Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and co-editor of the website Boing Boing has a great article about urban surveillance. He discusses how cities have incorporated cameras on every street corner, to the point where a resident of London is photographed over 300 times a day. The problem is cameras report what has happened; rather then stop it from happening like a police officer would. A friend of mine who recently returned from London discussed how she was “gently mugged†while in the heart of the city. Cameras create a surveillance state where everyone is viewed as a possible perpetrator of a crime and recorded accordingly. Doctorow states:
The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Panopticon, leeched of the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be seen, where every nose pick is noted and logged and uploaded to the Internet. You don’t have anything to hide, sure, but there’s a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to want to do it in public.
The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance–what’s the difference between the cops watching your every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to the guy next door?