Electronic Monitoring Is A Godsend To The Wrongly Accused

By Hans Sherrer ©

(June 30, 2008)

The explosive growth in the pervasiveness of electronic monitoring during the last several decades in the United States and other westernized countries constitutes a veritable revolutionary assault on individual privacy. A person’s location to the nearest connection point is constantly monitored by their cell phone or Internet accessed computer, and many new cars are tracked by a built-in global positioning system. Virtually every retail business and most private and public buildings in the country are monitored by a network of surveillance cameras. Earth orbiting surveillance satellites can zero in and identify a vehicle, many public highways are monitored by cameras, it is becoming ever more common that cities are installing cameras to surveil streets and public areas, and special cameras can automatically record a vehicle’s license plate for ticketing the owner as a red-light or speed limit violator. Credit and debit card transactions can be monitored in real-time so the location of an account’s user can be pinpointed, and an ATM user is filmed. Telephone and email records are retained for years by the service provider. One could go on and on itemizing the myriad forms of surveillance and electronic monitoring that a person is subjected to daily. That doesn’t even include the random ways a person can be recorded, such as by a cell phone’s built-in digital camera.

Public and private surveillance is so extensive that it was estimated several years ago that a typical New Yorker is recorded by 75 different cameras daily. England has an even more extensive network of electronic monitoring than the U.S., and it is estimated the average person in London is recorded by 300 separate closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras daily.

The enormous amount of data recorded about people throughout society has resulted in the ongoing development of software to predict what action a person possibly may take based on the time and circumstances of a particular situation the person is in. Websites such as Amazon.com and Google.com already use behavior predictive software to try and increase the sales of products, while profiling software is being used by law enforcement to identify who may commit a future “criminal” act.

The sea of pervasive electronic surveillance that we are bathed in was prophetically foreseen by science fiction writers many decades ago in books such as The Year of Consent (1954) by Kendell F. Crossen, and of course, in George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) the omnipresent telescreens were everywhere, allowing people to be watched by authorities twenty-four hours a day.

A twist in widespread electronic monitoring from what Orwell and others foresaw, is that the majority of it is conducted by private organizations. In fact, Google.com, and not the U.S. government, has amassed the world’s largest repository of personal information. However, this public and private surveillance has occurred right under our nose so silently that the details of a person’s actions in the United States, England, Israel, and possibly several other countries, can to a significant degree be as closely monitored as those of a person in prison. Jeremy Bentham would be amazed that we all now live under a panoptical gaze that more than 200 years ago he only envisioned for convicted criminals.

The ramifications of living in an electronic fishbowl are cause for grave concern for people concerned about the sort of society we live in, and its possible psychological effect on people subjected to it. It has, however, had at least one positive consequence. For the first time a person has the realistic possibility of proving, by one or more of the ways that electronic monitoring is conducted, that he or she did not commit a crime. This can be accomplished by methods such as a person’s exclusion as the robber filmed by a store’s surveillance system, or a person proving by a credit card or bank transaction receipt that he or she was not at a crime scene. An example of the latter is what happened to Tanya White, a defendant in the infamous Tulia, Texas drug prosecutions that resulted in Governor Rick Perry pardoning 35 men and women in 2003. White was able to produce proof that at the exact time an undercover sheriff’s deputy swore he was buying crack cocaine from her in Tulia, she was actually conducting a bank transaction more than 300 miles away in Oklahoma City.

An example of an exoneration attributable to video surveillance is that after spending eight years in prison, Michael Hutchinson was released in 2006 because expert examination of a San Jose convenience store’s CCTV video proved he was not the store’s armed robber. Similarly, after serving two-and-a-half years of a life sentence for rape and murder in Michigan, Claude McCollum was released in October 2007 after a CCTV video proved he was in another part of the Lansing Community College campus at the time a female professor was fatally assaulted. A twist in the McCollum case is the video also proved that his confession to committing the crime was indisputably false.

The video from handheld devices such as a cell phone camera has also proven to be invaluable. An example is that four men in England were cleared of raping a woman in 2006 because one of them recorded their evening with her on his cell phone’s built-in camera. That video proved she was a more than willing participant.

The full impact of the availability of electronic video and transaction records is not yet known. That is because the known cases of exoneration by various electronic techniques are the very tip of the iceberg of people who have thus far benefited from them. There are many millions of surveillance cameras throughout the U.S., and virtually everyone who ventures out of their home is recorded surreptitiously multiple times each day. William G. Staples, a University of Kansas sociology professor who has written two books about surveillance describes these pervasive recording devices as “Tiny Brothers” – electronic Peeping Toms voyeuristically watching and recording us as we go about our daily life.

Consequently, there are increasingly good odds that a person suspected in a robbery or a burglary, or a rape or murder – virtually any crime involving a person being at a particular location at a specific time or a period of time – can have some form of electronic proof they either were not the person recorded at the crime scene, or that they were at another location on or about the time the crime was committed. Eliminations of a suspect by a video or another form of electronic tracking before the person is wrongly charged are rarely reported by the press. They are buried in a case file, so we remain unaware that a likely wrongful conviction was averted by the pervasive electronic surveillance that is now an integral part of life.

Another aspect of living in a surveillance society is it is foreseeable that predictive behavioral software could be used to analyze a person’s electronic footprint to exclude him or her as a criminal suspect. The software could determine that the circumstances of the crime are simply too far outside the parameters of what can be expected for the person to do based on extensive information collected about the person, and other people similar to him or her.

The full value of electronic monitoring techniques in identifying or excluding a person as a criminal perpetrator has not yet been realized, and their usefulness in doing so can be expected to increase since growth in their development and deployment shows no signs of abating. It is somewhat ironic that as we increasingly live in an all-encompassing electronic prison the likelihood of being wrongly imprisoned in a real physical prison decreases.

Hans Sherrer is the editor and publisher of Justice:Denied – the magazine for the wrongly convicted

Sources:

John Schwartz, “Cameras in Britain Record the Criminal and the Banal,” The New York Times, July 23, 2005. (There were an estimated 4.2 million security cameras in England in 2005.)

NYC Surveillance Camera Project, New York Civil Liberties Union, 1998, http://www.mediaeater.com/cameras/overview.html (The Surveillance Camera Project conducted by the New York Civil Liberties Union, found that only 11% of the surveillance cameras of public areas were operated by a government agency.)

As security cameras sprout, someone's always watching, by Dean E. Murphy, The New York Times, September 29, 2002.

Hans Sherrer, “How Computers Are A Menace To Liberty.” In National Identification Systems: Essays in Opposition. ed. Carl Watner and Wendy McElroy. McFarland & Company, 2004.

Hans Sherrer, “Travesty in Tulia, Texas: Frame-up of 38 Innocent People Orchestrated by a County Sheriff, Prosecutor and Judge,” Justice:Denied, Issue 23, Winter 2004, 3.

William G. Staples. Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

The Explicit Video That Trapped A Blonde Who Cried Rape, London Daily Express, September 20, 2006.