Page 58 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

MORE COHERENT, LESS SUBJECTIVE, AND OPERATIONAL 43

receiving calls from her attacker. The Court ultimately ruled in this case
that the suspect’s expectation of privacy had not been violated, because the
numbers he dialed had been passively received by the phone company, a
third party. In this case, a court applying the CAPD would reach the same
ruling—albeit with a different rationale for doing so. Such a court would
find that the information collected was of low sensitivity because it does
not include the content of the calls.
U.S. police departments sometimes use technology that “aggregates and
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analyzes public safety data in real time.” Developed by Persistent Surveil-
lance Systems (PSS), helicopters or small planes are equipped with cameras
that scan large parts of a city continuously and feed the images into a com-
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mand center. The planes also carry infrared cameras that can track people
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and cars under foliage and in some buildings. The information is kept and
analyzed in the command center maintained by the company. The Washing-
ton Post reported that “[the company that sells the system] has rules on how
long data can be kept, when images can be accessed and by whom. Police
are supposed to begin looking at the pictures only after a crime has been
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reported. Fishing expeditions are prohibited.” The amount of information
this technology collects, its bandwidth, and its cybernation are significantly
higher than those of tollbooths, speed cameras, and other similar technolo-
gies included in the previous category. The information’s sensitivity is, gen-
erally, relatively low. The main privacy effects of this technology concern
the scope and kind of cybernation involved. If the company’s self-imposed
rules are codified in the law—and the law is effectively enforced—the pri-
vacy implications of this and other such technologies would be limited
and tolerable. If these conditions are not met, the use of such technologies
should be prohibited because their use amounts to subjecting all people all
the time to fishing expeditions. The main variable that differentiates that
which can be tolerated from that which should be banned is not collection
but rather the level of cybernation. (To reiterate, this chapter focuses on the
harms to privacy of various government acts rather than on their contribu-
tions to the common good. Both elements must be considered, per liberal
communitarianism, but this study holds constant the contributions to the
common good accomplished by a particular use of surveillance.)
An even more telling case is that of Microsoft’s Domain Awareness
System (DAS), a technology that “aggregates and analyzes existing public
safety data streams” from cameras, license plate readers, radiation detec-
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tors, and law enforcement databases. The technology helps police keep
an eye on suspects by providing their arrest records, related 911 calls, and
local crime data, as well as by tracking vehicle locations. The DAS also
makes it possible to tap into and rewind the city’s thousands of CCTV cam-
era feeds. 103 The DAS may also be expanded in the future to gain access to