Big Brother in Chicago

What do the city of Chicago, the IBM Corporation, and the guided-missile frigate U.S.S. Stark all have in common? Probably not very much at the moment, but that’s likely to change according to the article from the AP this morning about the new security surveillance system being installed in the Windy City. Basically, it’s a set of video cameras hooked up to logic units that can be set to look for specific images and react to pre-set events – such as spotting a specific license plate, or noticing that someone dropped a backpack in the park and then ran like heck. Here’s a link to the story on Yahoo News if you want to take a look at it.

Now, I’m not going to address any of the privacy vs. public safety issues in this space; I’m sticking to business issues. But somehow this reminds me of what happened to the Stark. In May of 1987, the Stark was on patrol in the Persian Gulf when it was attacked by two sea-skimming Exocet missiles fired by Iraqi warplanes. Here’s a summary of those events and their aftermath. In the investigations that followed, the question everyone wanted answered was why the ship had failed to defend itself. Inherent in this question is how a generic anti-ship missile costing less than $1 million at the time could inflict $142 million in damage on a front-line Navy vessel, kill 37 crewmen, and nearly sink the ship, especially giving the Stark was equipped with the best same-generation point defense systems.

It turned out that the missile defense system had been malfunctioning for weeks, and the crew had eventually turned it off because they were tired of dealing with almost constant false alarms. Now, I know it’s twenty years later, and the state-of-the-art has changed beyond recognition. In 1987 a 20-megabyte hard drive would have been hot stuff; today you might easily have 50 TIMES that much storage in a little gizmo attached to your keychain. But by the same token, a large urban center like Chicago has more activity going on – by several orders of magnitude – than the open sea in the Gulf. Programming the system to look for specific license plates (if it can actually do that) might be helpful if the police are actually looking for someone, but if the system summons the authorities every time someone puts down a backpack for 30 seconds (that’s the time frame given in the AP online story) that would be thousands of alerts every single day.

From a financial standpoint, the idea of spending large amounts of public money for a system that may or may not be able to do what you need it to do is questionable. From a social standpoint, the idea of anyone with access to the system being to track any imaginable person, group, or activity within the system is a bit frightening. Orwell himself never imagined such a system, although American author David Drake did (in the ”Lacy” stories ). In any case, I have to question the effect this will have on police deployments, invasion of privacy lawsuits, and loss of business from people avoiding the affected parts of town.

The simple fact is, people don’t like being monitored. They are even less fond of spending time in places where the authorities know everything you are doing, and are likely to appear at the drop of anything resembling a suspicious action. And they will sue anyone and everyone involved if they feel any of their rights are being violated, including their right to privacy. If any of this surveillance data falls into the hands of the IRS, for example, or allows one business to gain any advantage over another, the city is in for a huge storm of trouble, and who’s even mentioned the fallout from people who get no response to 911 calls because all available units are busy checking out people who have set down their backpacks?

I’m not objecting to the public scrutiny; I was raised to believe that any time you are in public, you must assume that someone is watching you. And no one will be happier than me if this new system can manage to overcome the vast information overload and actually spot potential hazards on the streets of Chicago. But as a business decision, I’m not sure the city has really thought this one through…