Perceptive and myopic views of our transparent future. Especially police cameras.

Let's veer from either science fiction or politics into our politically science-fictional new world of light. Starting with a reminder that my new anthology (with Stephen Potts) Chasing Shadows, is released this week by Tor Books, featuring contributions by William Gibson, James Gunn, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and many others, offering stories and insights into a future when light flows almost everywhere. Prepare yourself!  This might be a good start.

Steve and I will be signing copies, along with Scott Sigler, at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, on January 27!

== Floundering gradually toward wisdom ==

In a vivid article - Should We See Everything a Cop Sees? - McKenzie Funk of The New York Times describes the wide cast of characters in Seattle who are grappling with a pressing modern problem, how to comply with a court order to make police camera footage available to the public.

It's a can of worms, because the police department is also legally required to redact or blur personal details such as faces or identifiable voices, for the sake of privacy. While Funk's article makes for entertaining reading, the story is murky about the context for it all. That context is a proliferation of cameras, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, better, more numerous and mobile at rates much faster than Moore’s Law.  

Short-horizon myopia is common to every person I've seen weigh in - even very bright folks - on this topic.  Sure, a few of us predicted all this back in the 20th Century - e.g. in EARTH (1989) and The Transparent Society (1997) - yet the very notion of lifting one's gaze beyond this month, following trend lines instead for three or five, or ten years ahead, seems impossible even for intelligent and critical observers like McKenzie Funk.

Regarding just the zoomed-in dilemmas of 2016, Funk's article does a good job of showing us the trees (the dilemmas faced by police, prosecutors, attorneys and citizens in adapting to these court decisions), without even noticing the forest. The context of why this is all happening and how this amounts to - for all the tsuris and aggravation - a huge victory for our kind of civilization.

I have called it the most important civil liberties victory of this century so far -- perhaps in thirty years -- even though it was hardly covered by the press. In 2013 both the U.S. courts and the Obama Administration declared it to be "settled law" that a citizen has the right to record his or her interactions with police in public places.

No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of "sousveillance" or looking-back at power, that The Transparent Society is all about. It is also fundamental to freedom, for in altercations with authority, what other recourse can a citizen turn to, than the Truth?

But the forest is rapidly changing! Next year, the same scene that was today only visible on a cop-cam’s footage will have been covered also by the suspect’s auto-record phone app, or a passerby’s dash cam. Or a store’s security system, or chains of cheap button cams pasted on lamp posts or bridge overpasses by activist groups, or even hobbyists. Follow the price curve a bit farther and you have the sticker cameras that I describe in EXISTENCE, stuck to any surface by 9-year olds who peel them from great, big rolls, each with its own code in IPV6 cyberspace and powered by trickles of sunlight.

In that context, not a single issue wrangled-over in the NY Times hand-wringing article will seem anything but archaic - even troglodytic - just half a decade from now. If there was ever an era in desperate need of the Big Perspectives offered by science fiction….

== The pattern continues ==

After which I listened to NPR's To The Point broadcast about the regulation of police body and dash cams. And despite generally liking Warren Olney - he always asks good questions - I must say I was disappointed in how this topic makes everyone myopic. The only interviewee who applied two neurons to a bigger view was the former Redlands police chief, who gave thoughtful, logical answers... though like the others, only focused on the here and now. (All right, the ACLU guy got a little better, across the interview.)

Not one of them contemplated how technology made all of it possible - this entire topic would have been (and was!) science fiction five years ago - and every interviewee on Olney's show ignored how tech will be utterly different five years from now. None contemplated the proliferation of ever smaller, faster, cheaper cameras.

How could they have gone an hour without mentioning the one fundamental... that other people than police have cameras? More and better ones, every day. This will -- and already has -- empowered citizens on the street.

Listen to the broadcast, then tell me how many hand-wringing statements will be even remotely relevant, as a skyrocketing percentage of police-citizen encounters will be recorded from more than just the police perspective, with both the suspect and onlookers loading their files into the cloud.

How, oh how, can we have such bright folks, who mean well and who want to solve problems, yet absolutely refuse to lift their gaze beyond the near-sighted today? Don't answer. We all know the greatest recent example: the entire political caste of the Democratic Party. 

A much smarter article that actually tries to peer ahead is this one in the Atlantic - Even the bugs will be bugged - by Matthew Hutson.

See a more in-depth analysis of central surveillance, predictive policing and tools for accountability from the new Scout site: Should the Future of Policing Look Like This? by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath.

