---We're Being Watched

FTLComm - L Ronge - October 31, 2000

As this teacher stroles to his classroom a few minutes after 8:00AM in the morning he is being video taped and so is every other person who moves into the hallways and various parts of La Ronge's Chruchill School. Northern Lights School Division has just completed the installation of a complex video system that monitors the hallways, gym, shop and several entrances of their La Ronge high school. No public explanation has been given for this rumored $100,000 expense but it has been installed and the system records the black and white images from around the building twenty-four hours a day.

There is a certain irony in this as the school only owns five working televisions for using in the school for instructional videos. Classrooms are not equipped with television technology of any kind, when a teacher wants to use a video in a class they drive a cart with a television on it into their room. Equally as ironic is that they school has four video cameras for creating video productions.

The use of television monitoring devices has become a part of our lives with stores almost all fitted with similar devices. Several Saskatoon high schools have been equipped with this kind of equipment and it is likely that few movements of people in public places will take place without being recorded by some system somewhere. The technology has been around for a long time and yet it is only in the last five years that we have seen such wide spread use of it in almost every aspect of life. Highway patrol police cars are now mostly video equipped and this move into school hallways is likely only the beginning of a much wider use of keeping an eye on things using video tape.

While I am commenting on this situation FTLComm began using video equipment in June of this year to monitor the driveway to our home office. Unable to hear the doorbell a wireless television was installed in a living room window that transmits a coloured signal to the little monitor in the office. The system works well and gives me a look at the outside weather while working in the basement. However, this little system is not connected to a VCR and is really an extention of the concept of "window." We got the system form X10.com for $100 US and it worked perfectly right of the box.

We are all going to have to come to terms with the idea that like it or not there are TV cameras and recording machines keeping track of everything that moves. Should this happen, is it a threat to our freedom, one of those prices we pay for safety, I really can't say. The single most significant incident that has changed people's attitudes toward this technology was the public camera in Britian that was able to record the abduction of a little boy and the video information was used to discover the killers and bring them to trial. Since then people have been less concerned about what seems like an invasion of privacy.

Timothy W. Shire