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

safety first

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that helps keep me safe against terrorism is alright in my book.

Re:safety first

[an.echte.trilingue]

Anything that helps keep me safe against terrorism is alright in my book.

Hell no. Have you read what this system does? It reads (and presumably records) every license plate number driving on city roads. I think the risks here are too obvious for me to have to detail.

I will take freedom and risk over a police state and big brother any day.

Re:safety first

[AlHunt]

I will take freedom and risk over a police state and big brother any day.

Did you ever think about the irony of cops who treat every traffic stop as if they've just pulled over a mass murderer? Approach from both sides, stay behind the driver, weapon holsters unsnapped, at the ready, hand sometimes on their weapon while they assess the threat level and decide if the occupants have guns - meanwhile, the driver is sitting there, probably having seen stories about excessive force used by police, and he *knows* that person walking up behind him is in fear for their life AND that they have a gun.

Re:safety first

[Lumpy]

Yes and terrorists are too stupid to use a rental car or steal a license plate or make up a fake one.

Thank god that terrorists are too stupid to do things like that as it would nullify the system and it's only use would be to help supress political dissidents.

Re:safety first

[0xABADC0DA]

The problem is that everything you do that you don't want at least one person to know about is a potential way to blackmail you. For example, do you limit your donations to the Democrats to less then $250 because you know your Republican boss can check online to see which employees to fire or not promote or not give a raise to? That's an implicit blackmail.

Then there is explicit blackmail, like the person with access to the database that sees who is driving in crackville and threatens to report them, unless. Or the person who makes obvious 'detours' to his secretary's apartment every so often.

Privacy is like bees. A particular bee or any given sting might seem like a small problem, but once you get a whole cloud of them around you then your only chance is to freeze and hope your clothes don't look pretty in ultraviolet. It's not even so much a slippery slope as it is a death by a thousand cuts.

Re:safety first

[Artifakt]

With current tech, everywhere is public. Night Vision, Low Light CCD, Thermal Imaging, chemical sniffer chips, millimeter wave radar, low and high altitude photo surveilance with 100x or better zoom, Computer programs that can supposedly tell the difference between the green of a pot plant and some other weed from 10,000 feet away (and that have a 20%+ false positive rate).
      Data mine all these, and every single person in the area will do something that constitutes probable cause, a dozen times a day. I don't usually use 'alls' and 'everys' like that, but just to take one example - how many people drive past multiple elementary schools on their way to and from work, every day? No kids of his own, passing by two schools and seven day care centers on the way to work, slows down responsibly, route is two blocks longer than the computer generated shortest route (but is actually a few minutes faster with the usual traffic), that's enough. Many judges would issue a warrant to search a home or tap a PC connection just for that.
      Any time the IRS thinks you may have failed to declare income, they could easily get a court order to use that camera footage to see if your spending habits reflect being paid possible extra cash under the table. Right now, they have to justify the costs of an investigation, but here, a state government is doing the work, and the funds are coming from the Homeland Security dept. so it's suddenly a lot easier to afford. Again, it's a method that will generate a whole lot of false positives. (People who live outside of camera zones usually don't bother as much to drive there to shop, except possibly on days when they are doing a whole lot of shopping. Drive 40 miles each way for a special all day shopping trip and get a lot of things you've waited months for. The IRS will usually assume that's the way you spend money every Saturday.). So now the IRS is tending to selectively suspect people who live in suburbs, small towns and the country, probably totally without realizing they are biased that way.
      The point is, if you accurately describe your own lifestyle, I can show you how Law Enforcement could over-react to it. Nobody is completely average in all respects. A hobby as innocent as model railroading sounds to some suspicious types like a good way to attract potential child victims for molestation. If nothing else, you post on Slashdot. Somewhere within the group of people who can access those video records, there's a federal agent who considers Slashdot a hotbed of Libertarian radicalism.
      Occasional surveilance, i.e. by police patrols, doesn't tend to trigger paranoia in cops (usually). Near constant surveilance, accompanied by data mining techniques that routinely produce spurious signals from random noise, will. You, me, and everyone else will all be doing some innocent something that somebody somewhere now thinks indicates a potential crime. That will "justify" them investigating us in our homes, clubs, businesses and other places, where there IS a routine expectation of privacy.
        If Law Enforcement is corrupt they will abuse the additional power. If Law Enforcement is honest, it will take them 30 years or so to learn enough about spurious correlations from data mining to stop unwittingly committing the same abuses.