Futurist Glen Hiemstra discusses The Future of Policing -- looking at some of the problems and possible solutions for policing in the fast-changing world of today and tomorrow.

== Another try ==

More hand-wringing. Even when a writer tries to look beyond the immediate horizon, the usual result is short-sightedness.  As in this case: “Should Police Bodycams Come With Facial Recognition Software?”  Jake Laperruque, on Slate, warns that such technologies loom just ahead and will be used… unless serious efforts go into privacy protection.

Three plus points to Mr. Laperruque for at least trying.  And five more for an article that brings us up to date on current efforts to either introduce or construct facial recognition use by authorities… 

... then minus thirty points for failure to peer just a little farther, asking: “What on Earth do you think could possibly prevent this, over the long run?”

Take into account a crucial factor, technological drive. Reiterating a point made above: as cameras get smaller, faster, cheaper, better and more mobile at a rate much faster than Moore’s Law (sometimes called Brin’s Corollary ;-) cop cams will get too small to see and the facial recognition databases will proliferate far beyond your ability to limit them with well-meaning, ACLU promoted regs.

This needn’t be a disaster, if common citizens share in the new powers of vision, able to scrutinize and criticize when no cop action can remain unobserved. If we can not only recognize any harm doer, but also catch and chastise eavesdroppers and gossipy peeping toms, who stare too closely, then a surprising side-benefit will be more, rather than less privacy. 

The increase in light flooding the planet could be prodigious, searing the harmful and helping drive trends toward our crucial victory condition. In other words, technological trends seem to work in our favor.

But first, our well-meaning paladins of freedom must get better glasses, and start looking beyond next year.

The Era of Light...

First an announcement looking ahead..  Stephen W. Potts and I have just handed in to Tor Books 140,000 words of short stories – plus some insightful essays – that explore our near and far futures, in the coming era when cameras are so cheap they'll be almost everywhere.  Chasing Shadows will take you on a ride with thirty of todays finest SF authors, like Cat Rambo, Nancy Fulda, Bruce Sterling, Ramez Naam, Kathleen Goonan… plus a few classics by Robert Silverberg and Damon Knight etc.  Watch for it in early 2017!

And following along that theme…

Growing use of body cameras by police has led to a dramatic fall in brutality, a top U.N. rights expert said in June 2015. Surprise. Surprise. When police know they are on camera they behave differently and police brutality drops sharply. (Nicely summarized in this cartoon by R.J. Matson.) Here is a report on what has happened since body cameras were introduced. 

Oh, but progress is in fits and starts. Why do you think I had to go to a television network in India to find this story?

The lesson here: a watchdog without a leash becomes a wolf. “Town Where U.S. Marshal Smashed Citizen’s Camera Rakes in Millions from Federal Forfeiture Rules.”  The lesson here is clear. We are winning this fight for freedom and accountability and professionalism on our streets.  But victory won’t come cheap or easy.  We must all be video warriors. Better yet, video citizens.

Are we done with the transition to full police accountability?  Not at all.  The process is just underway.  Here's a disturbing (and of course one-sided) anecdote:  

“Take, for instance, the individual who filmed the choking of Eric Garner, Ramsey Orta. Orta has been in and out of Rikers since that tragic day. Speaking with VICE, Orta, who was friendly with Garner, decided to start documenting police misconduct in the summer of 2014 around his heavily-policed neighborhood of Staten Island. But since Garner’s death, Orta and his family allege that police have zeroed in on him, following close family members as well as his girlfriend. Police charged Orta with gun and drug possession as well as armed robbery. On April 6, the Free Thought Project wrote about Orta’s imprisonment. His case went viral, and soon a GoFundMe campaign had collected over $54,000 to free him. Orta was released on April 10.”  

Let’s bear in mind that Orta was already very much operating in shady-side activities.  The balance in all of this can only come out when juries are exposed to all facts, vigorously and adversarially investigated.  But news reports - even tendentiously slanted like this one - are part of that back and forth tug. And police supervisors are going to have to think carefully.  As will we all. 

But police will also use cameras to increase their own safety: the Explorer is a softball-like camera that can spot danger, sending photos back to a smartphone -- before emergency workers enter a potentially hazardous zone.

And let me reiterate. Sousveillance is something about which we must be utterly militant... while remaining calmly moderate. Citizens must demand the right and power to supervise our public servants!  But we do not have to get into their faces, screaming "pig!"  A majority are skilled, dedicated folks doing a very hard job. Our aim is to make that a vast majority.  An overwhelming majority. And that will happen sooner if we make it clear that we want the good cops as allies.

