The police state. British author and political philosopher George Orwell warned about it 70 years ago in his novel 1984. Big Brother is watching.
Police, the 1980s rock group led by Sting, sang about the tools of surveillance in their hit “Every Breath You Take.” The Chinese government is perfecting it. Mass surveillance with 200 million high resolution cameras linked to facial recognition software is part of a system that identifies people and scores each of them on their social fitness.
Is the United States headed in that direction? Is New Hampshire? It’s no longer an unreasonable question to ask.
Last month, former Weare state representative Neal Kurk, a privacy buff and longtime chairman of the House Finance Committee, joined the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire in a lawsuit to prohibit the installation by police of surveillance cameras to record activity in Manchester’s city center. Kurk and the ACLU say the cameras, powerful enough to capture faces and license plate numbers, would violate a 2006 state law that bans the use on the state’s public ways of surveillance technology capable of identifying individuals and the time and place of their appearance.
This month this newspaper and the ACLU-NH sued the city of Concord to force the disclosure of the nature of a $5,100 police budget item listed only as “covert communications equipment.” The city contracted with a company that it won’t identify to provide a service that it won’t identify and did so with public funds. The contract prohibits naming the private company, which “provides technical products and services to law enforcement,” including, apparently, access to its website.
Revealing the nature of the equipment, Concord Police Chief Brad Osgood claims, could lead to subjects of surveillance taking countermeasures, compromising investigations and endangering the lives of officers. It’s impossible to know whether those concerns are justified without knowing the nature of the service. He and city officials are saying, “Trust us, it’s better that you don’t know what we did with your money or how we are spying on you.”
We don’t know what the police bought, but a series of articles over the years in the technology magazine Wired might offer a clue. They discuss the purchase by local police departments of a device named Stingray by Harris Corporation, a Florida company that insists that its law enforcement customers agree to a strict non-disclosure agreement. The contract requires that customers notify the company of any right-to-know requests about its product and services.
The company’s device sends out a powerful wireless signal stronger than those from local cell towers. Phones in the area connect to the Stingray by default. The phone’s identifying information is recorded and its location pinpointed far more swiftly and accurately than normally possible.
Nationally, police collaborations with private corporations to spy on the citizenry are increasing. They include partnerships between police departments and the popular Ring doorbell cameras sold at local big-box stores. Ring is a subsidiary of Amazon, which already collects personal information about millions of customers. Ring and police in some communities offer discounts on the purchase of the doorbell cameras or even raffle them off as long as buyers agree to allow police to view and even record videos of activity in their yard or neighborhood.
Last week, the Monitor ran an Associated Press story about Ring and its partnerships with local police. The story quoted a police officer in Hammond, Ind., a city of 81,000 that offered discounts on Ring cameras. “You cannot enter or leave our city … without being captured on film,” the officer said.
Such partnerships trade personal privacy for a dubious increase in security. It is not an exchange any New Hampshire community should make.