The strength of Slobogin’s arguments lies in the fact that his reasoning is neither liberal nor conservative. His point of view is not a compromise between political polarities; it is rather inclusive of both the public’s right to privacy and the government’s need to know.
To quote Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Slobogin translates this in contemporary terms thusly: “we must make sure we are ‘secure’ from government overreaching as well as from criminals and our enemies.”
The impact of the recent developments in surveillance technology haven’t really affected the majority of Americans yet. In case the reader isn’t sure about the effects of losing his or her public privacy, Slobogin succinctly writes “Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open society. Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society.”
In a section entitled “The effects of being watched,” Slobogin says that “in addition to its effect of behavior, [closed circuit television] might trigger a number of unsettling emotional consequences.” Quoting Jeffrey Rosen’s work The Unwanted Gaze: The Violation of Our Privacy, Slobogin writes, “it’s considered rude to stare at strangers whom you encounter in public.” He extrapolates that the “cyclopsian gaze of the camera eye may be equally disquieting, and perhaps more so, given […] the unavailability of normal countermeasures, such as staring back or requesting that the staring cease.”
If this isn’t enough to trigger unease in the reader, Slobogin refers to the research of Roger Clarke, who summarizes the dangerous consequences of what he calls “dataveillance,” including “wrong identification, blacklisting, denial of redemption, witch hunts, unknown accusations and accusers, denial of due process, prevailing climate of suspicion, adversarial relationships, inequitable application of the law, decreased respect for the law and law enforcers, reduction in the meaningfulness of individual actions, reduction in self-reliance and self-determination, stultification of originality, increased tendency to opt out of the official level of society, weakening of society's moral fibre and cohesion, and a repressive potential for a totalitarian government.”
Slobogin doesn’t leave us in fear without recourse, however. In his chapter five, “Implementing the Right to Public Anonymity,” he writes about accountability, cleverly entitling a section “Watching the Watchers:” “How do we make sure that the police refrain from using cameras in a discriminatory fashion?... Self-reports probably will not work…
How might we ensure access to the information necessary for accountability? David Brin has argued that the best way to control the government (and everyone else) in a surveillance-happy ‘transparent society’ is to watch the watchers. Camera tapes could be audited periodically - or the watchers really could be watched, by cameras. That method would not only capture the facts necessary to determine whether conduct of surveillance standards are obeyed, but also bring home to operators the panoptic effects their surveillance has on others, thus perhaps curbing voyeuristic and other unnecessary observation.” (p. 133, italics mine)
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