Chicago Rushes Head First Into 'Limitless' Surveillance

from the but-will-they-be-able-to-spot-political-corruption? dept

Governments around the world are finding reasons to install surveillance cameras, but few are keeping account of the costs and benefits that come from those CCTV systems. Chicago, in its bid to follow in China's steps as host of the Olympics, is the most recent one to do so. By spending millions of dollars, Chicago aims to have a camera "on every corner" in preparation for the 2016 Summer Games that it hopes to host. But they are doing so without thoughtful implementation or an understanding of the realities of around-the-clock government surveillance.

Under the auspices of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, Chicago's Police Superintendent Jody Weis is hyping CCTV as having "limitless" crime-fighting potential. The reality, as is evident to anyone who has actually researched this type of thing, is that studies have shown municipal surveillance cameras to have little to no positive effect on crime. Further, London is widely known to have the most extensive CCTV network in the world, but that served as little deterrent to the terrorists of July 2005. But instead of bringing this up, the Sun-Times and Chicago officials point to a test in which "live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy's State Street." Given the cost in both dollars and civil liberties, it is hard to justify catching petty criminals stealing some coins from charity.

But according to another city official, "civil libertarians have nothing to fear" from the blanket surveillance system because police operating the pan-and-tilt CCTV cameras see only what you would see if you were sitting on a park bench in front of that building." The difference, of course, is that by extending government power to all facets of public life, you extend the asymmetry of power between citizens and government (especially the corrupt ones for which Illinois is known). Indeed, we have already seen examples of "park bench" type cameras being abused by government.

What Chicago needs is an honest assessment of surveillance and a commitment to real police work, not hyped technology. If they want to follow in China's footsteps, it would be best to avoid the Big Brother ones.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Chicago Wants To Double-Collect Taxes On Event Ticket Sales

from the pay-more-taxes dept

eBay subsidiary StubHub seems like a pretty straightforward concept: it's a marketplace for event ticket resales. It's a huge market, and it makes sense to have a platform for people to resell tickets they've legally bought. However, StubHub seems to keep getting attacked and finding itself in court. First there was Ticketmaster, which complained that StubHub was violating Ticketmaster's "exclusive" rights to selling tickets to certain venues. Then there was the New England Patriots who demanded the names of whoever sold tickets through StubHub in order to punish the ticketholders. Now, the city of Chicago is suing eBay and StubHub, claiming that it needs to collect a special city "amusement tax" on each ticket sold. This is a pure money grab. The original ticket buyer already paid that tax -- and even if you accept the idea that resales should also be taxed (which is pretty questionable), then it seems like something that the actual seller should be responsible for, rather than StubHub/eBay itself. But, don't tell that to Chicago politicians who see this as an easy way to hit up a big company for millions of dollars. If this sounds similar to the attempts to suddenly get Amazon to pay up in other states, that's because it is. Seems like local governments are looking for any way to squeeze companies for extra tax dollars, no matter how little sense it actually makes.

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Take Two Sues Chicago Transit For Taking Down Grand Theft Auto IV Ads

from the now-the-ads-inspire-crime? dept

Take Two Interactive, the makers of Grand Theft Auto IV, have now sued the Chicago Transit Authority for taking down a series of ads for the video game that had appeared on the transit system. The Transit Authority took down the ads in response to a local news broadcast questioning the ads since there has supposedly been a wave of violent crime lately. So... now people think that just advertising GTA IV leads to crime? Considering there's no evidence that even playing the game leads to violence, what's wrong with the ads? It's hard to see why the CTA pulled the ads based on a silly, sensationalist news piece, though suing in response does seem a bit extreme as well. Of course, either way, now that it gets GTA IV back into the news cycle, Take Two may just be leveraging the Streisand Effect for all it's worth.

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Muni WiFi Takes A Beating

from the weak-signal-strength dept

Municipal WiFi's been having a rough time lately, as the ridiculous levels of hype that built up around it comes back to bite it in the backside. Things have taken a turn for the worse over the past week: EarthLink's deal with San Francisco (which garnered tons of hype) now looks like it's dead, while its deal in Houston looks like it's dying as the company pulls back from muni WiFi altogether. Meanwhile, city officials in Chicago have dropped their plans to get a vendor to build a citywide network there, after balking at demands that the city become the network's anchor tenant, and guarantee certain payments to the vendors. Elsewhere in Illinois, AT&T has decided not to move forward with plans to build a muni network in Springfield.

All in all, it's not been a good week for muni WiFi and its backers. But does all this bad news spell doom for muni WiFi as a whole? Perhaps -- but the idea of municipal wireless in general still could hold some value. Muni WiFi is bound to fail when it's being judged by unrealistic expectations -- as so many muni networks are. Vendors and politicians have whipped up a frenzy around the networks, while a willing media lapped up the stories and fed them to an easily excitable public. The fact remains that there are plenty of useful applications of municipal wireless; delivering widespread public internet access, and making money from it, may simply not be one of them. Also, as we've stated before, WiFi -- a local networking technology -- may not be the best technology to use for covering large areas. WiMAX could hold some promise in this regard, while in terms of muni broadband in general, fiber is probably even better. And, as Rick Martin points out, many smaller communities are seeing more success with their muni WiFi efforts, an indication that smaller-scale installations are much more workable than huge citywide installations in places like Chicago and San Francisco. He also passes along the quote that muni WiFi is "the monorail of the decade" -- meaning it's the boondoggle du jour for local politicians. But as Martin also notes, that while the monorail has never really lived up to its hype as the solution to cities' public transport ills, the concept and some of the technology has lived on in the form of light rail and other transport projects. In the same way, while muni WiFi might be looking pretty poorly, the idea of municipal wireless, or municipal broadband, should live on.

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