cameras: catching criminals and destroying freedom

 “Without the cameras, I don’t know where we are.” The cameras were everywhere. 

They led the  authorities to the  bombers at a speed that would not have been possible in days when cameras were not everywhere, shooting everything  and making their images so easily accessible through modern day social media. 

That flood of images and the ease with which the authorities can access them raises so many serious questions about  Privacy and the right to it, in our age. 

Cameras can help catch criminals but they also help in destroying  the very freedoms that those criminals set out to blow apart. 

This Is the Modern Manhunt: The FBI, the Hive Mind and the Boston Bombers

• BY SPENCER ACKERMAN
• 04.19.13
• 4:00 PM

Suspects 2 and 1 together. Photo: FBI

In an earlier era, law enforcement might not have identified the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing so rapidly.

When the smoke literally cleared on Monday, investigators had a huge problem and nearly no leads. No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the bombings that killed three and wounded more than 180. So they took a big leap: They copped to how little they knew, and embraced the wisdom of The Crowd.

Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited. Police, FBI, and the other investigators opted to let spectator surveillance supplement and augment their own. When they called for that imagery, locals flooded it in. They spoke to the public frequently, both in person and especially on Twitter. All that represented a modern twist on the age-old law enforcement maxim that the public’s eyes and ears are crucial investigative assets, as the Internet rapidly compressed the time it took for tips to arrive and get analyzed.

But the FBI and police have been reluctant to embrace what the hive mind can provide: it implies the authorities don’t always have the answers. Veteran law enforcement officers remember cases from the ’90s when the bureau clammed up to the public and local cops, at the expense of receiving greater public cooperation. “If law enforcement didn’t share any information — [as with bombers] Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski — if your intel is shared with no one, that is the consummate investigative challenge,” says Mike Rolince, a retired FBI special agent who set up Boston’s first Joint Terrorism Task Force.

As of this writing, police, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and state troopers are still combing the streets of Watertown, trying to find 19-year old University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth student Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. His older brother, Tameran, a former boxer, lies dead after a chaotic pre-dawn chase with police. But they might never have been identified so rapidly, the ex-investigators tell Danger Room, had investigators not decided that their best resource wasn’t in their own pockets. It was in everyone else’s.

“The great advantage here is the number of cameras out there,” Rolince says. “Without the cameras, I don’t know where we are.” The cameras were everywhere. It wasn’t just the surveillance cameras looming on the tops of buildings at Copley Square. Bostonians and out-of-towners who came to the Marathon, one of the most celebrated civic events in the city, pulled their phones out throughout the race to feed their Instagram addictions and keep their Flickr pages current. It would become a reminder that the public enthusiasm for documenting their lives can outpace even the vast surveillance apparatus of the government.

All of this is a modern update to a very old story. Law enforcement has always relied on tips to do its job. It’s always had to balance the needs of transparency and operational security. The Boston manhunt is nowhere near over, as the ongoing clampdown on the city shows.

And there are messy precedents emerging from mass photo and video data emerging from an era of ubiquitous cellphone cameras augmenting police surveillance: the ex-FBI technology official says that “legal and ethical questions” cause investigators to hesitate before launching big data-mining projects, even with all the broad leeway they have to violate citizens’ privacy. That hesitation doesn’t have to apply when citizens volunteer the data.

“Nothing has really changed,” Bar-Tur says, “just the medium has changed.” That might be enough for a new model manhunt to emerge.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/boston-data-manhunt/