== And light will flow ==

Leak after leak after leak after leak... when will you get the hint, and learn to surf this wave, instead of futilely trying to conceal?

The resumes of over 27,000 people working in the U.S. intelligence community were revealed on Thursday in a searchable database created by mining LinkedIn.  Transparency Toolkit said the database, called ICWatch, includes the public resumes of people working for intelligence contractors, the military, and intelligence agencies.  The group said the resumes frequently mention secret codewords and surveillance programs.”  Our civil servants will have to adapt to such times and supervision is called for.  This is not my preferred method, by far. 

Only consider.  We learn of so many of these events.  How many have we never found out about?

Fact-checking In Nepal: “To weed out false rumors that can waste precious time, (aid workers) elnist local volunteers to use an experimental Web tool to crowdsource rumor verification as quickly as possible.”  Rumor control can be a huge thing in our era, a new Web platform called Verily .   “Users can go to Verily’s website and read short tutorials on simple, established ways to verify things like the source of an image or the date and location of a report on a social network. They can answer yes-or-no verification questions about reports, provided they supply a piece of evidence supporting their answer—a corroborating photo, for example. Users can also share verification requests with their own social networks.”   

This is more important than it sounds, folks!  It is a key ingredient for the kinds of Smart Mobs I describe in Existence. 

== Reasonable Expectations ==

Why do intelligent pundits always, always do this?  In the Christian Science Monitor, Dan Geer addresses “The reasonable expectation fallacy…” making some excellent points — then collapsing into the very same error that he criticizes.  Greer writes: 

“In the Supreme Court case Kyllo v. US, defendant Danny Lee Kyllo, a marijuana grower, argued that police use of a thermal imager to discover the high-intensity lights growing marijuana in his garage constituted a search for which a warrant was necessary. The Court held: "Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search,' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

Greer notes, “Read that carefully – the requirement for a warrant exists solely where the device to be used to gather photons is "not in general public use." As anyone knows, what the government and only the government has today, the rich will have tomorrow. What the rich have tomorrow the lumpen proletariat will have it the day after tomorrow – it is general public use that removes any prohibitions on use by government or other institutions....“Now consider the thermal imager. Fifteen years ago when Kyllo was decided, the devices were not in general use," continuing, “This is the point: No society, no people need rules against things that are impossible. If your personal "expectation of privacy" is based on the impossibility of observability or even the impossibility of identifiability, then your logic, like that of the Supreme Court, is temporary and weak. A long view in the face of rapid technologic change is far harder.”

Yes, indeed, technology will advance far beyond the foresight of today’s pundits. The real choice we face is whether to let this fact panic us into attempts to ban the new methods — which will only guarantee their use in secret, by elites…

...or to embrace them and use them to do “sousveillance”… looking boldly back at elites. The latter approach, explored in my book The Transparent Society, is precisely the one that got us our narrow, recent renaissance of freedom — one that is always under threat.

Alas, Mr.Geer then veers away from sense into nonsense: “The ability to delete yourself from the Web doesn't really matter. What really matters in the age of advanced surveillance is the right to not be correlated. Technology is always watching and capturing you, but the correlation is where the danger lies. Laws can change that, but only if enacted soon.”

Whaaa?  Laws… against… correlation? Against a mental process? One that is accelerating faster than Moore’s Law? Pray, tell us what law will stymie elites from doing all their looking and correlating, in secret?  Can you name one time, in the entire history of our species or planet, when such a law actually worked?

This is fundamental: It is impossible to police what others think and know, because you can never verify that someone else does NOT know something.  

What we have proved possible is to regulate what people DO with knowledge.  Actions can be observed, deterred, even prevented by law, sometimes.

Has Mr. Geer been paying any attention at all? To the cop-cam trend that has altered citizen relations with authority and nearly all for the better?

If your dread is that elites or neighbors will know stuff about you, then welcome to permanent hell. A hell of your own fantasy.

On the other hand, if your aim is to be left alone and not physically interfered-with… to be empowered with tools of knowledge and correlation to catch anyone who’d abuse you... and to potently shout “MYOB!” (Mind Your Own Business) knowing that what they know about your non-harm-doing activities cannot be used to limit you in any way, because you can look-back and hold others accountable?  

Then welcome to a world of enhanced and ever-growing freedom.

== Info Monopolies and Competition ==

We still have time, before flat-open-fair competition is ruined by its own fruits..

