Publication Date: Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Somebody's watching you ...
Somebody's watching you ...
(July 07, 2004) City of Palo Alto has purchased dozens of digital cameras, but elected officials have not been consulted
by Bill D'Agostino
Drive into Foothills Park, and City Hall will be watching. Walk down a stairwell in a downtown parking garage, latte in hand, eyes are on you. Hike the city's last natural creek by yourself, and you won't always be alone.
Quietly, and with little public oversight, the City of Palo Alto has purchased dozens of small digital video cameras over the past couple of years, prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks and the availability of new and affordable technology. The buying spree is continuing at a rapid pace this year.
City officials say they are using the cameras to protect the public. They're looking out for thieves in parks, fires in the foothills, vandals in a parking garage, mountain lions in the creeks, and terrorists at electrical substations.
But there has been no policy direction about the use of such cameras from the City Council. That worries privacy experts who fear the potential invasion into people's civil liberties as such small, inexpensive cameras proliferate without proper public supervision.
"I think that's a serious problems. ... I don't think that's an agency-level decision," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in San Francisco. Due to the complex trade-off between privacy and protection, supervision "requires a responsible legislative body" elected by the people who "can be thrown out by the people."
Privacy law related to the government's and private industry's use of such digital cameras is currently "very messy" with new court rulings coming constantly, Tien said. "We're at the beginning of trying to get the law to think much harder about these kinds of technologies."
Experts like Tien advocate for using such cameras only when there appears to be a clearly defined threat. "We are very much opposed to a dragnet use of public video surveillance," he said.
Individual cameras are not the problem, since no one has an expectation of complete privacy in public places. Rather, the concern is about the overabundance of numerous cameras, and the cumulative effect of being followed. "You really don't expect to be tracked from here to there," Tien said.
Leaders within the city say they are working to respect people's privacy. But the use of such cameras appears to have gone beyond the police department, whose officials are specifically trained in such laws. City personnel in the city's information technology department have also been using and installing them.
For instance, IT staff placed small cameras at the entrance to Foothills Park last year, at the request of park rangers. (The camera helped nab a bicycle thief.)
Hearing about that camera for the first time from the Weekly, Councilwoman Judy Kleinberg grew concerned and said the council should consider setting a policy.
"The council has the final responsibility for finding that proper balance between security and privacy," Kleinberg said. "I don't think there's some crisis, but certainly this would be an alert for us to step back and take a look. We ought to take that opportunity."
The interest in the cheap ($50 to $75) digital cameras started with the city's information technology personnel. "The staff wanted the opportunity to -- I guess you could say -- play with the technology," Chief Information Officer Glenn Loo said. The first camera was placed inside a window of City Hall, aimed at the foothills, looking for fires.
Because they were inexpensive and "easy to deploy," other departments took an interest, Loo said. Other cameras have been placed at electrical substations, at the request of the Utilities Department. All told, the city owns more than 30 cameras, according to Loo.
Many are viewable by top city officials on their desktop computers, although the employee uses a password to gain access.
The police department has also purchased more expensive digital cameras. Last year, Police Chief Lynne Johnson held a public meeting with the city's Human Relations Commission to get their thoughts on ways to use such cameras without impinging on privacy, Kleinberg noted.
"I felt that, at the time, Chief Johnson was very thoughtful of and sensitive to all of the legalities associated with the use of surveillance by police departments," Kleinberg said.
That discussion, though, never reached the level of the City Council.
"I think if they (commissioners) were concerned about too much discretion or lack of sensitivity or lack of guidelines, they would have said that and brought it to the attention of the City Council," Kleinberg said.
The council needs to be careful not to have too much oversight, Kleinberg argued. For instance, the exact locations of the cameras need to be kept secret for them to be effective.
"If you tell people where they are -- we've all seen Tom Cruise movies, you can get around them," she said.
Loo said the council hasn't been asked to set a policy because "there hasn't really been that much activity until of late." Plus, most of the IT department's cameras are not aimed at publicly accessible areas, since officials are cautious of concerns about privacy.
The data from those cameras are kept indefinitely, Loo. The police department, however, has a different policy. Information from the police's digital cameras is purged weekly, unless they are needed to prosecute a crime.
"I think we are being judicious," said Sheryl Contois, the police department's technical services coordinator.
Recently, the police purchased two motion-sensitive cameras -- for approximately $1,500 -- to watch out for mountain lions. In May, the police department came under sharp scrutiny for shooting and killing a mountain lion that wandered into a residential neighborhood.
One camera was placed in the San Francisquito Creek, and another will roam the city, periodically moved to undisclosed locations. So far, the two new cameras have only captured images of domesticated animals, officials noted.
"We're taking pictures of cats -- kitty cats, that is -- and dogs," Capt. Brad Zook said.
If a mountain lion is spotted, the city naturalist will be consulted. It wouldn't cause immediate alarm since the animal would be in its natural habitat, Zook said. "It's not a crime for it to be there."
Last month, the City Council approved $75,000 for the police department to purchase 12 new video cameras for the parking garage under City Hall, to battle increasing vandalism. Cameras had already been placed in one level of the garage, and outside the police building, but officials thought more were needed.
City employees, among others, have had nails placed in their tires, tires slashed and windows broken in recent months. Also, there is a "longstanding problem with transient persons urinating and sleeping in stairwells," according to the staff report.
"It's time to put an eye down there," Zook said.
The funds will also be used to purchase other devices to keep intruders from entering offices through the garage's elevators after hours.
The only reason approval of those cameras went before the City Council was because of the high cost. Otherwise, the council and the public might not have known about them.
Cameras will also be purchased later this year for inside police patrol cars. But that's a different story, said Mark Schlosberg, the police practices policy director for the ACLU of Northern California.
Cameras that watch police officers interactions can be a deterrent to bad behavior, he said. "They're definitely not a panacea for police misconduct ... (but) they're a step in the right direction."
Staff writer Bill D'Agostino can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com
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