Someone To Watch Over Me

By MARGARET CARLSON

I read George Orwell at an impressionable age, and I'm above average in my worry over an ever nosier Big Brother, with cameras everywhere. I like anonymity so much that when I'm out doing errands in baggy pants and mud-caked garden clogs, I stumble around without my glasses so that I'm harder to recognize. But I assume there's no transaction that I carry out, from buying floss at the drugstore to getting cash from an ATM, that's not videotaped. Last week the city of Tampa, Fla., unveiled 36 cameras in its entertainment district downtown with new software to scan the crowds and compare the recorded faces with mug shots on file. But those cameras are also capturing the mug of the guy stopping by for a drink who told his wife he was working late at the office. It has got so we are all stars of The Truman Show.

So I was surprised last week when I wasn't as outraged as almost everyone else seemed to be over the case of James Turner, 44, who found himself the unwitting victim of a global-positioning-system (GPS) device implanted in a minivan he leased from Acme Rent-a-Car in New Haven, Conn. Turns out the bug recorded him speeding in three states at rates from 78 m.p.h. to 83 m.p.h. Each violation, digitally recorded, automatically added a $150 charge to his bill.

It seems to me that Acme has quantifiable reasons for charging speeders for speeding. An SUV hurtling along at 83 m.p.h. rather than 65 m.p.h. costs more in wear and tear, accidents, insurance and lives. What critics quickly devolve to is the slippery slope: Where will it all end? Their answer: a police state.

Usually I'm a sucker for the slippery-slope argument. On cloning, I'm in favor of ending it now before we have three grandmothers at Thanksgiving dinner, all faintly resembling Martha Stewart. On privacy, you don't have to be Ray Bradbury to be concerned that soon every membrane will be permeable by some gadget recording, taping, filming or just watching you. Coloradans are no doubt pleased that the state plans to start using three-dimensional "face recognition" photos for driver's licenses in order to prevent identity-theft crimes. Yet states sometimes sell their databases to anyone who can afford to pay for them, and no one knows how your face print will be used then. The videocam in missing intern Chandra Levy's hallway would have been a godsend to investigators if it hadn't already taped over the crucial segment by the time they got their hands on it. But few people want cameras out on the street filming hundreds of people who might be guilty only of association with the wrong crowd. In Tampa, the city council is already reconsidering its face-recognition software as way too much of a good thing.

As for the in-car speed trap, I'm on the reverse of a slippery slope: Let's have more of it. If Acme in Connecticut can do this, why can't the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration get this in all cars? Road accidents kill 42,000 Americans a year. The device doesn't infringe on the innocent the way eavesdropping does. There's no downside for those driving at the speed limit, which could safely go up if there were universal enforcement rather than the spotty enforcement of an overtaxed highway patrol.

Civil libertarians would also like to do away with the Sniffer, a $600 flashlight that illuminates the inside of a car and the blood-alcohol level of the person in it quicker than a weaving driver can say he has had only two beers. A man's car is his castle, after all, and shouldn't you have the same protection from snooping inside your Ford Expedition, with its cathedral ceilings and multiple cup holders, as inside your house? Mothers Against Drunk Driving sure hope you don't. Those pro-Sniffers could take heart from a Supreme Court ruling in June in which the court protected a house from a high-tech surveillance device capable of detecting a marijuana lamp from afar, but extended no such protection to a car. Getting rid of all surveillance devices is where the libertarian left and right find common ground, leaping to the cheap Gestapo analogy at the sight of every security camera. Minority leader Dick Armey railed on the House floor the other day about cameras at busy Washington intersections. But there was no one there to ask him whether he was willing to let the epidemic of red-light running in the District continue unpunished. Some surveillance simply gets us back to where we used to be, when everyone knew your face, if not your name, and if you flew through a stop sign, you would have had no refuge in anonymity. Don't stand for a dragnet by camera, a virtual sweep of Tampa's bars and restaurants. But cheer for Acme's GPS and the trooper's Sniffer, which make us drive as if someone were watching. In a perfect world, someone would be.