Whether you are walking down a city street or working online, you are under almost constant surveillance.

High-tech security cameras maintain around-the-clock vigils on area homes, businesses and streets, helping police capture criminals but also tracking law-abiding citizens.

New “smart” electric meters can monitor homeowners’ activity by their energy usage and provide data sometimes used in criminal investigations. Internet companies track consumers’ online habits, while Homeland Security monitors social media such as Facebook and Twitter for terrorist activity.

State-of-the-art surveillance technology can save dollars and lives, according to proponents. Advanced monitoring systems and high-tech data mining help to lower staffing costs while expanding the capabilities of humans to prevent or solve crimes, reduce fraud and theft, and even thwart potential terrorist attacks.

However, widespread surveillance raises personal privacy concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union has strongly criticized what it calls the Surveillance Society, which Mike Brickner, ACLU of Ohio Director of Communications & Public Policy, called “inherently un-American.”

Surveillance industry

Mass surveillance has become one of the U.S. government’s principle strategies for protecting national security in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Advances in digital technology during the last decade have made it faster and systematic to store and retrieve video surveillance data compared to the lengthy process of watching video tapes.

As a result, private sector video surveillance has moved beyond traditional security into new areas such as transportation, manufacturing and retail.

Total revenues for the global video surveillance market are expected to grow from $10.5 billion last year to $25.4 billion by 2016, according to an analysis by MarketsandMarkets, a Dallas-based market research company.

Persistent Surveillance Systems, based in Xenia, provides wide-area surveillance products for law enforcement agencies in cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, as well as for major public events and U.S. border security.

PSS in 2010 received a $900,000 grant from the Ohio Third Frontier to develop wide-area airborne surveillance technology for continuous second-by-second video monitoring of city-size areas for law enforcement and security purposes. The company developed the Hawkeye II, an aerial surveillance system that is comparable to 700 simultaneous video cameras and enables authorities to watch a five-mile by five-mile area of a major city.

The company’s Hawkeye systems and image analysis have assisted law enforcement organizations in 34 murder investigations, allowing them to track suspects and their accomplices to their homes or places of origin, said Ross McNutt, company president.

PSS launched in 2007 with four employees and now has a staff of 30. The company does $3 million to $5 million in business annually, “and that’s been doubling every year,” McNutt said.

Springfield

Springfield has red-light cameras and traffic-flow cameras, but it doesn’t have cameras designed to monitor public spaces.

Sgt. Brian Radanovich said the city uses red-light cameras to determine who was at fault in crashes and to catch hit-skip drivers. Springfield has 17 red-light cameras at 10 intersections.

The city also has nine traffic-flow cameras at intersections, two of which can record footage. The others provide only a live feed.

The recording cameras were installed at the intersections of Spring and North streets and Limestone Street and McCreight Avenue as part of a traffic signal upgrade project finished last year. Those two intersections also have red-light cameras.

Right now they are used to monitor traffic flow and see if problems arise, City Engineer Leo Shanayda said.

The city hasn’t used the traffic cameras for any law enforcement actions, but it is discussing with the police division if they want to use them, and if or how they want to archive the footage that’s currently saved on a server, Design Supervisor Juli Springer said.

“We’re still exploring how we use them,” she said.

Englewood

About 30 minutes west of Springfield along Interstate 70, Englewood has deployed 20 cameras throughout the city.

City Manager Eric Smith said the project started in 2006 with an Ohio Department of Transportation grant to improve the city’s traffic flow.

Main Street from I-70 north to National Road has five traffic lights that cause havoc with rush-hour traffic flow.

After much discussion, it was decided to connect the signals through fiber-optic cables and tilt-and-zoom cameras to keep an eye on traffic.

At the state’s suggestion, camera feeds were transmitted to the city’s dispatch center so dispatchers would have a better idea of what equipment to dispatch to accidents.

“Nobody anticipated it would evolve into law enforcement,” Smith said.

That evolution began within a year of the first traffic cameras’ installation.

Dispatchers heard a report of the theft of a mailman’s uniform just outside the city. The dispatchers used one of the traffic cameras to zoom in on the nearby Meijer parking lot and spotted a suspicious young man wearing part of the uniform. Dispatchers were able to direct officers to the suspect, who was arrested.

Since then, the city has used $1.8 million in grants to expand the fiber-optic network and place cameras throughout the city.

“We are looking only at open public spaces,” Police Chief Mark Brownfield said.

