The San Francisco Surveillance Camera Players

The Surveillance Camera Players aim to raise awareness of surveillance and challenge its legitimacy. One way of doing this is to put on silent "performances" in front of cameras surveilling public space.

For more information on general issues about video surveillance, check out the original Surveillance Camera Players site (New York City), which has a lot of essays on surveillance and descriptions of their plays and activism.

Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference

You are welcome to come this Wednesday, April 21 to our "Birds of a Feather" session from 9:30 pm - 11pm at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, and check out the other BOF sessions as well. The BOF sessions (but not the rest of the conference) is open to the public.

Walking Tours

At some point, we are going to begin giving walking tours of surveillance cameras in San Francisco. We may do some before then, but the first scheduled one for now will be on Saturday, April 24th at 2pm, to accommodate participants in the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference . We will meet by the statue in the middle of Union Square in San Francisco.

Directions:

By BART: Take the BART to the Powell Street station, then walk three blocks north on Powell. Union Square will be on your right. While you're waiting for the BART, take some time to notice the cameras in the station, and while you're on the train, notice the surveillance cameras in the cars, with their lights blinking in a somehow menacing way.
By SF Muni (subway, tram, bus): Take any of the Market Street lines (5, 6, 7, 9, 21, 71, F, K, L, M, N) to Powell Street or Fifth Street, then walk three blocks north on Powell. Union Square will be on your right. While on Muni look for cameras on some buses and subway cars, and microphones (!) on some buses.
Other lines that go close to Union Square include the Powell street trolleys, the 30 and 45 Stockton lines and the 38 Geary. Union Square is bounded by Post, Geary, Stockton, and Powell. Download the downtown map from the Muni maps page.
By car: Not a good idea. It's best to find somewhere outside of downtown to park and then walk or take transit in.

Issues

The SF Surveillance Camera Players will focus on the following issues and others, depending on its members' interest. Many of them are focused on local agencies.

Government or government-mandated surveillance:
- Video cameras in BART stations and trains
- Video cameras in Muni buses
- Microphones in Muni buses. This is most likely illegal under federal and California wiretapping laws, for instance:
  - 18 U.S.C. chapter 119, especially section 2511, "Interception And Disclosure Of Wire, Oral, Or Electronic Communications Prohibited".
  - Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968
  - Other federal wiretapping laws - see also post-Patriot Act laws re: libraries.
  - California law is unclear: does it only cover "confidential" conversations?
  - The Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Katz v. the United States held that evidence from audiotaping a telephone call from a public payphone could not be used, since it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
  Regardless of the actual laws, it is a profound violation of common decency, not to mention the Fourth Amendment, to have the public transportation department routinely record conversations on buses.
- Surveillance cameras installed by private entities by order of the police. Examples:
  - Surveillance cameras in San Francisco taxicabs (is this a condition imposed by the SFPD for a license?)
  - Nightclub forced to install surveillance cameras and to search all patrons
  - Son blames camera in merchant's slaying: Court ordered surveillance at S.F. liquor store
- Red-light cameras. Among other issues, the flash that goes off can startle and disorient people, to the point of causing bicyclists to lose their balance.
- expected: The SF County Transportation Authority, in its Market Street Action Plan, has included a recommendation to install (or consider installing) surveillance cameras along Market Street (a common route for large demonstrations) to enforce the transit-only inner lane (section 11.3). The section in full reads:
  Camera enforcement of transit lanes in London, England has shown a 92% reduction in transit lane violations. Using camera enforcement would require state legislative changes and involves certain technical and operational issues. While not intended to be a revenue source, fines from enforcement would help offset ongoing operating costs of video enforcement.
  No source is given for the 92% figure. They estimate a cost of $25,000 per camera for eight cameras, for a total of $200,000. Ongoing costs are not estimated.
Technologies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags that pose a severe threat to privacy. The San Francisco Public Library is considering using RFID tags in its books in place of its existing barcode and magnetic strip technologies, although the benefits are doubtful, the downsides for the library are significant, and the social and privacy implications enormous.
Some retailers (Tesco) have combined surveillance cameras and RFID tags to automatically take pictures of consumers when they remove items from a shelf. [source needed]
Surveillance of public spaces by private entities.

Framing and Ideology

When thinking about RFID or surveillance cameras, one of the most important things to keep in mind is our society's blind adoration of technology. There is a technological imperative that insists that whatever can be done, will be done; that when new technologies become available, they will be implemented, and usually rapidly and on a wide scale. The unintended and often unforeseen consequences must be dealt with after a technology is so prevalent as to be almost impossible to remove; the solution then presented is more technology.

Finally, after a couple centuries and several intense decades of this foolhardy pattern, resistance is growing and ideological constructs are available to counter the tendency toward blindly adopting new technologies, or allowing private parties to adopt new technologies with public consequences. One of the most important of these is the "Precautionary Principle" from the German Vorsorgeprinzip (forecaring principle).

San Francisco has actually signed into law an ordinance making city departments responsible for taking the Precautionary Principle into account. This has implications for the possible health and environmental consequences of electromagnetic radiation produced by RFID readers and wireless transmitters attached to surveillance cameras.

More importantly, though the Precautionary Principle comes out of the environmental movement and is most often used in an environmental context, as it is in San Francisco's law, the concepts are valid when applied to other domains such as privacy. In fact, at a recent forum on its possible adoption of RFID that the San Francisco Public Library had to be pressured into holding, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation posed the metaphor of RFID as a form of "privacy pollution": having benefits for private parties but imposing externalities and social costs. He said implementing insecure RFID tags is rational for private parties but not rational for society as a whole, just as dumping toxic waste into a river is economically rational for a factory but irrational for society to allow.

Thus, those opposing surveillance and privacy-invading technologies have natural allies in those opposing, say, genetically modified crops and nuclear weapons. The groups have in common the goal of countering the technological imperative as such: we should have the right and ability as a society to ban a technology, to prevent its use by private parties if the social costs and consequences are significant, and at the very least to delay its adoption until the consequences are clearer.

To join us or for more info, email scp-at-survile-dot-org.