Friday, Sep 5, 2008
From "Snooper Bowl" football fans in Florida to ferry passengers in Rhode Island, surveillance subjects are starting to realize that they don't control the dissemination of their own images. In April, a local businessman in Block Island, R.I., moved his webcam, which had been aimed at the island's only ferry, after the company operating the ferry threatened to sue, complaining that passengers could be identified from the images. The webcam owner backed down to avoid a costly lawsuit.
He may have jumped the gun. According to legal experts, in most states there are no legal grounds to object to your image being captured in a public place, unless it's a place with an "expectation of privacy," like a bathroom stall. Shari Steele, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, explains: "People are putting cameras in all sorts of public facilities. They're everywhere. We, as a society, have just decided that that's acceptable." But is what Arpaio, the self-proclaimed "Toughest Sheriff in America," is doing acceptable? The hugely popular sheriff has gained notoriety around the country for an array of harsh practices, for some of which he has already been sued. He brags it costs just 40 cents a day to feed one of his inmates, while it costs $1.15 to feed one of the jail dogs. He serves inmates green baloney sandwiches, makes them wear pink underwear and houses them in tents outdoors in the 115-degree Arizona heat. He lets the inmates watch only two TV channels -- the Food Channel, so they can drool at the gourmet cooking, and the Weather Channel, so they can see all the other places around the country where it's not so damn hot. In one case, the county's insurance company paid out $8 million to the family of a man who died in a restraining chair while in custody at the jail.
Arpaio says the jail webcam is just a sign that he and his officers have nothing to hide: "It's there to let the whole world know that we're doing nothing wrong. I'm tired of my officers being accused of killing people." But Eleanor Eisenberg, executive director of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union, says that the public's right to know doesn't justify the constant presence of the webcams: "The public's right to know is adequately taken care of by the existence in our jail, and virtually every other jail in the country, of video surveillance cameras that are internal and make a record: That record is a public record."
Middle Ground's Hamm even suggests that the "shakedown," which is marketed on the sites as the first one in four years at the jail, is "a staged event for the webcam ... It's a titillating opportunity for the viewers to see something other than prisoners standing around doing nothing. It wasn't exciting enough, so they had to stage something."
Sheriff Arpaio denies the accusation that the shakedown was staged. His position is that there is a punitive purpose for his 24-hour reality show. "Johns picking up prostitutes can wave to their wives on the Web, and drunk drivers can wave to their employers," brags Arpaio. "That might deter that segment of society." He thinks that subjecting detainees to the public eye of the Web might make petty criminals think twice before they strike again.
The only problem is, many of the people caught in the jail webcam haven't been convicted of anything. They're "pretrial detainees," says Eisenberg, many of them unable to make bail. "The people in the booking area where the webcams [are] not only haven't been convicted of a crime but haven't been charged with a crime yet ... He is acting as the judge, jury and the entire justice system without the authority to do that."
"Really all this is is a way to humiliate people who have been arrested," says Cara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the ACLU's National Prison Project in Washington.
And what about those of us who haven't been arrested? What about those of us buying a Coke at the minimart, or sitting on a bench in a public park, or hanging out at a ballgame? The webcam at Madison Street Jail may seem like an outlandish and absurd mockery, but it can also be seen as merely the leading edge of a campaign to invade privacy unthinkable in the days before the Internet and omnipresent video cameras.
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