CHENNAI: The Chennai city police are on a spree installing CCTV cameras in every nook and corner of the city. So far about 25,000 cameras have been installed in public places and the police have set itself a target of 1,00,000 cameras across the length and the breadth of the city, covering almost every highway, street and lane. The stated objectives are public safety and that mere presence of CCTV cameras deter criminals. Also, the recordings help in the investigation of crimes.
But what has been completely forgotten is the question of privacy of the individuals. A few numbers could help understand the scale of the issue. Let’s approximate the limits of the Chennai city police to 1,000 sq km and the target of 1,00,000 cameras would mean every city resident would be captured by a camera every 10 meters as he moves in the city on a daily basis. The details that would be incidentally available are where you are going, at what time, in what vehicle and with whom. And more worryingly, who ‘owns’ details of this piece of your life, could range from the building owner who installed the camera, to the company behind the software on which the camera runs.
Of course, legitimate authorities like the police too can access this information and technologies like face and number plate recognition can enable police to track your movement too from a control room. These are not futuristic technologies, and some of these the Chennai police already possess and use.
It’s true that CCTV cameras have helped identify a few involved in criminal acts recently. But indiscriminate installation of cameras also come with a host of problems which are not even acknowledged, if not addressed.
The two sides of the debate has been lucidly brought out by two instances that were made public recently. The first one was a two-year-old footage of a former DGP meeting a journalist in a restaurant. It was released by a blogger along with a defamatory write up on the former police officer and the journalist, who was then investigating a major scandal. Even though there was nothing incriminating in the footage, surely, neither of them would have wanted their private meeting to be seen by thousands on the internet.
Incidentally, it was the same police officer who was said to be instrumental in the government passing an order in 2013 that mandated CCTV cameras in public buildings like restaurants. What was more troubling was that the restaurant management had reportedly told the journalist that the only outside people to have had access of the footage was a police team who approached them under the pretext of investigating a robbery.
The second was a footage that showed a police inspector damaging an auto parked on the roadside and the proof made it possible for the auto driver to even lodge a complaint against the police inspector.
So is the cost of privacy worth the benefits of public safety? There answers are not very simple.
The foremost concern is how easy it is now to stalk any one with the help of CCTV cameras. Consider this: A woman can lodge a complaint of stalking if her neighbour continuously monitors her. But if the same person puts up a CCTV camera from his building covering the entrance of the woman’s house and keeps track of when she goes out and who all visit her, he can simply say he is merely following the city police’s advice. More ironically, all the information on visitors and the movement of the woman becomes the property of the neighbour.
“From preventing street crimes, the CCTV cameras can lead to digital crimes. While we are just looking at the security aspect, we are missing out on a lot of other issues,” says Alagunambi Welkin, general secretary, union of IT & ITES employees. To increase the number of CCTV cameras covering public places, the police have been compelling many building owners of late to install cameras in their premises. The chances of abuse of the recordings are huge. For example, Express approached a shop owner in the city seeking a copy of a particular footage recorded in his CCTV camera. He agreed to sell it for `1,000.
As an alternative model, the Chennai city police have themselves taken up the task of installing cameras, along with voice recorders and speakers, in every street and road in Elephant Gate police limits. From a centralised control room, police officers monitor the streets of this locality in north Chennai. A government body in charge of recordings is much better than random individuals, right? But it is not as simple as it appears.
“Even though it’s the police which had installed the cameras, the software used is not open source software and they are owned by third-party companies, which are private corporates. Since the software isnot open-sourced, we don’t know what the companies are doing with our data,” says Rajalakshmi Sridharan, member of Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu. (open-sourced software, in contrast to proprietary, allows anyone to access the codes of the software and check how it operates).
Incidentally, the face-recognition software that Chennai police use is also being run by a private company and the company staff may have access to much of the data the police upload. While the infrastructure may be owned by the police, the software that actually deals with the data belongs to a private party and even the police may not know for sure how the data is being used by the software and the company.
At another level, the network of cameras installed by the police is very easy to tamper with and anyone can get access to it. “It requires only elementary knowledge of networking. Anyone can insert a device and have access to the same videos that the police see. We don’t even have to go to the level of hacking or cracking. It’s just available for anyone to see,” says Welkin. He says encryption of the data during transit could prevent such misuses, but police are unlikely to take such efforts since they are not aware of the dangers. When queried by Express, Additional Commissioner of Police R Dinakaran also said there is no encryption of the data during transit in the new model they have implemented at Elephant Gate police station limits. (See interview below)
But how can we be assured even if the police acquire technologies that make it difficult to hack? Another recent case reported in Chennai could give an answer. An inspector, S Thomsson, along with a local politician, has been booked for allegedly barging into the house of a senior citizen and extorting Rs 10 lakh. It is alleged that the police inspector planned the extortion on knowing that the senior citizen had just recently done a property transaction. What if the same police inspector, using his position, had access to a CCTV footage which had, for example, a secret on the complainant? The person may have been silenced.
Cameras offer many chances for misuse
Apart from chances of a few bad apples in the government misusing the footage, studies showing how police forces in western countries had used surveillance systems against racial and religious minorities also raise alarms. Also, a camera in a street where an activist or an opposition leader resides would be a blessing for any ruling regime.
What can be way ahead? “Even if the government is going to own the software and entire data, the citizens must be given an option to opt out of the surveillance,” says Rajalakshmi, comparing the failure to make the same demand when Aadhaar was introduced.
There are others who argue against this. “National sovereignty and safety comes first before our right of privacy,” says V Rajendran, former president of Cyber Society of India, which closely works with Tamil Nadu police in cyber security matters. “Whenever a person feels a particular camera was aimed to monitor his movements in his house, he can move a civil petition in a court. But practically it may be difficult for him to prove the motive of the person who installed the camera,” he says acknowledging such cameras pointed at houses can be an intrusion of privacy.
Welkin says certain checks within the government bureaucracy on restricting access to the data by the staff and fixing accountability on the safety of the data could be a way ahead. “After the US NIA episode (which brought to light the massive surveillance by the US government), it came to light that even an entry-level contract worker had access to all the raw data. Restricting this itself goes a long way in preventing many of the misuses,” he says.
The camera surveillance systems may be in a nascent stage in Chennai. But cities in western countries like UK have already implemented an extensive set of cameras across cities and US cities like Chicago even have artificial intelligence systems that analyse footages from across the city. Another reason for worry should be that researchers there find that CCTV cameras have had little impact in controlling crimes, except a few petty robberies. Many times, professional criminals quickly learn to cheat cameras.
The cameras finally end up only surveilling innocent citizens.
One of the noteworthy movements in the United States is led by the American Civil Liberties Union which demands the local civilian participation in deciding what kind of surveillance the city needs, instead of leaving it entirely to the police officers to decide. This may be a starting point for Chennai to emulate.
Know your rights
The American Civil Liberties Union has been instrumental in various city councils in the US to enact a ‘Community Control Over Police Surveillance’ law. Some of the aspects of the draft law are:
All decision on use of any surveillance technology should be taken only after strong consideration on the impact such technologies may have on civil rights and civil liberties
Only after public opinion has been solicited and given significant weight, any decision should be taken regarding if and how surveillance technologies should be funded, acquired, or used, and whether data from such technologies should be shared
Legally enforceable safeguards, including robust transparency, oversight, and accountability measures, must be in place to protect civil rights and civil liberties before any surveillance technology is deployed