From donga.com comes this fascinating story about the South Korean National Election Committee (NEC) promoting the use of camera phones to help prevent fraud during April 15 elections in the country.
Here's what donga.com reports:
"The National Election Commission (NEC) will run a hotline center around March 15 and camera phone owners can report any illegal activities by taking snaps of the actual scene."According to one mobile internet service on Friday, NEC plans to make this coming election the cleanest and the most impartial one in Korea’s general election history by operating a mobile internet service called '415 Mobile Station' that receives reports of illegal election campaigns from cell phone holders.
"If this hotline center is put into operation, camera phone owners can take pictures of the illegal election campaign on the spot with their cell phones and report them to the NEC’s mobile internet homepage immediately.
"If NEC sends the reported content to the mobile phone of the supervisor in charge, the indicated scene will be checked or investigated."
Cellular operator participation
South Korean cellular operator, KT Freetel (KTF), is participating in the camera phone application by including a menu item on the home page "deck" on the cellular phone that links to the NEC service. In addition, KTF is offering a "hot number" capability enabling cellular subscribers to enter five digits to access the NEC service.
Cellular subscribers also can use SMS to transmit information to the NEC.
Donga.com quotes a "person from the mobile phone business" as saying there are 34 million cellular subscribers, of which six million have camera phones.
The big picture
The Korean government is asking its citizens to be tipsters to potential election crimes -- and to document those crimes with camera phone photos. Is this a job for citizens? Are there dangers to citizens trying to photograph someone creating a criminal act?
I wrote on November 21, 2003 that we could see "suicide photograpers."
Here's what I wrote then:
"Take a photo of secret police brutality, send the photo to the Web...and then you get killed. Suicide photographers. Sure I'm being melodramatic. But war photographers risk their lives every day. Ordinary citizens with camera phones will risk their lives to document brutality, criminal activity, etc.Indeed, I am waiting (though not eagerly) to read the first report of a citizen killed because he/she was taking an important photo -- whether it would be of a bank robber, a political protest, a police action, etc."
Greater issues
Camera phone users already are transmitting photos to law enforcement agencies to report possible criminal activities, traffic accidents, etc. But we haven't seen any of the ramifications of these citizen tipsters.
There's a lot of good that can come out of reporting potential abuses. But there could be unseen (or seen) problems as well.
Comments