Big Brother Might Be Watching

New “Intellistreets” street lights being installed in Las Vegas will have video screens, because the one thing we definitely don’t have enough of in our day-to-day lives is video screens. But the streetlights won’t just talk. They’ll also have the capability to listen and pick up audio and video of their surroundings. Of course, they won’t be recording. For now.

The Intellistreets website shows where on the street light the camera system can be “integrated.” But Las Vegas public works director Jorge Cervantes told NBC News 3 that their intention is not to have any cameras or recording devices “right now.” 

Sure, if you don’t count six months from now as the “immediate future.” Machines always end up doing what they’re designed to do. Oh, we don’t have immediate plans to use it the way it actually works.

The fantasy of technological omnipotence is becoming increasingly familiar, as the computer age insists that there’s always an app for everything. But how are police departments that already can’t respond to their most basic calls for service with reliable speed and quality going to listen in on a thousand streetlight recordings? What do they do with the data?

And government agencies usually end up being ridden by the beast, rather than riding it. Edward Snowden hacked the NSA by walking around the cubicle farm and asking his coworkers for their passwords. Local police, who will have less training and computer knowledge than people who work at the supposedly sophisticated NSA, will not find that problem easier to tackle. So when you see this, think of this.

Or compare to the American war in Afghanistan, where a similar dream of technological omnipotence keeps running into the realities of war.

A story in The Economist last year opens with a description of a smoldering building and American soldiers using scanning devices on the eyes of the dead. “Investigators,” the magazine explained, “were confident of finding a match at Qargha Lake, and did so. Their success underlines the growth of the database and the ambition of those behind it.”

And what was the success? “In this case an unnamed suicide-bomber had been scanned two years earlier, in Logar province, because he was looking suspicious, said Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammad Anwar Muniri, who leads the Afghan
programme. However, he was not detained.”

Two years later, though, after he was dead in a suicide bombing, they were able to rescan him and find him in the database. Congratulations.