Checks and balances

[daveschroeder]

Technology will always make abuse easier, just as it makes so many other aspects of life easier.

Technology will always make jobs of law enforcement easier, just as it makes our lives easier.

Technology will always act as a force multiplier for government, just as it magnifies the capabilities of the individual user.

Just to take one example: if a system of license plate readers can detect a plate that has been flagged by some agency and prevents one, e.g., car bombing, why is that not a valid mechanism to use?

Just because it can be abused?

Or because it could be abused "more easily" than individual humans reading license plates in public?

Or because someday, someone could "come to power" who would use it against [insert ostensibly oppressed population here]?

All technology - computers, databases, telephones, cameras, the internet, vehicles, helicopters, robots, radios, video cameras, heat sensors, weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets, office buildings, body armor, remote controlled aircraft, tape recorders, wireless transmitters, you name it - can and will be able to be, and in fact will be, "abused".

But it's not the technology that's being abused; it's power.

So instead of being luddites-by-proxy, why not recognize the issue for what it is, instead of pretending that government should not be able to leverage technology to solve problems?

There is no reason surveillance cameras in public places or license plate readers in stationary locations or on aircraft should be vilified any more than any other piece of technology. Whether the cost/benefit ratio is reasonable is another argument entirely.

But I cannot and will not fault the government or law enforcement for using technology such as this, whose costs it can ultimately justify to the public's satisfaction, in public places to attempt to fulfill their charge to society.

Whether or not such systems actually do deter crime or terrorist activity, or whether they are worth the money, is really what is at issue. Not kneejerk reactions about 1984 likely to dominate some (most?) debates on this issue.

This isn't some plot to turn America into a police state. It's an effort being undertaken by local, state, and federal law enforcement and security professionals to attempt to protect the public. That is the first and primary goal. There are no ulterior motives that rise to any meaningful level. Let's keep things in some sort of perspective.

If it was your job to protect the people and property of New York City, what kinds of initiatives would you be undertaking? Hint: if your answer is along the lines that it's much better to stomach the errant terrorist attack every now and then rather than take proactive action to attempt to prevent them using whatever means you have at your disposal, you probably won't be in that job for long.

So think about this, and try to put yourself in the place of an urban security expert or a law enforcement official or a city mayor. There are valid points to be made on both sides of that debate, about costs, effectiveness, balances with privacy, and so on.

But none of them involve rants about police states or governments secretly wanting to monitor and control innocent citizens. Technology is technology. Implying that government and law enforcement shouldn't be able to use technology to the extent that it is legally allowable and its costs are justifiable is absurd.

One other point is that while things like cameras and checking ID may not always deter or prevent a crime or an attack, it often greatly assists in the investigation after the fact. We need only look as far as the London car bomb plot to know that cameras in public spaces (among a great many other tools) can be an aid. Cameras have been a valuable aid in such instances as long as they have been used. The real issue is cost effectiveness.

Could the $90M be spent a different or more effective way in a city like New York? Befo

Re:Checks and balances

[wizardforce]

Just to take one example: if a system of license plate readers can detect a plate that has been flagged by some agency and prevents one, e.g., car bombing, why is that not a valid mechanism to use? Just because it can be abused?

sometime, some day people are going to realize that trading freedom for security gets neither. it is no longer the case where there is a potential for abuse, it IS being abused. your house can be searched without warrent, your calls logged and now an overabundance of security cameras. all of this because some batshit terrorists decided the WTC had to go and now we all pay for it with our freedoms. I am sorry but to me it is plain stupid to sacrifice what made america great just to feel safe against something that has a lower probability of killing people than chocking on food.

Re:Checks and balances

[mcelrath]

All technology will be used, and all technology will be abused. The government has far more power to do harm with technology than individuals do. Therefore its use of any technology must be very, very carefully weighted in a cost/benefit analysis. When in doubt, do not give more power to governments. They will use it against you, eventually.

Furthermore this issue is fundamentally different than just technology. A watched society is not a free society. It does not matter who the watchers are, or whether they do good or ill with what the see. People behave differently when they know they're being watched.

People do not exercise their freedom of expression as often. They do not take unpopular views, or will not discuss them in public. They conform. They are not free. People need to escape from watchful eyes, for their own health and sanity. This starts in teenagers, when fundamental biological urges drive young people to get away from the tribe with their honey, for reproductive purposes. But it is a fundamental part of the human psyche.

We would be naive to believe that we could live a watched life, and still be the same person we are today.