Besides the city’s major intersections, cameras are mounted outside the city’s elementary schools, the YMCA/Sinclair Community College complex, and adjacent to Kroger, Walmart and Meijer stores.

Both Smith and Brownfield emphasized the cameras are not used for speed enforcement or red light enforcement, nor are they used to look at private property.

“The cameras only see what a police officer would see if the officer were standing there,” Smith said. “The citizens are getting additional police service without paying for more officers.” Englewood has 20 sworn officers. Brownfield estimated adding 20 more officers would cost the taxpayers more than $1.6 million annually in salaries and benefits alone. The only costs for the cameras is maintenance.

Neither Smith nor Brownfield have heard any complaints from residents.

Smart grid

The advanced “smart grid” technology being applied to Ohio’s existing electric system to make it more reliable and efficient also raises data-privacy and data-security issues.

The U.S. Department of Energy warned in 2010 that digital “smart meters” that provide highly detailed energy-use data could reveal personal details about the lives of consumers based on their energy consumption.

Such information could include consumers’ daily schedules, including times when they are at home, away or asleep; whether their homes are equipped with alarm systems; whether they own expensive electronic equipment such as plasma TVs; and whether they use certain medical equipment.

The proprietary information of business customers also could be revealed through the release of energy consumption data, “resulting in competitive harm,” the report said.

“Because of its detailed nature, such information should be accorded privacy protections,” the report concluded.

Duke Energy of Ohio is scheduled to start installing smart meters in the Dayton area later this year, company officials said. More than half of Duke Energy’s 685,000 electric customers in Ohio are using smart meters.

“Duke Energy does not share nor sell customer data for marketing or other purposes,” said Paige Layne, a company spokeswoman.

Dayton Power & Light Co. last year withdrew a $370 million, 10-year plan to create a “smart” grid in the Dayton region because of challenging economic conditions and customer privacy concerns, company officials said.

Both Duke Energy and DP&L provide customer energy records to law enforcement agencies that subpoena the information as part of criminal investigations, such as suspected indoor marijuana growing operations.

Last year in Ohio, Duke Energy received about 200 such subpoenas, Layne said.

DP&L officials declined to release the number of such subpoenas the company received.

Montgomery County Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Brem said the regional drug task force uses advanced technology to gain search warrants for its drug raids.

“If we get a tip from a confidential informant on a (marijuana) grow operation at house, we may subpoena the electrical usage for that house and neighboring houses. If we find the suspected house is using 5,000 kilowatts while the other houses are using 200 kilowatts, we’ll use that information for a search warrant to thermal image the house,” he explained.

Online surveillance

Digital privacy is becoming a federal policy issue in the wake of recent revelations that Internet services such as Google were tracking consumers’ online habits.

President Obama last week outlined a framework to help consumers control the use of their online personal data.

In response, Internet companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have agreed to add “Do Not Track” buttons to their browser windows so users can prevent advertisers from tracking their surfing habits.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security monitors public online forums, blogs, message boards and web sites including Facebook and Twitter “to collect information used in providing situational awareness,” according to government documents obtained by the Dayton Daily News.

The agency’s Media Monitoring Initiative was launched in 2010 and has since been expanded to “collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information,” according to a “privacy compliance review” issued in November.

Officials said Homeland Security’s National Operations Center only monitors social media during times of crisis, such as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

However, a 2011 manual for DHS analysts that was disclosed last month as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed that analysts monitoring social networks also were instructed to produce reports on policy debates related to the department.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement agents need a court-approved warrant to track a suspect’s whereabouts using a GPS tracking device prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn off about 3,000 GPS devices that were in use, an agency official said.

FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann, speaking last week at a University of San Francisco conference titled “Big Brother in the 21st Century,” said the Supreme Court ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS devices to track criminal suspects has caused a “sea change” at the U.S. Justice Department.

Civil rights advocates called the Supreme Court’s January ruling a significant victory for privacy rights.

Privacy issues

The ACLU’s Brickner said there is a long-held presumption in our society that unless someone is doing something wrong, what they do is their concern.

“Where I go and what I do and where I spend my time is really not the government’s business,” Brickner said.

If there is legitimate suspicion of wrongdoing, then law enforcement can take action, such as obtaining search warrants. But because the Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable search and seizures, there is a burden of proof that must be met, Brickner said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2057 or lgrieco@coxohio.com.