You Still OK with Surveillance Because You Have Nothing to Hide?

Let me fix that for you.

The operators of the aerial mass-surveillance system that has been flying over Baltimore since January have apparently been indefinitely retaining all the images captured by the surveillance aircraft, despite promises that those images would be destroyed after 45 days.

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This is a technology that promises to do for our physical movements what the NSA has aimed to do with our communications: collect it all.

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From the time the existence of this massive surveillance program was revealed in August, the program’s operators have been touting the privacy protections that are supposedly in place, and assuring the public that they are sufficient. In particular, they have been claiming that the imagery is retained for 45 days unless it is part of an investigation.

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But a new document indicates that’s not the truth. [...] As public defender Kelly Swanston put it in a Baltimore Sun op-ed,

Our office did not know the BPD was working with the Community Support Program to collect data on our clients' movements and then using the data to charge our clients with crimes without disclosing the source of the evidence. For our innocent clients, we missed opportunities to subpoena exonerating footage collected by the spy plane. For our clients who were mistreated by officers, or whose versions of the truth differed from an officer's report, we failed to corroborate the truth because we did not know that a plane had captured footage of the city. The BPD, and by extension the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office, had data that likely could have corroborated our clients' innocence in the face of an officer's inconsistent statement, but they decided to keep it a secret….

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[T]he Baltimore Sun has reported that Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), the company operating the program, is considering marketing the surveillance data that his company collects to insurance companies. This raises numerous new issues aside from those raised by government surveillance. After all, this is a system that could become capable of recording all manner of lifestyle data about people, including:

• How often various drivers break the speed limit.
• Who goes to the gym every day, and who goes once a month.
• Who goes to bars once a month, and who goes every day.
• Who eats fast food and who shops at health food stores.

  ACLU

"Marketing the surveillance data to insurance companies."  Still OK?

When I met with PSS president Ross McNutt, he assured me that the system would only be used for “major crimes.” He may have been perfectly sincere at the time, but this is a lesson: that the logic of data capitalism has a momentum of its own, and limits are unlikely to stand unless they’re written into the law.

And maybe not even then, depending upon how the law is written and how it is interpreted.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.