New York Plans Surveillance Veil For Downtown

News.com is reporting that a security system modeled after London's "Ring of Steel" is coming to New York City. The plan, to include license plate readers and over 3,000 public and private security cameras, aims to aid officials in tracking and catching criminals. "But critics question the plan's efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city. [...] The license plate readers would check the plates' numbers and send out alerts if suspect vehicles were detected. The city is already seeking state approval to charge drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, which would require the use of license plate readers. If the plan is approved, the police will most likely collect information from those readers too, Kelly said."

Comments

Opaque Society

[Anonymous Coward]

But try photograph and/or videotape a police officer, and see what happens.

(They can have my camera when they pry it from my cold, dead hands)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,284075,00.html

Straight Talk: Videotaping Police

Tuesday , June 19, 2007
By Radley Balko

Last month, Brian Kelly of Carlisle, Pa., was riding with a friend when the car he was in was pulled over by a local police officer. Kelly, an amateur videographer, had his video camera with him and decided to record the traffic stop.

The officer who pulled over the vehicle saw the camera and demanded Kelly hand it over. Kelly obliged. Soon after, six more police officers pulled up. They arrested Kelly on charges of violating an outdated Pennsylvania wiretapping law that forbids audio recordings of any second party without their permission. In this case, that party was the police officer.

Kelly was charged with a felony, spent 26 hours in jail, and faces up to 10 years in prison. All for merely recording a police officer, a public servant, while he was on the job.

There's been a rash of arrests of late for videotaping police, and it's a disturbing development. Last year, Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly threatened Internet activist Mary T. Jean with arrest and felony prosecution for posting a video to her website of state police swarming a home and arresting a man without a warrant.

Michael Gannon of New Hampshire was also arrested on felony wiretapping charges last year after recording a police officer who was being verbally abusive on his doorstep. Photojournalist Carlos Miller was arrested in February of this year after taking pictures of on-duty police officers in Miami.

And Philadelphia student Neftaly Cruz was arrested last year after he took pictures of a drug bust with his cell phone.

As noted, police are public servants, paid with taxpayer dollars. Not only that, but they're given extraordinary power and authority we don't give to other public servants: They're armed; they can make arrests; they're allowed to break the very laws they're paid to enforce; they can use lethal force for reasons other than self-defense; and, of course, the police are permitted to videotape us without our consent.

It's critical that we retain the right to record, videotape or photograph the police while they're on duty. Not only for symbolic reasons (when agents of the state can confiscate evidence of their own wrongdoing, you're treading on seriously perilous ground), but as an important check on police excesses. In the age of YouTube, video of police misconduct captured by private citizens can have an enormous impact.

Consider Eugene Siler. In 2005, the Campbell County, Tenn., man was confronted by five sheriff's deputies who (they say) suspected him of drug activity. Siler's wife surreptitiously switched on a tape recorder when the police officers came inside. Over the next hour, Siler was mercilessly beaten and tortured by the officers, who were demanding he confess to drug activity. Siler was poor, illiterate and had a nonviolent criminal record. Without that recording, it's unlikely anyone would have believed his account of the torture over the word of five sheriff's deputies.

Earlier this year, Iraq war veteran Elio Carrion was shot three times at near-point-blank range by San Bernardino, Calif., deputy Ivory Webb. Carrion was lying on the ground and was unarmed. Video of the arrest and shooting, however, was captured by bystander Jose Louis Valdez. Webb since has been fired from the police department and is on trial on charges of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm. The video is the key piece of evidence in his trial.

While it's possible that police and prosecutors would have believed Carrion's version of events over Webb's even without the video, it seems unlikely. Webb is the first officer to be indicted in the history of the San Bernardin

Re:Ha!

[Cheesey]

Yeah, good going. Stolen plate reported, different make/model - instant red flag. Perhaps the terrorists in your world play make-believe like you do!

No, this is crap. Over here in England, there have been cases where people have copied licence plates, often in order to dodge the Congestion Charge: the special city road tax that is implemented using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR). They look out for a car of the same make and model as they drive around, note down the number, and then get a copy of the licence plate made.

In order to stop this, the Government added new laws to make it more difficult to get licence plates made. If you want to get a new licence plate from a reputable dealership or mechanic, you have to prove you own the car by producing all the documentation for it. And two forms of ID. Unfortunately this didn't help at all, because licence plates can be bought on the black market.

So the new solution is to RFID chip every car. Luckily, there could never be any way of cloning an RFID chip... The new solution does have the added benefit of making the sensor equipment very cheap - no image recognition required - so it can be more widely deployed. Just one more step towards a log of every action you ever take... only then will we be safe from the terrorists, right?

If regular criminals can clone cars, resourceful terrorists won't have much difficulty. Or they won't use cars at all. It's security theatre again, an excuse for a new tax. It's bullshit, and there's evidence from the UK that shows it's good for nothing but milking more money out of you.

The ring of steel was useless

[cliffski]

I used to drive vans full of computer equipment through central London when they first introduced all the checkpoints. The cops would occasionally stop the van, with its blacked out windows, and demand to look in the back. Faced with tons of unusual looking metal boxes with cables, sockets and switches they would end up asking us what it was, "satellite decoding equipment" was often the answer, but we could have said "dilithium crystals" for all it mattered. unless every policemen is an expert in electronics, chemical analysis and explosives, they don't stand a chance of catching a well organized, confident and trained group of terrorists. If you pack a transit van with gas cylinders, nails and fertilizer, and write 'death to america' on the side of the van, you might be in trouble, otherwise, your chances of getting rumbled are close to zero. So the aim of this is to 'reassure the public', it won't do anything to actually make people safe.