Under Surveillance with Richard Smith

VO: Are we being watched?

Richard Smith: Yes. The world is becoming a very highly surveilled place and Vancouver is kind of at the edge of tumbling into the world of very surveilled places.

VO: Surveilled? Is that a word?

Richard Smith: I don’t think so.

VO: Oh?

Richard Smith: I’ve made it one.

VO: Are we being watched now? I mean, here in Steamrollers?

Richard Smith: As you go through the lobby of this building, the Waterfront Station, you’re under surveillance by many, many cameras. We’re under surveillance all the time in retail. In the sky train, they file the footage away on hard drives. I saw a small camera when I was waiting for you in the lobby of the restaurant.

VO: Who’s watching and why?

Richard Smith: You put up cameras so people will get inhibited in a good way and not kill each other and steal things. People don’t know they’re being watched, generally. The data goes into storage. Sometimes its outsourced to companies who may send it to the third world. There’s a big company in the UK that does this. There’s a Canadian company. There’s one company that uses people in South Africa to look.

VO: So people in Africa are watching us?

Richard Smith: Maybe.

VO: You conducted a study in Vancouver about surveillance. What did you find?

Richard Smith: We talked to people in the Waterfront Station and told them they were being watched.

VO: Were they freaked out?

Richard Smith: Turns out when they find out they’re being watched, they don’t care.

VO: What’s the meaning of this?

Richard Smith: They trust the system.

VO: Anything wrong with that?

Richard Smith: Surveillance means literally “watching from above,” as in the lord builds a tower and watches the serfs in the fields.

VO:That’s a sobering thought. That people on high are watching us here on the ground.

Richard Smith: Right now, often, nobody’s watching. Nobody’s looking at all the data the cameras collect. But the technology is changing so much that the average person’s understanding of how it works is falling behind. We are trusting a system that we don’t understand. Surveillance is corrosive to people’s sense of freedom.

Canada’s vitality comes from the extent to which that freedom is felt by everybody. That people will take it upon themself to run for office, to talk things out, to participate in the process.

As people lose their freedom, they start to speak less, ideas don’t come forward. And the country’s economy then shrinks along with democracy.

VO: So, cameras inhibit freedom?

Richard Smith: In Canada, we’ve spent almost 200 years without inner turmoil. People here don’t realize the extent to which things can get out of hand, and very, very quickly.

Take the Cultural Revolution in China. People were encouraged to speak out and critique the revolution. Then, over night, that was no longer the way to do things and people were persecuted dreadfully for what they thought was the right thing.

Into that context, we’re building a gigantic system that in the hands of a repressive government would be a ghastly weapon.

It was okay in the eighties to have a few cameras here and there.

Now it’s beyond okay.

VO: Why was it okay then, and not anymore?

Richard Smith:Because of the extent to which the system can do automated tracking today, it’s less okay.

If you trust the system and you don’t know how the system works and you build an approach to the system that says you can put cameras anywhere and how you run it is up to you, then you run the risk that at some point someone will decide to increase the investment into that system and operate it in a way you can’t imagine.

It’s not completely out of control today, because most people don’t put the money into it to make it out of control. That could change at any moment. When what/


VO: Is Canada under pressure from the US to track ordinary people?

Richard Smith: A factoid just came out that Canada is one of the best places in the world for privacy despite pressure from the Americans. We rank number two in keeping people’s privacy and not invading it unnecessarily.

VO: Go Canada!


Richard Smith: We have rights here, because people have insisted on them. People often think of giving up privacy to get safety from things getting stolen, being attacked by a knife, terrorists blowing up my airplane.

But to have an effective democracy, you need privacy and anonymity.

VO: How many cameras are watching us in Vancouver?

Richard Smith: So many. The Sky Train alone has 650. Up to 40 per station. Think of all the cameras you encounter in retail stores. Then there are the cameras you aren’t aware of. (He looks around.) When I was waiting for you in the lobby before lunch, as I was mentioning earlier, I saw a tiny camera. Cameras today are only visible when people want them to be. They can be as small as a dot.

VO: So we’re being watched when we aren’t aware of it.

Richard Smith: Yes.

VO: Who is watched the most.
Richard Smith: Young people and that worries me.
Who rides the bus? Who takes the Sky Train? Who is watched in their schools and on their school buses? Young people.

Older people have built a material privacy, so they aren’t even subject to the surveillance that they wish on others. Then, we put young people into institutions where they must attend schools and ride buses and in both places we pepper them with compulsory surveillance. If you go into London Drugs and found surveillance irksome, you can just leave. But if you find surveillance in your high school, you’re stuck.

VO: What does all this cost?

Richard Smith: The cost is to the psyche.

This comes back to my research motive. We were interested in the impact of surveillance on civic engagement. How much do you feel like playing a part in the political society that we have?

You can imagine that surveillance could play a part in that.

If you want to go to a political rally or something, you ride the sky train and take the bus. If everybody going downtown to a rally is on camera, maybe that’s not such a good thing for our democracy.

The basic premise of surveillance is that people will feel inhibited from doing bad things. Most people never even think of this, but you don’t want people to be inhibited from doing good things like voting, or just talking and participating in the democratic process.

If somebody stops you and says could I just talk to you a bit about abortion here because I think this is an important issue and that person is a rabble-rouser and now you’re clustered with them, because a camera has recorded your conversation, that’s inhibiting people in the wrong way.

Privacy is a bargain, a balance. We have to keep demanding it.

Richard Smith is a professor of communications at Simon Fraser University where he teaches Introduction to Information, Technology, and the New Media. He teaches a seminar on Issues in an Information Society. He is the author with Gordon A Gow of Mobile and Wireless Communications(Open University Press, 2006 His favourite gadget is the Ipod Touch, shown in the photo above, which was taken with his cell phone. His wide-ranging, fifteen page interview with Linda Solomon will be printed in full as soon as our staff of one can edit it. Coming soon to the Technology section.