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Over the past decade, they're everywhere across the city, including on streets, poles, buses, business and shopping areas, in train tunnels, schools, local landmarks, and elsewhere, in a network linking private and public entities to police. Yet a May 6 Chicago Tribune Steve Chapman article headlined, "Surveillance cameras a flop," said that in Chicago, New York and other cities, their results are unimpressive, and "The more cameras (and) cops watching (them), the more potential for waste."
Yet it doesn't deter zealots like Mayor Richard Daley, planning them for "almost every block," despite their high cost and low return.
After the New York bomb incident, expect that attitude throughout the country, in Manhattan for certain reported AFP's Sebastian Smith on May 4 headlining "Police cameras to flood Manhattan to prevent attacks," saying:
"New York officials say they could stop attacks like (the Times Square one) by expanding a controversial surveillance system so sensitive that it will pick even suspicious behavior" without further explanation. Mayor Bloomberg supports a high-tech system, modeled after London's "ring of steel" in its financial district. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative way exceeds traditional surveillance. It will constantly watch, collect license plate numbers, video pedestrians and drivers, as well as detect explosives and other weapons.
A complementary system, called Operation Sentinel, will log every vehicle entering Manhattan by scanning license plates and checking for radiation.
Analytic software will analyze raw data in real time for fast results and follow-up. Alarms would signal unattended bags or a car circling a block more times than normal or operating unconventionally. It's a brave new world, a new level of privacy invasion and civil liberty intrusion, soon heading everywhere across America to a greater or lesser degree.
For the ACLU, it raises serious "privacy, speech, expression and association concerns. Troubling examples of that come from (NYPD) video archives."
Headlining "Ready.Fire.Aim!?," the ACLU highlights a growing video surveillance infrastructure with virtually no oversight or accountability, its proliferation impinging on civil liberties and personal freedom "in the most intimate, and most public, sense."
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