The Opaque Society, Part 1

Besides a certain debt to P.W. Singer’s Wired for War, the scenario below reflects my reading of David Brin’s ideas about the Transparent Society during the 1990s.

Brin proposed (briefly) that a) governmental and private surveillance technology was eroding citizens’ privacy, and b) one possible cure was to have truly ubiquitous surveillance, including publicly accessible cameras that watched the watchers. Brin wrote that this regime of many-to-many surveillance would tend to counter abuses of the surveillance system by those in power.

But what if you posit a sudden sharp increase in governmental surveillance, one that the great majority of the population favors, with no countervailing increase in citizen surveillance of the authorities? The scenario below features a single technology—automated scanning of surveillance-camera footage—that generates two distinct sets of problems for civilian and military policymakers to consider.

Assumptions: Surveillance cameras proliferate throughout U.S. cities. Automated facial scanning by these cameras helps officials track criminal suspects, but citizens in urban areas take countermeasures to foil such tracking. Meanwhile, the U.S. military adopts even more robust versions of this technology for use in war.

Civilian Scenario: In October 2012, U.S.-based terrorists stage a Mumbai-style attack, simultaneously barraging a middle school in San Diego; an elementary school in Newark; a shopping mall outside Chicago; and a pedestrian mall in Atlanta with pipe bombs and gunfire. The low-tech, low-budget attacks, designed to influence the approaching presidential election, cause hundreds of casualties and widespread panic.

Afterward, examination of surveillance-camera footage shows the perpetrators carefully surveilling their targets over a period of months; their ringleaders are even seen visiting all four sites.

To avoid missing these types of patterns in the future, both the U.S. government and private corporations dramatically expand the automated scanning of surveillance-camera footage. Computers sift through billions of hours of footage from millions of cameras, looking for suspicious activities or travel by individuals.

For example, thanks to telephoto lenses and powerful processors, computers can now confirm that a man leading his family to different rides at DisneyWorld is the same man who bought cigarettes at a store in Times Square two days earlier—all with no human sifting through the man’s records, or even knowledge of his name.

Although federal officials downplay civil-liberties concerns, this enormous increase in governmental surveillance power provokes a backlash. While Fourth Amendment challenges percolate through skeptical state and federal courts, citizens begin to conceal or even alter their facial appearance while in public.

Facial covering by Muslims is suddenly a side issue as thousands of city dwellers start covering their faces using various materials and configurations that foil visible-light and thermal imaging. Some even use an ever-changing selection of prosthetics to alter the appearance of the face itself.

While they are barred from concealing their appearance within government offices and businesses such as banks, disguise actually becomes hip in less-regulated settings. Some urban areas start to look like Halloween year-round as Klingon makeup, Elvis sideburns and Emperor Palpatine hoods proliferate among an increasing number of secular veils, fedoras and burqas.

The federal government responds by limiting how and how much citizens may conceal, leading to still other privacy-based court challenges. For the time being, however, hoods, veils and burqas become illegal, as do facial prosthetics, elective cosmetic surgeries, and even certain cold-weather clothing such as balaclavas.


Questions: On which side will the courts fall when there is no immediate national-security concern posed by covering one’s face and otherwise changing one’s appearance? Or does the sheer ability of governments and businesses to electronically observe every urban public space lead courts to conclude that civilians face a “reasonable expectation” that they will be observed?


The above is only the civilian side of this scenario. Stay tuned for the military implications of this CounterStory tomorrow.