“Plans to implement the technology are under way in cities from San Francisco to Hartford, Conn., and Eugene, Ore., to Columbus, Ohio,” said the report in The Daily yesterday. In San Francisco, it adds, “the Department of Homeland Security is funding the entire cost with a grant,” while in Concord, N.C., officials “used part of a $1.2 million economic stimulus grant to install a combined audio and video surveillance system on public transit vehicles.”
It’s not new. In Baltimore, transit officials backed away from installing microphones in 2009 – but only temporarily – when civil liberties groups complained. The attorney general, however, suggested that signs warning passengers they were being recorded would help combat any legal challenges. Fast forward to October 2012, and the Baltimore Sun reports, “The first 10 buses – marked with signs to alert passengers to the open microphones – began service this week in Baltimore, and officials expect to expand that to 340 buses, about half the fleet, by next summer.”
Civil rights activists and even politicians are concerned. "People don't want or need to have their private conversations recorded by MTA as a condition of riding a bus," said David Rocah, an attorney with the ACLU.
James Brochin, a state senator in Maryland, commented, "They have absolutely no grounds to do this. If we can't get them to listen and change their minds, we'll deal with this... and make them defend what's indefensible.” Fellow state senator Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law expert, added, “this sounds kind of Big Brotherish to me.”
According to The Daily, “deployment of the technology on buses raises urgent questions about the boundaries of legally protected privacy in public spaces, experts say, as transit officials – and perhaps law enforcement agencies given access to the systems – seem positioned to monitor audio communications without search warrants or court supervision.” It is indeed difficult to understand the rationale for the DHS to fund the surveillance if it doesn’t expect access to that surveillance.
It is a debate partly had in the UK. Following release of the EU’s proposed Data Protection Regulation earlier this year, the Information Commissioner announced that while video recording might be justifiable, “using such systems to record details of peoples' conversations is unlikely to be complaint [sic] with the Act, unless this is in response to a specific threat such as the use of a panic button in a taxi.” He subsequently followed up with an enforcement order against Oxford City Council using audio recording in city taxis, and an instruction that Southampton should stop a similar process.
“We hope,” said Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, “this action sends a clear message to local authorities that they must properly consider all the legal obligations on them before requiring the installation of CCTV or similar equipment and that audio recording should be very much the exception, rather than the rule.”