Surveillance Society
We’re a nation of watchers; the flipside of that is, meanwhile, we’re also being watched
- By Ronnie Rittenberry
- Feb 01, 2011
Along with “It’s a Wonderful
Life” and “Polar Express,” holiday
viewing for me this year
included video footage released mid-
December by the King County (Wash.)
Sheriff’s Office. The four-minute-or-so
clip shows five teenage girls boarding a
crowded Metro bus in Seattle and making
their way to the back of the vehicle
where they, without warning, begin attacking
another teenage girl and her
boyfriend, both of whom are just sitting
there, minding their own business,
as the video commences.
As it turns out, the girl under attack
was 17 years old and three months
pregnant at the time. You know this
because her 19-year-old boyfriend,
while having his pockets picked and
receiving a flurry of punches and flying
kicks to the head, apprises the attackers
of her condition. The response
from one of the assaulters, clearly audible
on the video, is, “Nobody hit her
in the stomach . . . hit her in the face!”
Which, as the video vividly shows, is
exactly what happens.
It is a long four minutes. Watching
it, you can’t help but notice the other
passengers who, for the most part, just
sit there and watch the assault happen.
Eventually, two or three snap out of
their stupor and join the boyfriend in
yelling for the driver to stop the bus, but
until that point they resemble nothing
so much as deer in headlights. No one
even bothers to dial 911. It makes for
eerie viewing and a sad counterpoint
to Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey. It
also forces you to consider how we’ve
become a society of watchers . . . and, at
the same time, a nation being perpetually
watched.
Unblinking Eyes
The footage for this particular bit of
yuletide drama came from the lens of
a lone surveillance camera installed
at the back of King County Metro’s
Route 358 bus, recording all -- including,
indisputably, participants’ faces,
down to the blood on the pregnant
teenager’s cheek. Authorities were able
to use the footage to identify and apprehend
all five of the attackers.
According to King County Sheriff
Sue Rahr, the Route 358 bus is one of
nearly 400 Metro coaches currently
equipped with such state-of-the-art
video equipment. She said there is a
more than 90 percent arrest rate for
crimes captured on video and that,
partly because of that, cameras will be
added to another 250 buses over the
next few years.
Rodell Notbohm, general manager
of Apollo Video Technology, the Woodinville,
Wash.-based company responsible
for the camera installations aboard
the Metro’s fleet, said the presence of
such mobile video systems is definitely
on the rise. He added that while the
Route 358 bus was not equipped with
the latest wireless technology, often the
mere presence of a camera is enough to
deter crime. This time it was not, even
though the bus also had signs posted
alerting passengers that video surveillance
was in use. Typically, he said,
Apollo puts anywhere from six to 16
cameras on a transit vehicle -- and usually
more than a dozen cameras per car
on a train.
Wi-Fi on the Rise
Notbohm noted that most of the recent
federal funding for security on transit
vehicles has included a clause requiring,
at a minimum, live look-in capabilities.
“Essentially, what that means
is the buses will generally have Wi-Fi
access points onboard,” he said. When
responders arrive, they’re able to access
an onboard camera’s footage in real
time, as it is happening, without actually
getting on the vehicle, using an inboard
laptop in their police cars or even
an iPhone app. “They can see what’s
happening in there, but they have to arrive
first. That’s the baseline funding.”
More and more, though, municipalities
and transit agencies are opting for
systems with a cellular connection, and
with those, authorities can be anywhere
and dial in -- not just right there within
the line of sight.
While video on transit vehicles is not
new, it’s still not widespread. “I would
say that if you go through all the transit
vehicles in the United States, it’s a
pretty small percentage of them that
actually have video cameras onboard,”
Notbohm said. “It’s still very customized
to have equipment on a transit vehicle
and survive in that environment,
with the extreme wide ranges of temperature
and power and so forth.
“I would say two years ago probably
less than half of the vehicles that
we put video systems on had any kind
of wireless whatsoever, and now almost
all of them have at least some form of
wireless onboard that they can use to
look in live and see what’s happening
inside those vehicles. And just in the
case of the last year, I’m seeing many,
many more agencies going for the cellular
technologies that give them always
the ability to look in at any point and
see what’s happening.”
The Moveable Lens
Eventually, technology will make the
presence of such real-time monitoring
commonplace, and while that will mean
more people will be watched more often,
it also will mean -- hopefully -- fewer
attacks like the one on Route 358. It
will be a matter of ubiquitous surveillance
in the name of safety and security.
If that brings to mind George Orwell
more than George Bailey, it shouldn’t,
Notbohm said.
“Really, people don’t have an expectation
of privacy on a transit vehicle,”
he said. “If you ask any transit agency,
that’s what they’re going to tell you --
that, ‘Well, you’re on a transit bus; this
is not a private place; you have no real
expectation of privacy in that location.’
“On the other hand, what you see at
transit agencies that have video systems
onboard some percentage of their fleet
is that the drivers want to be driving
the vehicles with the cameras because it
protects them much more than it monitors
their behavior.”
This article originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of Security Today.