Steve Quayle News Alerts

Sunday, April 28, 2002

VENICE BEACH, Calif. -- Once upon a time, the beach was a place where bare feet met sand, sand met surf, water touched sky and you felt blissfully alone even when surrounded by thousands of barely clad, coconut-oil-slathered others.

In Southern California the sand, surf and sky are still there, but the feeling of being alone -- that's about to disappear.

Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice, El Segundo, Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo -- the beaches that practically invented bohemian sun-worship and hang-ten hedonism -- are soon to be placed under the watchful eye of 24-hour-a-day, 360-degree-view cameras. Thank you, Uncle Sam.

Using a new federal grant of $557,000, Los Angeles County has announced it will install 27 panoramic, wide-angle cameras along 72 miles of coastline over the next year. With them, lifeguard monitors at the Fire Department (they're in charge of L.A. beaches) will, among other things, be able to make sure they have adequate staffing at secluded locations.

The monitors will also send the images to Web sites, where the public will be able to check weather, beach, crowd and parking conditions via still images that will be updated every five minutes. The grant comes from a Clinton-era program called Technology Opportunities, aimed at using the Internet for communal good.

Hence, says the county's press release: "A stated goal of the program is to reach out to inland communities and allow them to plan a trip to the beach with as much ease as someone living with a view of the water."

But the byproduct is the government watching while Californians tan. So, surveillance at the beach: A public service? Or something insidious?

The county says it's entirely the former. The public will get up-to-the-minute information about California swimming holes. Environmentalists will get new data on "coastal erosion." Lifeguards will know where crowds are heaviest.

The cameras do not record, officials say -- at least not yet. Private areas of the beach, like homes and restrooms, will be blacked out. The cameras will be fixed in place -- typically, atop the lifeguard tower, maybe two stories high -- and unable to zoom. Images of people will be blurry, and even gender will be difficult to decipher (unlike the planned D.C. surveillance system, which would be able to distinguish individuals). And the county promises to place signs warning beachgoers of the presence of cameras.

"If anything, we're improving on the privacy issue," says L.A. County Lifeguard Chief Mike Frazer, who notes the presence of privately owned cameras elsewhere on the coast. He's frankly tired of fielding questions about the matter and has started ducking the media. "We're going to divert [the images] to our free, public system."

If the cameras ever were used to identify individuals, he says, "we would lose our funding."

Still, suspicions have been aroused.

"It concerns me," says Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "I can understand why the city thinks it will be a public benefit. It has attempted to place privacy restrictions in . . . But there are serious problems with having public spaces widely covered by cameras, and putting the public under surveillance."

The problem, as she puts it, is "function creep." Sure the cameras don't record now, she says, sure they won't be able to identify individuals now. But what about next year, and the year after that?

"We know that once the technology is in place, it's not going to be very difficult to upgrade these cameras to have far greater capability," she says. "Having someone else pay to upgrade the cameras is a lot less money, and it may be picked up by another government agency that sees a crime-fighting benefit."

Schroeder doesn't have a problem with crime-fighting per se, but she cites a new study that found that cameras installed by the government in public places in Great Britain were frequently used by those monitoring them for voyeuristic purposes.

Hmmm, voyeurism on the beach, not exactly a rarity. But the problem is more subtle than that, perhaps. To some beachgoers, surveillance cameras would somehow change the very essence of what it means to go to the beach.

"You don't think of yourself as being watched when you're down there," says Chad Nelson, an official with the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit group for surfers.

He considers what surfing-under-a-lens might be like. "It's kind of interesting. There are cameras everywhere now. We live with them at the ATM, at 7-11." Pause. "I guess it's okay. The Big Brother aspect is just pretty, mmm, interesting."

Nelson knows -- as most beachgoers probably don't -- that there already are many cameras eyeing the sand. A company called Surfline.com has cameras perched up and down both coasts, providing real-time images of water conditions to surfers who subscribe to the service.

Another company called Argus has cameras set up to monitor waves and beach data for environmental restoration projects. Beachgoers are not singled out, but they are certainly visible on these webcasts.

TV stations have also had cameras facing the water for years. Next to the county's dome-shaped, off-white camera up on the roof of Frazer's Venice Beach lifeguard lair (it's not yet hooked up, but it's ready to go) is a large camera belonging to the local NBC affiliate, used for weather reports for the past decade. That camera, Frazer points out, has a zoom lens.

But Schroeder argues that it's quite different when the government is in charge. Information mixed with power -- that, she says, is the essence of Big Brother.

"There's a qualitative difference when it's the government," she says. "The government is pervasive. It's not like going into a liquor store, and if you don't want to be on camera, you don't go in the store. You have no option but to walk public streets."

And even with privately owned cameras at the beach, the lure to use them for other purposes has proved irresistible. In Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles, Nelson's group is using a Surfline camera not to check the waves but to monitor and record fistfights between the local surfers and rival visitors.

"If there's a crime, it might be negligent not to look for that," Nelson speculates.

Meanwhile, Schroeder's fear of "function creep" may be more immediate than she realizes. In its press release, the county notes: "Presently, there are no mechanisms in place to video record," but leaves open the possibility of "very limited recording" of rescues at sea or large swells.

Schroeder sees the next step -- clearer images and more recording -- as not far behind. "They may have the best of intentions. But they can't stop it once it does happen. It's almost inevitable, with basic equipment in place," she said.

And down at Venice Beach, lifeguard captain Shannon Carr-Davey has her own expectations, no matter how blurry the images are supposed to be. "Don't worry," she says, when asked about the installation timetable for the cameras. "Everyone still has time to lose weight and pick out their new bathing suits."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54333-2002Apr26.html