A fascinating and well-written explanation of how info-monopolies combine with better analytics to put the squeeze on both modern consumers and producers.  Welcome to the new capitalism… and these are the GOOD guys, compared to old-style, parasitical monopolists.  

Blatantly, there need to be serious discussions about the next set of reforms to the social contract.  Not socialist radicalisms!  But tweaks that maintain healthy, flat-open-fair competition. 

The irony? Folks on the left demonize “competition” even though it is the engine of the wealth they use to make a better world. 

Meanwhile the right (insanely) thinks you get flat-open-fair competition by “reducing regulation.”  When, in fact, the only competitive arenas that ever worked well — democracy, science, recent markets, courts and sports — only work when very much regulated!  Indeed, careful regulation enhances flat-open-fair competition.

== Art as a Weapon? ==

“For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War."

Ooookaaay.  Though the rationalization and the effects are hardly what one would call Orwellian: “…this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the U.S. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.” 

 A case where – ironically – the symbolism and the thing itself amount to the same outcome, offering little grist for paranoia.  

What? Will we find out that the 1950s golden age of science fiction was also CIA supported?  Filled with memes of tolerance, diversity, innovation and individualism? Yes, scifi bolstered the western zeitgeist!  Whereas, in the USSR it was tightly controlled, with the few stars of Soviet SF having to express their social thoughts between the lines.

Oh, but art will always be impudent.  Activists have had a hard time sending their message to the G-7 leaders, who were tucked away in a secluded Alpine valley guarded by thousands of police.  So Greenpeace decided to project its demands onto a nearby mountain.  The environmental group used green lasers to beam the words "G-7: Go for 100 percent renewables" onto the side of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak.

Still, is government always bad? Over heavy Republican opposition… the FCC will continue subsidizing the expansion of broadband into under-served communities.

== And finally ... Zero Sum Games ==

CCTV NATION is a location Based Augmented MMO Game created by Open Realities Inc. "Watch the watchers! Surveillance tech is around you! Choose a side: Security vs Privacy!" -- This Kickstarter game (now finished and not funded) aims at a practical purpose as players crowdsource-input locations of surveillance devices. "The outcome of playing CCTV Nation will be an Open Data map with all security cams and mobile networks on it." 

My reaction? Well, I start with irritation at the zero-sum notion of a tradeoff between two things we absolutely need, both security and freedom. I have been battling this dismal (and disproved) notion for a quarter of a century. It is simply false.  See The Transparent Society.

On the other hand, I can see its utility in game-play mode… at least at the lower levels of play.  I’d hope that more positive sum subtlety builds, as the designers pull you in…

But the overall goal?  Using play — outdoors and active and location based — to create a crowd-sourced database of info for citizens?  This is the heart and soul of the “smart mob” methods I described in both EARTH and EXISTENCE! Sure, this particular database will be rendered moot, as cameras keep getting smaller.  But we can keep up, if we develop habits of a Sousveillance Society.  And although I know almost nothing about CCTV Nation, I have to admit I find the concept and plan way above average.

                                               

Citizen Power - Part II: Those Cop-Cameras...

Continuing our series on co-veillance, sousveillance and general citizen empowerment, on our streets... last time we discussed our right and ability to use new instrumentalities to expand our ability to view, record and hold others accountable, with the cameras in our pockets.

Now -- the other side of this accountability equation. 

Some ideas seem far-out "scifi"... until suddenly they become mainstream.  In the wake of the recent Ferguson, Missouri riots, a petition asking for a "Mike Brown Law" that would require all state, county, and local police to wear cameras. has achieved almost 150,000 signatures. Last August, a federal judge called for the NYPD to wear such cameras when she ruled that the department's stop-and-frisk policy violated people's constitutional rights. But as A.J. Vicens discusses in Mother Jones: "Putting Body Cameras on Cops Is Hardly a Cure-All for Abuses."

Meanwhile, Taser International (TASR), which makes the most widely used police body cameras, increased its bookings for its video unit almost twofold last quarter, signing deals with the police departments of Winston-Salem, N.C., Spartanburg County, S.C., and San Diego. The company provides both hardware and data services related to the cameras and now works with 20 major cities in one capacity or another.

Groups that would normally be skeptical of authorities videotaping everything support the idea of camera-equipped cops. The American Civil Liberties Union published a white paper last year supporting the use of the cameras. “Everybody wishes right now there was a video record of what happened,” says Jay Stanley, the author of the ACLU’s paper, referring to the Ferguson shooting.

