I was catching up on all the local news that went down while I was away. As you might guess, the one that irritated me the most was the August 23 announcement that the city would saturate the subway system with “1,000 video cameras and 3,000 motion sensors.” To leaven the Big Brotherness of it all, they’re throwing the unwashed masses a bone: cellphone service in 277 underground stations (but not on the subway itself), to ease efforts in calling 911 in case of emergency. I guarantee you, legitimate calls to 911 will be 0.01% of the calls; the others will be people calling other people saying, “Oh, nothing. Waiting for the subway. Where you at?” and more-important-than-you people in suits that start trembling like crack addicts without their little hands-free call device.
But at the center of the effort
will be a dense network of cameras that can zoom, pivot and rotate, all while transmitting and recording images of sensitive areas, from dark tunnels under the East River to bustling subway platforms in Midtown. Each camera will capture distances up to 300 feet and will cost about $1,200. A selected location could have 2 to 30 cameras.
The cameras, supplied by military-favored corporation Lockheed Martin, are “intelligent video” systems in that they’re operated by software that can differentiate between moving people on a subway platform and a “suspicious” stationary object, like an unattended suitcase or a bag lady, sending off an alert to police. I think the best we can hope for from any camera system isn’t preventative, but to get some smudgy color photos of the infidels who just killed themselves and a bunch of subway passengers, like in the London bombings.