Camera Watch: Links to Public Webcams

Mikkeles writes "From an Associated Press story: 'It sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy": Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched a project called Camera Watch that lists Internet cameras that monitor public spaces, letting Web surfers try the role of bored security guard.' The site permits searching for an available webcam in the geographical region (US) of your choice. About 600 webcams of 6000 in the pipe are now available."

Comments

Slashdotted - here's the text

[Anonymous Coward]

Webcams let surfers play security guard
Associated Press

NEW YORK -- It sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy": Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched a project called Camera Watch that lists Internet cameras that monitor public spaces, letting Web surfers try the role of bored security guard.

The project is part of "Surveillance of Surveillances," an effort by the school's Data Privacy Lab to monitor the exploding number of cameras watching the public. The group hopes to learn enough to propose policies to govern the cameras' use.

The lab is in the process of posting links to 6,000 of the estimated 10,000 public Web cams in the United States.

The site includes everything from gray stills of traffic in Rockville, Md., to video of students meandering across a campus in Washington D.C. and even lenses peeping on jail buttfuckings in Tennessee and Louisiana.

The site -- http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/cam watch -- notes that a few of the "jail cams" had been disabled due to lawsuits

I go here...

[Wireless Joe]

I like to use the World View of Live Webcams to get my voyeuristic fix. It's kept fairly up to date, and has hundreds of cams.

Project Statement:

[SteakandcheeseUm]

The Camera Watch project is part of our Surveillance of Surveillances ( SOS) effort. We are constructing a repository of links to publicly available on-line webcams, where the webcams of interest are those that observe the public in public spaces. At present, we estimate there are about 10,000 such cameras displaying public places in the United States. Our goals are to assess the number and nature of such cameras, explore potential uses, and analyze and propose related policies and best practices.
Our database is just being launched. The current edition of the database has only a few hundred direct links to cameras with about 6,000 links currently queued for processing. We expect to have these included in the database over the next weeks.

You can search the database for a camera or submit a link to a camera for inclusion in the database.

Wow, 6,000 camera links queued for processing. They should write a bot to check the links for up-time-ness and verification.

Existing city webcam project

[Mr. Darl McBride]

If this interests you, also check out CincyStreet.com. They have an index with dozens and dozens of cameras from many different US cities.

I discovered this a short while ago myself, and was surprised to find one within just half a mile of my own home, just off a street on my regular commute. I come within a hair's breadth of appearing on camera every morning, and I never knew it.

I keep a couple locations on shortcuts, and sometimes I check out the sunrise in other states over my morning coffee.

Re:a great congestion reduction tool

[gmenhorn]

We've had traffic cameras in Atlanta for a couple years now. Comes in handy once in a while for deciding the best route from/to work: Traffic Cams. The link was ./ed so hopefully this isn't already mentioned, but I would like to see some type of geographic view of the cameras locations. You could zoom in on an area and click on a camera icon and you would get a stream from that camera.

--
George