Dear Editor,
I commend your Sunday editorial on surveillance for keeping the matter above the radar. Indeed, government surveillance of citizens, even if well-intentioned, raises serious privacy and other human rights concerns. And, as your example of China highlights, the potential for government abuse hardly goes unrealized.
I join your call on the government to provide data on the crimes prevented and criminals caught since the advent of the Safe City project in 2019. This info is vital for its costs-benefits analysis. Our society can then determine if actual and projected gains in crime-fighting outweigh the serious harms in using the technology, such as loss of our privacy and comfort.
Editor, I do not however agree with your assertion that the coalition government, as initiator and defender of the project, can now say little on its expansion under the PPP. Maybe so on the genesis of the idea, but the coalition can say much (and must so do) to ensure the government adequately responds to the myriad of concerns raised during what you described in Sunday’s editorial as the “storm of criticism” in 2019, and which you partly recaptured in that editorial.
When the matter first surfaced as a public concern in 2019, I posed several questions and offered a few suggestions in a letter to your newspaper (https://www.stabroeknews.com/2019/08/01/opinion/letters/govt-must-conduct-privacy-impact-assessment-of-surveillance-cameras-project/). I wish here only to reiterate two that should not be overlooked.
Firstly, the danger of Safe City tracking technology is not only that it can be used to identify a person, and monitor his locations, movements, and activities in real time. It can over time, through the storage, cross-referencing, and aggregation of data, create a good record of a person’s life. It is capable of stitching together pieces of our life from when we were in Linden, NA, and GT, or in banks, bars, and brothels. That capacity to store and aggregate data puts law-abiding citizens at greater risk.
Secondly, as a recommendation, a necessary preliminary step must be to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). One good definition of a PIA is a process aimed at communicating more clearly with the public (and at receiving the public’s input) on how personally identifiable information is collected, used, shared, and maintained, including how the govt intends to address privacy concerns and safeguard information. The PPP/ government must have that engagement with the public.
Yours faithfully,
Sherwood Lowe