Surveillance technology without accountability is a recipe for authoritarianism, but with strong guardrails and transparency, it can help stop crime, including crimes committed by law enforcement.
An article in the Washington Post chronicled how police officers were caught abusing surveillance technology to stalk ex-wives and, in at least one case, an actress a police officer wanted to meet. Critics of surveillance technology could point to this as rationale for blocking law enforcement agencies from using it, but the 50 police officers were caught by the very technology they were abusing. These software programs can log users’ every keystroke and click, and all that information belongs to the public. In other words, surveillance technology is responsible for taking 50 crooked cops off the beat.
A better debate than if technologies should be used to fight crime is whether public records laws should change as a result of tech’s use in law enforcement, and they should. Abuse of power has and always will exist, and with more powerful technology, the consequences of the abuse get larger. The public should have greater and more granular visibility into how the technology is being used. In other words, the surveillance needs to go both ways.