Re:Checks and balances

[kebes]

As a tangent to your thoughts on the subject... I think one of the things that I (and others) worry about when it comes to "the law" (police, etc.) using technology to make their jobs more efficient is that there is never a "restoring force" that modifies the laws along with.

Allow me to explain. The current laws, like it or not, are not entirely idealistic. They were written within a certain social and technological environment. Using technology to more perfectly enforce a law can turn a reasonable law into an unreasonable one.

A stereotypical example is speeding. Most reasonable people agree that there should be speed limits. The current speed limits, however, were in some sense set with the knowledge that people would "cheat a little bit," so the posted limit turns out to be below the limit most safe drivers actually drive at. This works out okay in the end. The cops stop the people who are speeding alot but tend not to bother with people that speed by 10% or whatever. However if you use technology to enforce this law perfectly, it becomes unfair in a hurry. Or, if you use technology to perfectly enforce a law like "stopping at a stop-sign" then the law becomes unfair (remember that your bumper is supposed to be behind some arbitrarily line and you must be stopped for X seconds, etc.). Even the safest of drivers will not follow these rules to the letter; nor should they: the laws are written with very little leniency in their wording because they are meant to be used to stop people from egregious abuses of the law. They were never meant to punish everyone for doing normal daily things.

Another example would be copyright. I don't want to get into this debate too deeply, since it is a "hot topic" on Slashdot. Suffice it to say that many aspects of copyright seem reasonable enough, but when copyright is enforced perfectly, or worse when technology makes compliance mandatory (e.g. DRM) then a reasonable law gets transformed into an unreasonable law in a hurry. Many of the "well obviously *this* should be allowed" things that were not formally written into the law disappear.

Laws that make the everyday, normal activities of socially-responsible people illegal are not good laws. So the problem is that if law enforcement uses new technologies to allow them to do their jobs "more efficiently" but there is no corresponding rewriting of laws (to make them *more lax* or even repeal them), then our society will tend towards being less free.

That is one of the worries. So the solution is either to limit the implementation of technologies by law enforcement in some cases, or to have the laws modified. (Or a combination.)

Ha!

[morgan_greywolf]

The terrorists will NEVER figure out a way around THIS!!! After all, they'd have to STEAL someone else's plate and put it on their vehicle! Or make up their own plate. Why, either way, it's next to impossible!

Boy, we're SOOO much smarter than the terrorists!

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.

they dont have the cash to do it... yet

[wizardforce]

But Kelly said last week that the department had since obtained $25 million toward the estimated $90 million cost of the plan. While $15 million came from Homeland Security grants, he said, another $10 million came from the city, more than enough to install 116 license plate readers in fixed and mobile locations, including cars and helicopters, in the coming months. The readers have been ordered, and Kelly said he hoped the rest of the money would come from additional federal grants. 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.

they don't have the money to build it so they plan to make us charge for our own surveillance using the very technology it is paying for in the first place. this is getting carried away, people need to start waking up and start voting these people out of here.

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

We are spoiled

[Harmonious Botch]

Privacy though anonominity in public is a relatively recent phenomenon, and we seem to take it for granted. But most of the world's population for most of its history - including the folks who wrote the US constitution - have not lived that way. Most people spent the majority of thier lives in a radius of a few miles, and were recognized on a daily or even hourly basis by someone who knew them.

We are used to having privacy in public even though we have neither earned it nor voted for it. It is a totally unrealistic expectation that we should be able to maintain it. It is just a freak of timing that we have it at all - the technology that made big cieies possible happened before the technology that made cheap cameras possible.

As long as they stay out of my property, it's ok with me.

Re:Call it what you will

[an.echte.trilingue]

But if it captures muslim terrorists, then I'm all for it.

And when it captures white political dissidents?

Money

[ktappe]

If they want me to spend my money there, they will not do this. I have already curtailed a previously-planned trip to London because I do not want to partake of their police state where anybody can be detained by police without reason. Now NYC wants to duplicate their Orwellian setup? Then I won't go to NYC. And I'm just the type of affluent daytripper (I live near Philly) that NYC is constantly trying to get to come spend money in Manhattan. Sorry guys, you can either get my money or put a camera on me, not both.

Life in NYC just got harder..

[cculianu]

You know, life in NYC is so difficult. Here let me run through the million and 1 annoying things about living here:

- You want to live somewhere? Cool. So does everyone else. Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.

