Richmond wants to use cameras to spy on you
Council wants to transform traffic cameras into high-resolution surveillance tools
In spy-speak, Richmond may be one of the most “surveilled” cities in Canada now that 110 closed-circuit TV cameras have been installed at major intersections, including those leading to Vancouver International Airport.
Posted at the city's borders are signs announcing their presence with signs at each signalized corner with a camera. There's now one camera for every two square kilometres; one for every 1,966 people. That's an awful lot of traffic monitoring in a city where ICBC data shows the crash rate has been cut nearly in half during the past five years.
Over roughly the same area with nearly three-and-a-half times more crashes, Vancouver has 180 cameras or one for every 3,750 people. Toronto with 6.25 million people spread over 630 square kilometres has only 297 cameras.
Four years ago, Richmond sold taxpayers on a $2.18-million “predictive traffic management” plan with footage also available to settle disputes like who actually was at fault in a crash.
Yet now that the cameras are in place, suddenly Mayor Malcolm Brodie is leading the charge to change all of that.
Suddenly, in a city with British Columbia's fourth-lowest crime rate, the mayor and council want the cameras zoomed in, transformed from benign traffic monitoring into high-resolution surveillance.
Following a 7-1 vote this week, they've asked Premier John Horgan and solicitor general Mike Farnworth to allow high-resolution video and exempt it from “undue regulation” and allow it to be used for criminal investigation and prosecution.
They're asking for permission for a substantial encroachment on individuals' privacy and an exemption from the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FIPPA), enacted primarily to protect people from the long reach of government and others.
Curiously, even though Brodie has framed this around the recent high-profile, gang shooting at the airport, his motion makes no mention of the federal government or the federal privacy commissioner, even though both the airport and its lands are under their jurisdiction.
Even if Richmond isn't anywhere close to cracking the list of most-watched cities in the world, it's all a bit concerning.
Comparitech, a U.k.-based consumer research website that tracks these things, has Delhi at the top of the list for most cameras per square mile at 1,826 cameras per square mile (33.73 per 1,000 people). But the cities with the most cameras per 1,000 people are: Taiyuan, China at 117.02 (174.39 cameras per square mile); Wuxi, China at 90.49 (472.66 per square mile); and, London at 73.31 cameras per 1,000 (one every 1,138.48 per square mile).
Sheer numbers aside there is — for now — another substantial difference.
In the most-watched cities of the world, most cameras whirring away collect high-resolution images so that officials can identify people and licence numbers.
In China, they're used to track and record information for the Communist party government's “social credit program” that rewards good behaviour and punishes bad behaviour from jaywalking to protesting by denying both citizens' and non-citizens rights and privileges.
It's why disabling or obscuring surveillance cameras was among the first things pro-democracy protesters did in Hong Kong.
Richmond's traffic cameras collect low-resolution video that obscures faces and licence plates. Because of that, B.C. privacy commissioner Michael Mcevoy raised no objections to the plan after reviewing it in 2018.
Richmond went ahead and bought the cameras after Mcevoy made it clear that faces and plate numbers must be blurred and that the footage could be taken for “predictive traffic management” and could not be “primarily” used for law enforcement.
The privacy act allows local governments to collect personal information to enforce their own bylaws and, because it's collected for a legitimate purpose, the video could be used to assist police.
“But that is a different matter than collecting it initially to help police,” a spokesman for the privacy commissioner said in an email.
To further ensure a privacy firewall, Mcevoy also insisted that the city — not the RCMP — manage the data.
Because Richmond accepted Mcevoy's guidance, its traffic management cameras are exempt from FIPPA. The same goes for traffic cameras in Vancouver, other B.C. cities and on highways.
Now, Richmond wants the province's blessing to jettison all of that.
Councillor Michael Wolfe is the lone dissenter.
He's not opposed to traffic cameras. But he is wary of public surveillance, mentioning specifically China's social credit program, and raised the prospect that any increase might “jeopardize public trust in police, which is already taking a hit.”
Wolfe is concerned that the city also can't afford the heightened surveillance with the high cost of staff and computers to properly store and protect the data from hackers and ransomers.
“The consequences of this are way too high risk for my stomach to bear,” he said.
Absent an exemption from the politicians, Richmond's only other hope is to convince the courts that traffic management requires seeing not only licence plates, but the faces of drivers, passengers, cyclists and anyone else using the street.
It seems like a very faint hope. During council discussions, Brodie taunted both Wolfe and the privacy commissioner, saying it is “an aberration of what the situation should be” when bad guys' privacy comes ahead of safety.
But as the B.C. privacy commissioner's guidance documents say, “Public bodies must not take steps to erode the right to privacy merely because they believe there is nothing to fear if an individual has nothing to hide.
“The loss of the ability to control the use of one's own personal information is harmful in itself.”
Nobody wants bad guys going unpunished.
But as former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Covoukian succinctly said at a recent conference in Vancouver: “You cannot have freedom without privacy.”