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Thursday, January 3, 2002 Big Brother in 2002: New police snooping devices raise concernNews-Journal Editorial It often starts with ads in law enforcement journals for a new piece of whiz-bang technology: A flashlight that sniffs a driver's breath, an infrared scope that senses body heat, software that can match facial features across a vast database. Local police departments fill out the order blanks, and the new devices hit the streets. Civil libertarians flutter, but most people rarely pay attention. After all, we all want to be Tough On Crime. Yet when Americans add up all the nibbles at their privacy, all the tiny intrusions into their personal lives, a different picture forms. We may be headed for a society in which every move and every word can be monitored and recorded. The latest gizmo for local police officers is an infrared scope that measures tiny thermal differences in the air. Police departments in Volusia and Flagler counties have purchased them to help track suspects attempting to flee through brush and woods. Used that way, the technology doesn't raise alarm. But the concern is the potential for misuse of such technology. Plus, this and other new technologies can just as easily be turned against law-abiding people, and there's reason to believe they would be. Infrared technology, for example, has been used to spy inside occupied buildings that police would otherwise need a warrant to enter. (A recent Supreme Court decision found this technology so invasive that a warrant is now required to use the scopes to peek inside private homes.) Also, directional microphones have been used to eavesdrop on private conversations. Even when used with good intentions, new snooping devices can threaten individual freedoms protected in the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment addressed one of the most fundamental injustices of America's colonial period, the "writs of assistance" that allowed royal agents to invade, search and occupy private homes at will. Misused, snooping devices could make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment's ban of unreasonable searches and seizures and its requirement that warrants be sought to prove probable cause before searching property. Today's police should be required to prove to a judge a specific and serious public-safety need to use such technology. The Fifth Amendment addresses the myriad abuses by British inquisitors who regularly tricked and beat confessions from colonists, tried them on poorly defined offenses and convicted them with mock trials that offered few protections. Thus, it protects the important right to fair trial and due process of law. There are potential and frightening parallels to colonial times in devices today that record conversations without the target's knowledge and new laws that authorize prosecutions on hazy grounds or in secret. Every now and then, techno-policing leaves cities across the nation with digital egg on their faces. In Sacramento, for example, city officials were shamed into removing cameras that monitored intersections to document traffic violations. The system was yanked after an investigation revealed that the vendor responsible for the cameras was issuing mass citations in error. In Tampa, a public outcry forced Tampa officials to reconsider a decision to use cameras and facial-recognition software to cull suspects from crowds. Speaking up against unwarranted use of modern snooping measures is not an attack on law enforcement. Rather, it is a defense of this nation's system of laws and rights, the system that has made it worth defending in the first place. |
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