- You want to go to the movies? Awesome! Plan on either buying your tickets 5 hours in advance online or not going at all or going at midnight on a Wednesday the second week the movie is out. Almost all the good shows are sold out. Oh also movie tickets start at $10 for your basic crappy theater.

- You want to have a car in Manhattan? Sorry it's impossible because there is NO PARKING. However, you can perhaps keep a car in one of the other boroughs like Brooklyn or Queens -- but don't forget to move your car twice a week because of "alternate side parking rules". It sounds simple enough but the average car owner in Queens spends about $250 per year on parking tickets because this alternate side system inevitably leads to your forgetting to move your car and getting a ticket. I personally spent about $400 in parking tickets last year. That's the cost of insurance in most states.

- You want to go to the beach on the weekend? Well you probably don't have a car (see previous point) so you either have to rent one (plan on spending at least $100/day for a crappy economy car) *or* you can take the Long Island Railroad with all the other schmucks. There's nothing like schlepping a cooler up and down stairs to catch a train that makes you just feel like a winner. Oh and if you do rent that car plan on spending 2 hours each way in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic on the notoriously overburdened LIE.

- They say the subway is great. They are people that haven't really lived in NY for longer than 1 year. The first year is fun -- the subway feels new and exciting and it's very NEW YORK so newbies get into it. However, after taking it for 20+ years to school, work, etc I can say it is a horribly dehumanizing experience. I have gotten yelled at, pushed, mugged, lost, been stuck in trains for hours, and been subjected to all sorts of gruesome sounds and sights and smells. Also, at rush hour it's really a very unhappy experience since it's so crowded you literally have to push and fight people for a spot to stand. It's really quite uncivilized.

- The nightlife is cool, but people are jaded and cold and it's a bit of a superficial existence.

- And NOW Bloomberg wants to charge us money to drive down below 86th St. He is creating a straw man problem -- there is NO PROBLEM with traffic in Manhattan! Most people don't have cars anyway, and the pollution argument is just stupid (it really is -- I agree people shouldn't be driving -- but charging them money to drive in Manhattan is idiotic and doesn't help with pollution at all -- or if it does it's a drop in the bucket). Bloomberg just wants to create new and exciting ways to charge people money and to rip off the common taxpayer. He already doubled most city fines (everything from sanitation to parking to health and safety fines, etc). Now he wants to invent new fines. It's madness!

- The police here really don't care. Unless it's a major felony -- you can call them and you will be treated as if you are insane for having called them.

- Spying on the citizenry is just going to make it even more fun. Since the police hardly give a shit -- now they can have all this high tech gear with which to harass us.

I realize that you're making a joke, but...

[ivan256]

...it seems to be lost on many people that the surveillance network in London isn't what stopped the recent terrorist plot, it's merely what helped them track down the people responsible. If some random jerk hadn't gotten into a knife fight near the car-bomb, the plot might have succeeded even with the cameras.

These things don't add any safety. They just make vengeance through the criminal justice system easier.

Re:I realize that you're making a joke, but...

[Gr8Apes]

2 things to add:

a) cameras don't stop terrorists.
b) cameras won't even help after the fact, if they're a cell of suicide bombers. There's no one to track down.

Look at 9-11. They tracked down all 19 terrorists relatively quickly without invading other's privacy. In no way would 9-11 have been stopped with the surveillance system in place.

Camera footage does make for great fodder for the news though: "LOOK! Here they are, about to commit egregious violence on innocents" and then blast it 24/7 across the airwaves.

Such a system is a great way of spending great amounts of money and time and accomplishing little to nothing except terrorize your own populace and maybe throw a few innocents in jail to boot based on bad "evidence".

Re:I realize that you're making a joke, but...

[ivan256]

Well, I suppose that depends on the goals of the person you're asking.

However it is always a bad thing to confuse the two. If what you want is vengeance, you shouldn't lie to yourself and pretend what you're after is safety; and you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking you're safer because you've punished those who have already done bad things.

Why?

[Penguinisto]

Cripes, man... what's with all the Mission:Impossible scenarios? It was easier for Nichols and McVeigh to just rent a truck.

/P

Watching the Police

[Doc Ruby]

This system would make a lot more sense if the public could tune into the complete records of the webcams. These cameras are looking at public places, and are being operated by public safety, claimed to be in the public interest. The public should be able to hit these webcams if not in realtime, to give police a jump on criminals, then at latest the following day. Which would give police time to convince a judge on the record that the occasional segment from a camera needs to be censored. Perhaps even ongoing random deletions to hide patterns of "cameras of interest" which could clue criminals which cameras caught something being used against them.

