Super Day for Big Brother

The creeping assault against privacy turned just plain creepy this week with the disclosure that close-up digital surveillance cameras scanned the faces of all who passed through the turnstiles at the Super Bowl. The strong reaction to this news stems from the omniscience of sci-fi technology, from worries about who knows what about us and from wondering where it will end.

These were not cameras checking for trespassers in an alley or alerting security guards at an office tower. The Super Bowl cameras digitally scanned each face and compared it with those in a huge digital database, hunting for terrorists or criminals, according to the Tampa, Fla., police who accepted the loan of the system from its manufacturers.

It’s worth noting that in a crowd of 100,000, police made only 19 matches, none involving serious criminals--which according to electronics experts probably has more to do with the system’s level of reliability than the crowd’s lawfulness. Misidentifications are common, they say, which only increases our unease. In any case, police would have hit a higher percentage of thugs by scanning the teams on the field, given the state of the National Football League.

Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin said the intentions of police were only good, aimed at preventing tragedy. Perhaps the Tampa police are always good, but what about a different kind of police chief? The late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would have loved this technology for his obsessive spying on elected officials.

It is one thing to know that the street is not as legally private as one’s living room and another to be subjected unknowingly to a sophisticated facial scan whose digital information can be forever stored. Americans are already struggling with predatory marketers who glean detailed information about personal finances and preferences from the Internet and elsewhere and with insurance companies that crave the legal right to conduct full genetic analyses of customers.

The digital scans fit all too easily into this anti-privacy trend, and it is not paranoid to feel the hairs rise on the back of one’s neck.