Have you met the new BOSS?

In my class at Immaculata, when we discuss our increasingly surveillance-rich society, I present my students with a scenario of a future in which surveillance cameras are on every street corner, connected on the back-end not to human monitors but to sophisticated software with both high speed facial recognition capability and a database of, well, everyone. The stated objective of such a system is to find wanted criminals and known terrorists, of course, but we’d all be getting our faces scanned and matched, all the time. I ask students to compare this to the old-fashioned cop on the beat, who can see your face as easily as a camera can. How is this different, and is it a worthy trade-off of privacy for security?

Well, I will to continue using this scenario in class; I’ll just soon be leaving off the word ‘future’. A government program has been designed, built and tested, and I think it’s closer to deployment than anyone realized.

With the well-chosen acronym, BOSS, the Biometric Optical Surveillance System has been under development for several years. The origins of the program are very interesting. It began with a military purpose: to spot terrorists and suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in typical mission creep fashion, the program was brought stateside and put under the control of the Department of Homeland Security. Now the aim is for domestic use by law enforcement across the US.

An article in the NY Times contains the recent revelations about BOSS, which has been a two-year multi-million dollar effort carried out mostly by contractors. It has been field tested (using volunteers) and the improvement in the technology – in terms of accuracy and speed – has been rapid and steady. As a technology guy, I’m impressed.

But as private citizen, I’m alarmed, and for a lot of reasons. The system is designed to contain not just mug shots of the bad guys, but all possible attainable photos – of all of us. The handiest source for this is driver license photos; although this has not been established yet, I foresee that the temptation for a complete nationwide identity recognition system will become very strong.

The potential for abuse is also very high. It would be nice if we could find the bad guys whenever they walk out of hiding, but the system can – and I think, undoubtedly will – be used to track even minor offenders, people subject to civil suits and all around government fishing expeditions. And the potential chilling effect on protected political protest and free speech is not something we should dismiss lightly.

Next, as my students eventually recognize, this system is very different from the cop on the beat. The cop uses judgment and has authority. Yes, we expose our faces to everyone in view when in a public place, and our expectation of privacy is adjusted accordingly. But that expectation does not extend to a big-brotherish system of continuous scanning – at least not yet. I fear the day when such a system may in fact be within our expectations.

And last of all, I’m alarmed that this system was developed entirely in secret, and was only revealed after a Freedom of Information Act filing. As Ginger McCall (a lawyer and privacy advocate who wrote about this in a Times Op-Ed piece) righty points out, we should not be deploying systems like this without safeguards and rules in place, and after a reasoned public debate. This is not something that government bureaucrats should deploy and control in secret. The public should have a say – and the right to a veto.

Given the government's penchant for mission creep and the often overzealous – and secret – application of technology designed to keep us secure at the expense of privacy rights, we should all be concerned. The NSA’s use of packet sniffers to spy on internet traffic and email is just one recent case of an agency going far beyond what reasonable citizens consider acceptable. I think it would be another tragedy if BOSS were deployed without public discussion, and clear-cut rules on how it is to be used, and not abused. Let’s not surrender our reasonable expectations of privacy yet again to another secret government program which we knew nothing about until after the fact.