But of course we should start from the premise that these cameras belong to the public, that their data belongs to the public. Then reasonable demands of justice and legitimate police process can be met within our existing system of warrants.

In fact, we should go further. All the police, their vehicles, and buildings should have webcams monitoring all their activity all the time. It should be available for anyone in the public to go through. That will not only keep police more honest, but also harness the millions of voyeurs to look for public evidence of crimes, and notify police when they see something in public. And of course there's huge potential for people to make our own "reality show" material, with the world's most exciting background sets and extras.

Re:...safety? think "tax money"

[Short Circuit]

Crime migrated to camera-free zones. Great! So we just have to get rid of all the camera-free zones.

Wait...

Balance of enforcement

[Short Circuit]

What risks? How is your freedom impaired? There's no freedom from being identified in public. There's a certain balance between having a number of laws, and having those laws enforced. Do you know one person who hasn't broken any laws? Probably not; People regularly break the law without being aware of it. And ignorance isn't accepted as an excuse.

The problem with surveillance societies is that all of those laws become enforced, when before only sufficiently important ones were. Sure, selective enforcement of different laws bites, but being hit with full enforcement of an encyclopedia of law will bite harder.

Re:Call it what you will

[ak3ldama]

But if it captures muslim terrorists, then I'm all for it. And when it captures white political dissidents? Why was the parent moderated Flamebait? I was going to moderate several posts up on this article, but I must call this to attention instead! This is a very relevant question, not only this but others questions must be asked.

Will this be used to maintain picket zones? What kind of data aggregation will take place? How many databases will this tie in with? Which organizations will have access to this data? What systems will be used to cull license plate numbers/face recognition/and other such patterns? How many people will be employed to watch these cameras? What are the metrics for results that they see as being acceptable results? The UK/London results were quite bad but the government groups that they were responsible thought the numbers were acceptable enough for a larger rollout. There are all kinds of questions that should be asked - besides the initial WTF?! that goes along with such intrusive surveillance system.

Are you that scared???

[cayenne8]

And so the rise of Big Brother in the US accelerates....

You know...frankly, I'm just not THAT scared of the terrorists. Is everyone else so frightened of them that this kind of sh*t sounds like a good idea???

Need a new name...

[russotto]

Since London calls its system the "Ring of Steel", New York should come up with a better name -- one which evokes its similarities with the London system, but is sufficiently different to avoid confusion. I suggest "The Iron Curtain".

Re:...safety? think "tax money"

[cayenne8]

"I don't have figures of the crime stats themselves but there is much (empirical) evidence to suggest that the police are having significant success in bring serious criminals to court."

The trouble is...these things are being sold over here as a preventative measure against terrorists. This just isn't the case. If the 'bad' guys come over here and cannot be prevented from detonating a 'nuke' of some kind....well, those cameras and footage will be pretty useless as that they will be vaporised too.

If the tool can't help prevent crime...then what use are they? I agree with the other poster....will aid in tax collections for cars...

Re:...safety? think "tax money"

[networkBoy]

Honestly not to be an ass, but:

They only were found guilty because they were incompetent and had no idea how to construct a bomb, coupled with their lack of devotion to suicide bomb. If you have someone willing to end their own life to take yours there is very little preemptive work you can do to stop them. If I build a bomb, line the outside with ball bearings, nails, sharks with lasers (tiny sharks, I admit), all within my house in a room without windows, then strap it to myself and put an overcoat appropriate to the season on (loose fitting linen for the summer perhaps?), and drive my car to a crowded place (mall?) how do you stop that?
How do the cameras really help after the fact? Point is that the cameras are fine for domestic crime tracking, but for genuine Islamic extremist terrorism they are rather useless.
-nB

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.

Re:Are you that scared of big brother???

[ModDoc]

I see no way for the orwellian "big brother" scenario to materialize in the United States,

Really? Don't you? Lots of things (national ID cards, police surveillance cameras, license plate readers, etc.) can be used to protect us. They can also be used for ill. And once they are in place, we have basically no way of knowing how they're used. The truth is: power corrupts.

yet terrorists are beating down our door.

Are they? Where? Support your statement.

If this system gets abused it will have the lid shut on it faster than you can say hot potato.

Would that this were true! Unfortunately I fear abuse of power goes unnoticed more often than not. How many times don't we find out about these things until the damage is already done? It makes me more than a little uncomfortable to think about how things like the Patriot Act are getting abused on a daily basis.