Palm Beach Post West Palm looks to cameras to spot crime

"Police are rolling out surveillance cameras downtown and in the city's most violent neighborhoods, the first step in an ambitious plan to make West Palm Beach the most closely monitored city in South Florida."

"The cameras' arrival will put West Palm Beach in the middle of a national debate about the use of police surveillance in public places. The cameras have been hailed as an innovative police tool and condemned as a dangerous infringement on privacy."

redux [10.17.03]
MSNBC Smile, you're on surveillance camera

" Instead, there’s an overwhelming feeling that too often surveillance is used not to make the country safer but to monitor innocent people and, in the case of speed cams, raise much-needed tax revenues. “There’s this notion starting to build in countries around the world that maybe we’ve been conned — that these ‘security measures’ are smoke and mirrors,” says Simon Davies, director of London-based advocacy group Privacy International. “People here are demanding a proper threat assessment. It’s one area where Europe leads the trend.”

U.S.officials might want to take note of that. Two years after September 11, the Bush Administration, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, are fast creating one of the most comprehensive, high-tech surveillance societies in the world."

redux [08.21.03]
Wired News No Surveillance Tech for Tampa

"Police thought facial recognition software could be a great way to spot criminals or missing children in crowds. Civil rights activists deplored it as "Big Brother" on the street.

Now police in Tampa, Florida, are removing the software, which is linked to street surveillance cameras, from the Ybor City entertainment district after the 2-year-old scheme, the first such deployment in the United States, failed to produce any arrests."

WorldNetDaily City dumps facial-recognition program

"The move is a hollow victory for privacy proponents. While the department is abandoning the use of the facial-recognition software, it will continue to rely on the 36 surveillance cameras to fight crime in the making.

"Officers have been able to make arrests involving illegal drug dealing, fights and things of that nature,'' Durkin told the Tribune. "One officer monitoring the cameras has been able to be the eyes of many in foiling this type of activity.""

redux [10.07.02]
The New York Times Protesting the Big Brother Lens, Little Brother Turns an Eye Blind
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"Confronted with the unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras, Michael Naimark believes he can hide in plain sight with the aid of a $1 laser pointer."

"In his research, Mr. Naimark discovered that there was already military literature widely available about using lasers to blind sensors, and that it was relatively simple to become invisible in front the cameras that now watch over many public spaces in this country."

The Chicago Tribune Surveillance on rise, and so are concerns
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"I have lots of worries about how this technology is being used," said John Graham, who is the founder of BroadWare Technologies, a Cupertino, Calif., maker of software for video camera networks, and who was one of the first researchers to send audio and video over the Internet.

"I've become Big Brother, but I didn't mean to be," Graham said. "It's just that there's no money in education or scientific collaboration.""

redux [09.09.02]
SFGate Surveillance Society Don't look now, but you may find you're being watched

"These days, if you feel like somebody's watching you, you might be right.

One year after the Sept. 11 attacks, security experts and privacy advocates say there has been a surge in the number of video cameras installed around the country. The electronic eyes keep an unwavering gaze on everything from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Washington Monument."

redux [03.11.02]
Wired News Spying: The American Way of Life?

"In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places such as street corners.

Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward greater restrictions on individual liberty."

redux [02.25.02]
NPR: Morning Edition The Video Surveillance Debate

"It hangs over Times Square, looking more like a street lamp than what it really is: a police video surveillance camera that can swivel 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to read a Broadway ticket in a scalper's hand 50 feet away.

As Jad Abumrad reports for Morning Edition, the camera and thousands of others like it in New York City and millions across the country are at the center of an escalating debate: is the use of such devices to combat crime and terrorism worth the loss of privacy and other guaranteed constitutional freedoms?"

redux [10.12.01]
The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
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"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""