Cities Gone Wireless: Safety Or Surveillance?

While some cities have seen their dreams of providing wireless Internet access for all fade, others have forged ahead with wireless networks for an altogether different purpose: surveillance.

Municipal surveillance is no longer confined to isolated street corners. Cities are mapping out vast wireless zones to create safety nets. Oklahoma City just rolled out the world's largest municipal network, linking hundreds of video surveillance cameras installed across the city. Such networks also extend to public transportation: Chicago has installed the largest network of bus surveillance in the U.S., with cameras on its entire fleet of more than 2,100 buses.

A few years ago, many cities plunged head-first into providing free wireless to the masses — especially to low-income communities — as a way of bridging the digital divide and marketing themselves to Internet startups. That didn't pan out so well in Philadelphia, which saw its much-publicized partnership with Earthlink collapse last year after the Internet service provider decided to exit the municipal wireless business.

Today, public safety is the "largest and most successful sector" in the municipal wireless market, according to MuniWireless.com, a Web site devoted to tracking wireless broadband projects and technologies. Its 2007 state of the market report found that 75 percent of cities and towns with active or planned wireless networks were using them for public safety purposes. That represents a 10 percent increase from 2006.

Concerns About Potential Abuse

Only preliminary studies have been conducted in the United States. An analysis of those studies by the ACLU concludes that "video surveillance systems in the U.S. show little to no positive impact on crime." The ACLU examined independent studies conducted in the U.S. and abroad from 2000 to '08.

"The surveillance cameras are virtually worthless as a crime-fighting device," the ACLU's Steinhardt says. "They are certainly not worth the expenditure."

Beyond the debate over the effectiveness of video surveillance as a crime-fighting tool, the ACLU has raised concerns about the potential for abuse in a variety of ways — from criminal or personal use of surveillance systems, to discriminatory targeting and voyeurism. The ACLU says video surveillance systems lack an adequate system of checks and balances and that their presence has a "chilling effect" on public life.

U.K.-based Privacy International, along with the U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, has published annual surveys on global surveillance for more than a decade. Privacy International's 2007 report ranked the U.S. as the worst country in the democratic world when it comes to putting laws on the books to protect privacy and enforcing them; it classified America as a country where surveillance is "endemic."