Right now, our dystopian predictions of the future are all about an artificial intelligence takeover. Constant surveillance, in contrast, seems like yesterday’s dystopia. 

This is not true though, as our university has been installing more cameras, according to an April 16, 2023 Campus Safety article. 

The University has also rented a mobile surveillance trailer from a company called LiveView Technologies, according to the Cynic’s live encampment coverage. 

To see how bad the surveillance is right now, I performed an experiment. 

As I walked to class, I counted the number of times I was caught on camera. I counted clusters of cameras as one camera, and I only counted cameras that were within about 150 feet of me. 

Just walking from my apartment—which is bordering campus—to Innovation Hall, I was observed seven times. Two were cameras at my apartment, one was a traffic camera and four were UVM cameras. This does not even count the cameras inside Innovation.

The Davis Center is worse: walking from the entrance of the Davis tunnel to the Cynic office I was observed ten times with fourteen different cameras. This walk takes me about two minutes.

While many of you will probably understand why this is a bad thing on an instinctual level, let me give you a few reasons why this is bad. 

First are the privacy concerns. 

Let’s assume UVM is trustworthy and responsible. We do not live in the 80s, so this data will end up on a server somewhere or in the cloud. This poses a problem, as the data can be hacked.

This may seem like an unlikely proposition, but just four years ago UVM Medical Center was hacked, according to a July 21, 2021 VTDigger article. 

Further, the aesthetics of this surveillance are poor.

The blinking blue lights on the security trailer make half of the prime real estate in Howe unusable. The constant blue flashing through the window is too distracting for me to work there, especially at night.

Constant surveillance creates a hostile environment. The black domes of the cameras clinging to the ceilings and the constant faux police lights on the green are a constant reminder of the authority that the University has over us. 

We are not a community like the constant emails from the administration like to claim. The cameras everywhere exemplify a clear distrust of the student body. There is no community between prisoners and guards, and likewise there is no community between us and admin. 

I love our campus’s beautiful old buildings and libraries; I find it disgraceful that the administration chooses to litter it with symbols of authority. We deserve a nice campus, not the setting of a shitty dystopian young adult novel.

Third, LVT is not the sort of company that the University should be relying on.  

The company received money from the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, or BIRD, in 2019 for developing AI security camera systems, according to a Jan. 13, 2020 Times of Israel article.

BIRD was jointly created by the U.S. and Israeli government in 1977 to promote cooperation, including in the defense sector, according to their website. 

Feel about Israel how you want, but the methods that they use to carry out their goals should probably not have much overlap with the University’s.

Fighting a problem like surveillance is hard. It’s not the sort of issue that people are mobilized by. The harms of surveillance are constant, but not as extreme drunk driving, for example. Because of this, there is a real risk that we just tumble off a cliff like lemmings. 

You can find a full list of board members on the school’s website, as well as the numbers for the UVM campus police administration. I suggest that you voice your disapproval. Talk to someone in SGA or in the administration.

You can also file Freedom of Information Act requests to the school for access to public records. This can be done directly from the school’s website. 

We don’t deserve to be spied on. It is disrespectful of our autonomy and right to privacy. If the administration is convinced that its students are dangerous vandals, then I have a better solution than cameras: dissolve Grossman instead.