“While no technical solution would eliminate misconduct completely, cameras do seem as if they could help reduce the legal bill. A study published last April showed that complaints against police dropped 88 percent in Rialto, Calif., after that city began randomly assigning officers to wear body cameras. At the same time, use-of-force incidents dropped 59 percent," writes Joshua Brustein: In Ferguson's Aftermath, Will Police Adopt Body Cameras?

See how this was forecast -- pretty much all of it -- in The Transparent Society.  And what did I predict will happen, when both cops and the citizens they stop are armed with cameras, all the time?

Better safety, better law, less injustice... but it will also be the dawn of a Golden Age of Sarcasm.

== But you can tell it's all arrived when the punditry class finally notices... ==

The topic is attracting attention from journalists and essayists, some thoughtful and some paranoid.   For example, Martin Kaste, on NPR, appraised how police cams can be problematic if department policies are confusing, or if it is left up to the officer when to record. Also: “there's the matter of the 30-second buffer. When an officer presses record, the camera saves the 30 seconds of images that led up to that moment, but not the audio. The manufacturer designed the buffer to protect the privacy of police officers — and to appeal to resistant police unions — but it also means the cameras may miss crucial noises or words that trigger an incident.”

See my earlier posting: You Have the Right to Record Police, where I discuss the legal basis for a citizen's right to record police interactions in a public setting.

Reihan Salam, writing in Slate, touted the many benefits of police body cameras, and pointed out: "Our capacity to remember past events is notoriously faulty. There is a universal human tendency to fixate on some things while neglecting others. Video recordings can help correct for these deficiencies."

But Sarah Libby, writing for the Atlantic’s CityLab, complains that even if the officer who shot Brown was wearing a body camera, the footage wouldn't necessarily clear up any of the questions the public—or even the victims and their families—have about how things unfolded, at least not right away. And maybe not ever.  In her article --  “Even When Police Do Wear Cameras, Don't Count on Seeing the Footage” – she discusses procedural obstacles to public access:

“Here in San Diego, our scandal-plagued police department has begun outfitting some officers with body cameras, and the City Council has approved a plan to roll out hundreds more…. That's because the department claims the footage, which is captured by devices financed by city taxpayers and worn by officers on the public payroll, aren't public records. Our newsroom's request for footage from the shootings under the California Public Records Act was denied. Once footage becomes part of an investigation, the department says it doesn't have to release them."

She quotes Joshua Chanin, a San Diego State professor who has studied transparency measures in police departments across the country. "There are enough instances of cameras 'not working,' footage having gone missing, cops 'forgetting' to turn them on, etc., that rules in place to punish officers who tamper with cameras, erase video are perhaps the most important part of the equation."

But Sarah Libby suggests: “The footage their officers record will never show up on YouTube and go viral. Nor will it help fill in the gaps when a major crime leaves lots of unanswered questions. Crime victims or their families may never get to see and hear what the devices recorded."

All told, alas, Libby's is a fairly shallow assessment. We need accountability, which will come (after some kinks are ironed out) when supervisors and Internal Affairs divisions and defense attorneys get reliable access to cop-cam records, even if the raw footage -- for some legitimate reasons -- falls short of being press-accessible "public records."  

We do not require youtubing of everything, in order to gain the accountability benefits. 

Indeed, once those benefits are secured, it will be time to swivel and show a little sympathy  for public servants on our streets who have one of the most difficult jobs imaginable!  Under a constant spotlight, they will eliminate the crude thugs and bullies in their ranks and keep ratcheting up professionalism! But in return, how about a little pity? You do not need every little expectoration, crotch-scratching, muttered curse or private opinion blared on YouTube. When a hardworking officer pees into a water bottle in his patrol car, because there's been no time for a bathroom break, are you gonna demand we all look?  Come on. Go ahead and assign some ACLU types to scan the raw footage, okay? Only then... 

...when they are generally being good... can we back off from utter voyeurism?  Moderation, in all things.

Nevertheless, and returning to today's friable, fragile present.  We do need to insist that souseillance-co-veillance and accountability march ever forward!  We need our eyes!  And the cops -- heck all elites and all authorities... including ourselves -- must be supervised, whenever we assert power over others.

Indeed, some of this accountability must come from outside the police force. Yes... though with less sanctimony. Do this progressively, pragmatically, irresistibly, with some sympathy for the 85% of cops who are sincerely trying to do a really, really hard job.

Moreover, I do agree with Libby's final assessment, regarding those cop-cameras:

 “If you want to make sure the world will be able to see footage of a cop or a criminal caught in the act, you're better off taking the video yourself.”