08/15/07 – Charlie Savage – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Wharton, and introducing our first guest today.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Boston Globe and the author of Takeover, The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Charlie Savage.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thanks for having me on.
Good to talk to you.
Oh, well, fair to say you about scared the hell out of me with this article you wrote last week here, or was it Monday?
I'm sorry.
I forget.
Came out on Sunday.
August 12th, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, the article is U.S. Dolls Out Millions for Street Cameras, and now this is the kind of thing.
We've been seeing cameras go up, at least here in Austin, Texas, for 10 or 12 years, I guess, but this article is about how these cameras are going up even in the tiniest of little towns, and not places like Times Square, but in the neighborhoods in big cities, and that the national government through the Department of Homeland Security and its grants are paying for most of this.
Is that right?
Yeah.
What's interesting about this is the Department of Homeland Security has a number of different grant programs in which it helps states and cities try to fight terrorism in various ways, and they've doled out $23 billion in 2003 in these grants, and they've gone to all kinds of different things.
They've bought radios that help cops talk to firefighters, which was a problem on 9-11.
They've paid for emergency drills.
But one of the things that they've been doing is funding through these grants the ability of both big cities and small towns to buy surveillance cameras for city streets and parks and stuff that are all linked up and can store digital video image, potentially forever, the new digital high-tech surveillance cameras, as opposed to the old-fashioned analog grainy stored-on-a-video-cassette kind.
That's fundamentally different than these other kinds of things.
It's one thing to improve a radio or build a better fence, and it's another thing to install cameras where there weren't cameras before.
What's interesting is that when you ask them, well, how much of this $23 billion has gone to the cameras, specifically, they won't tell you, they just won't say.
But if you do a search through newspapers, small-town newspapers, large newspapers and databases and also press releases from local congressmen who brag about federal pork dollars being spot to their district, it becomes apparent that this is going on everywhere, everywhere.
Just in the last month, just since July, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in Madison, Wisconsin, in Pittsburgh, all of them putting together million-dollar grants to add 60 to 80 cameras, and little towns like Liberty, Kansas, population 95, is putting a camera from the Homeland Security Department in its park.
In Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, population 14,000, using a $180,000 grant from the Homeland Security Department to put cameras throughout its few streets.
And in all of these cases, what's happening is the local city government, they might not have bought this without the fact that it was free, it was on the table, and so they said, sure, why not?
And so it's rapidly accelerating the spread of this technology, and yet we can't know exactly how much taxpayer dollars are going to this because the department won't say.
You say in your article that your best estimate by going through all those papers is tens, probably hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of these cameras.
Probably because the examples I decided to view ranged from a few thousand dollars in the case of that one camera for the tiny town to maybe three million for Pittsburgh.
But then when you add in places like New York City, which has gotten, I think, $15 million just for this purpose, and other big cities that have been doing this going back to 2003, it's got to be way up there.
But what is it they won't say?
And now you quote at the end of your article Joseph Lieberman talking about how we need a national strategy.
Is that a recent quote, or that's from before all this began with the Homeland Security Department?
Well, this has been going on since 2003 with the Homeland Security Department.
Lieberman has proposed an amendment just in the last, I think, month that would try to say, well, let's get some sense around what exactly we're doing here so that A, on the one hand, to the extent we are setting these cameras up, that they all work together and are being used efficiently.
But B, also, we ought to have some rules about what can be done with this data at the same time because right now we're operating in kind of a wild west atmosphere.
This is actually something that, unfortunately, was cut by the copy desk for space reasons.
The bottom of the article was, you know, we aren't the first to do this.
London is really the pioneer of having Blink and surveillance coverage on public spaces.
They did this before anyone else.
They've got more cameras than anyone else.
They have millions, actually.
Yeah, and they've linked in both government paid-for cameras and private cameras, like the bank, you know, has a camera on the corner and they can feed that data into the government data banks as well.
That's a very important point right there.
You talk about in your article that New York, Baltimore, and Chicago are all working on projects to link up the private cameras to the public ones.
And see, my thing has always been, I don't really mind if I'm being surveilled by a camera on private property at the local gas station or whatever.
They got to do whatever they got to do for security and I don't have to go in there and what have you.
But that's different than having a government camera, but now they want to link up all the gas station cameras to the same database?
What I was getting at was, yes, they do, which of course would dramatically expand the scope of this, but in England, what they have that we don't have here is they have an extremely detailed set of regulations about what can be done with this kind of surveillance data.
For example, law is saying at what point does it have to be erased so you don't just start accumulating years and years that you could go back and search through using computer programs to find out what was happening four years ago and that's just a street corner or you can't retrace someone's steps back in time beyond a limit.
They have requirements for signs that say, hey, you're under surveillance on this corner.
They have requirements about who can transfer the data, who can't, what can be used for cameras.
You have to apply for permits, essentially, and say what you're going to use the camera for and you can't go beyond that very regulated set of controls to keep it from just getting out of control and becoming a tool of oppression even though they've got so many cameras.
In the United States, we don't have any laws like that.
It's a totally unregulated vacuum environment.
Part of what Lieberman is getting at with this calling is we ought to sit down and think about it because to the extent that this is inevitable, just because once the technology is there, we're going to use it, and to the extent that it's getting here a lot faster because the Homeland Security Department is essentially handing free millions of dollars to anyone who's willing to put it up in town X, we better get some rules in place so that a few years from now we don't wake up and find ourselves in a very unfortunate situation.
Yeah, forgive me if I don't sound too reassured.
Lieberman is calling for a national strategy for helping to promote what's already going on.
The national government is the one pushing all this.
As you say, free money to any locality that wants to spend it on cameras, here you go, and now he's going to be the same one to protect me.
It's the same thing as all their laws about how all the different numbers they assign me can be used or abused.
