By L. GORDON CROVITZ
Few technologies make people as uneasy as surveillance cameras installed by governments and private companies, which come increasingly close to capturing everything that goes on in public. But let us praise the practical value of these cameras in the speedy identification of the Boston Marathon terrorists. Soon after authorities released footage of the suspects to the public—a digital version of a most-wanted poster—the suspect brothers were identified.
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The Boston bombing suspects captured on surveillance video, April 15.
Boston is one of the less-wired large cities when it comes to surveillance cameras, so authorities relied largely on footage from private parties, such as the Lord & Taylor department store near the scene. The most recent estimate, from 2010, is that Boston and surrounding towns have some 150 police surveillance cameras, plus 400 in the subway. This compares with more than 3,000 government and networked private cameras in New York City's financial district alone, and some 400,000 cameras in London.
The cameras are getting smarter. New software goes beyond passive recording to alerting law enforcement about suspicious activity in real time. Video analytics enable what is called "activity forecasting." By applying artificial intelligence to video, these services issue alerts of what researchers call "anomalous" behavior—such as when cameras detect people leaving bags behind in public places.
The technology, from companies with names like IPVideo Corp. and ObjectVideo, is still new. It might not have been good enough to have identified the bags left behind by the terrorists in time to disarm the Boston bombs. As these systems improve, however, there will be a growing gap between cities that make full use of surveillance technologies and those that don't.
Surveillance cameras and video analytics can be abused. Authoritarian regimes in countries like China and Iran employ these new tools to monitor peaceful critics and suppress dissent. The U.S. has constitutional limits on unreasonable searches, and legislation will need to be updated as technology progresses on how data on suspects and law-abiding citizens can be used.
But even before the terrorism in Boston, the benefits of applying technology to security altered the trade-off with privacy expectations. On a radio talk show last month, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg rejected criticism by the New York Civil Liberties Union of the thousands of cameras in New York and the prospect of also using new aerial surveillance drones. "You wait, in five years the technology is getting better, there will be cameras every place," he said. "The argument against using automation is just this craziness that 'Oh, it's Big Brother.' Get used to it!"
The estimate of only 150 police cameras in the Boston area was made by the American Civil Liberties Union, which leads absolutist campaigns across the country against their use. The ACLU issued a report in 2007, "Under the Watchful Eye," that concluded: "Given surveillance cameras' limited usefulness and the potential threat they pose to civil liberties, the ACLU recommends that local government stop deploying them."
Local ACLU chapters have succeeded in efforts to stop or limit cameras in dozens of cities, from Tampa to Kansas City to Seattle. Earlier this month, the ACLU also came out against aerial surveillance: "As with every privacy-invading technology designed and/or sold as helping foil terrorists, we have to wonder how long it will be before it's applied to tracking peace activists."
In 2009, the ACLU issued a news release praising the City Council of Cambridge, Mass., for voting down surveillance cameras "in the first move of this kind in the state—and perhaps the nation." Cambridge had installed but not activated eight cameras. The ACLU opposed the "technological capacity and potential use and abuse of the web of surveillance cameras and fusion centers that has been erected across the country in the name of 'fighting terrorism.'" The Tsarnaev brothers lived in Cambridge and allegedly murdered Sean Collier, a campus policeman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there. Since cameras were instrumental in identifying the suspects, the ACLU has a lot to answer for. So does the Cambridge City Council, which still hasn't turned its cameras on.
Just past noon on Sept. 16, 1920, anarchists set off a bomb on Wall Street, killing 38 people. Pockmarks left from the shrapnel remain in the old J.P. Morgan JPM +0.47%headquarters across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. The attackers were never found. In the era before surveillance cameras, there was plenty of privacy, and it was possible to commit terror in broad daylight and escape.
The Boston bombings are a reminder that we live in another age of terror. Given the alternative of future attacks, more technology to fight back has to be better than less.
A version of this article appeared April 22, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In Praise of Surveillance Cameras.
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