little closely and while passing through a light one is speeding and one may not be speeding. Is it not likely that a picture could be taken of the second car, a traffic violation could be recorded, and then a speeding ticket gets sent to the wrong person? There have been instances where multiple cars are pulled over for speeding simultaneously because they were travelling within in enough range of radar guns to be considered a traffic violator. I am sure that there are likely statistics to support the accuracy of radar guns in catching speeding violations, but the margin for error can not be discarded. A similar margin of error must be taken into account with the use of traffic light cameras. There is always a chance that cameras malfunction or delay and can capture the wrong data that then gets feed into a system where that information is shared among agencies who can make critical decisions about individuals. In this case, the decisions seem to be automated somewhat, but I could be wrong. What are the implications for deploying systems like this despite potential for inaccuracy?

We believe that the magnitude of implications of these surveilance systems is beyond what we could ever imagine because there are too many factors that are not being taken into account. Similar to all other collection of data stored in these systems, the potential for abuse by malicious individuals privy to that data within the organization that maintain this data is of great concern. You never know who is watching you, what information that is being kept about you, and just how that information can be used against you. Thus, we keep this in the forefront of our minds most of the time, but have to be careful not to get too comfortable with the cameras like the individuals on reality t.v. shows.