They're the ones who give me the numbers.
In fact, I just got a letter in the mail last week that said, oh, by the way, all your information has been stolen from us, this company you've never heard of and never done any business with, and sorry about that.
You might want to go ahead and change all your bank accounts and what have you.
All my information.
What is it that they got?
I got my social security and my driver's license number.
That's how they can access all my stuff, and I don't know.
That's what bothers me, is it's the fox guard in the henhouse.
Joe Lieberman, the guy enslaving me, is going to write the rules to make sure it isn't so bad.
Well, I just don't know if I agree with that.
At least he's talking about it, and no one else is talking about it, and so this is going to happen whether or not Lieberman's amendment passes.
If it passes, at least there will be some requirement that people are looking at what rules ought to be in place instead of just sort of having the cameras go up everywhere and then it's just a fait accompli.
The other thing, what you're getting at is we're entering sort of a brave new world of electronic data, privacy issues that just didn't exist before, and it's not just the government driving it.
Private companies are still collecting data on every step we take, every credit card transaction, every ATM withdrawal, every time we pass through an E-ZPass toll booth, you know, this is all our subway system now, this is all being recorded, and these databases can all be combined and are going to be combined, and when you get to cameras as well, there's a whole bunch of, you know, these technologies used to be limited by the fact that you had to have someone looking at the monitor for it to do any good, otherwise it was just a camera recording nothing, you know, a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, but with the advent of digital instead of analog, which means it's a lot more detailed and it's easy to store it forever on a hard drive, and the advent of some technologies that are right now primitive but are rapidly improving, in part with help from government grants but are going to improve regardless, such as face recognition technology, license plate readers, software that analyzes what's considered to be quote, you know, anomalous behavior, weird expressions, odds, foot fall patterns, it's going to become very easy to attract the attention of the authorities as, here's someone that stands out and ought to be scrutinized, and it's going to be very easy for those, you know, whoever has access to that data, those authorities, to not just look at what you're doing now, but to go back and look at everything you've ever done because the data can get stored perpetually, retrace your steps back in time, use face recognition technology to hunt through and find you, that's not there today, this is a little bit science fiction, but it's going to be here maybe five years from now, and so this is the idea of we ought to have rules in place now that some people, including conservatives, are saying, and that's I think what Lieberman's amendment is partially aimed at.
Yeah, I mean, well Bob Barr called it, he compared it to the panopticon, the prison set up where you may or may not be being watched at any given time, but there's no way for you to know, so you basically assume or behave as though you're being monitored at all times, and you point out in your article how this can have a real chilling effect, in fact I know even as a teenager going to political protests and then the state troopers would pull up and start taking everybody's pictures, and in my imagination I just figured, well, there it goes, it's in my file for the rest of my life now that I'm here protesting whatever it is I'm protesting, and that's the kind of thing that I'm sure would discourage a lot of people from ever even showing up in the first place.
That is the articulated worry, how does it change things if not only is there no longer anonymity in public, the sense that you're at the rally, you're walking down the street, you're walking into the doctor's office, you're cheating on your wife even, which is not illegal, even if it's immoral, but now you can't do that anymore without there being a record of it that's traceable to your name that can, even if not discovered today, can be discovered tomorrow if someone keyword searches for it, essentially.
How does that change how people live their lives?
This is the new world that we're headed towards, we're not there yet, but we're getting there and now we're getting there a lot faster, and so it's something that we ought to think about.
Have you ever seen that movie Demolition Man where Sylvester Stallone chases Wesley Snipes into the future and all that?
I have, a long time ago.
Yeah, there's a scene in there where Sandra Bullock is the cop and they're looking at the little monitor screen and Sylvester Stallone says, come on, let's go get him, and she says, well, he doesn't have a chip in his hand, how are we supposed to get him?
He says, well, we go look for him, and the cops were just used to the idea that that's how you find somebody is you look on the monitor and see where the tracking device in their hand tells you they are, and they couldn't even imagine the idea of a cop actually having to go out and drive his car around looking for the bad guy, and that's the thing that gets me is everybody getting really, really used to this brave new world as it is built up around us.
In your article, I was absolutely astounded to see 71% to 25% say that this is just perfectly fine and reasonable.
Yes, there's definitely broad support for this, and you can't go overboard, right?
Because there's no doubt that there is some utility to cameras.
We've seen it several times recently in England where there was an attempted terrorist attack that failed, or in some cases, whoever the perpetrators were survived, and the surveillance data was useful in figuring out who those guys were and taking them down as well as their network before they could try again.
And so that's why this gets complicated, right?
You can't just say we're not going to have cameras, we're not going to use this technology which has utility, but you better have rules in place to make sure that it's only used for good purposes and not bad.
Sure, yeah, that's fair.
And personally, I would be less alarmed, I guess, if it was just the state of Texas.
But when it's the Department of Homeland Security, which to me is something that I'm pretty sure is unconstitutional and shouldn't exist in the first place, pushing all this stuff, it seems really unconstitutional, making all the local enforcement agencies, the 18,000 different enforcement agencies across this country, every day becoming more and more dependent on the central government for their authority and their ability to carry out their authority.
Well, I don't necessarily agree with your legal analysis about what's constitutional or not.
It's kind of a policy issue that needs to be debated.
But I hear you.
All right.
Well, I appreciate your time today, everybody.
Charlie Savage from the Boston Globe.
And someday I'm going to have to get this book and interview you about Takeover, The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.
I know you wrote some prize-winning articles about the president's signing statements and so forth.
I'd like to interview you about all that someday if I could.
All right, I sure appreciate it.
That book is out next month, and so we'll see whether it's of interest to anyone.
All right, cool.
I can't wait to read it.
Thanks very much.
Charlie Savage from the Boston Globe, everybody.
Thank you.