An article in yesterday’s New York Times (“Where Little Is Left Outside the Camera’s Eye” by Mark Landler) asserted that since the Ring of Steel, developed in response to IRA bombings of the early ’90s, video surveillance has become widely accepted in Britain, “viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion.” With an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras in the country, a Londoner can be caught on tape hundreds of times a day, the article claims.
Then, in the paper today, a story (“New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown” by Cara Buckley) reported that by the end of this year, more than 100 cameras will have started monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, “the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.”
If [the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative] is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.
That staff is a key difference; there are already about 250 cameras placed in high-crime areas of New York City, but that video must be downloaded; the cameras of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative would transmit live video instantly.
Will the city approve and follow-through on this or will it end up the meaningless bleating of politicians aroused, like (apparently) that massive subway station camera campaign (strangely mentioned by neither Landler nor Buckley) that the city announced in response to the London Tube bombings of July 7, 2005?
And even if such a system were to be approved, could there ever be enough staff to track potentially thousands of live feeds? Cameras like these are really useful only in helping sift through ashes, at least until technology gets much more adept at real-time detection of “suspicious behavior,” whatever that might constitute in New York City. The cameras of London, for instance, prevented neither the Tube bombings nor the attempted car bombings last month, though they were useful in detecting suspects in the aftermath.