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Surveillance cameras are taking over America's public spaces. Date published: 9/21/2006
By STEPHANIE HOO and RAY ZABLOCKI
The Associated Press You may think you're alone as you sit there on a park bench scratching your nose or adjusting your pantyhose. But increasingly in today's America, someone is watching you. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. In parking lots, your local mall, office lobbies, city streets. Authorities say the cameras help catch criminals and stop terrorists. Civil libertarians say they are an invasion of privacy. Either way, consider this: Personally, do hidden cameras make you feel safer or more on edge? "It's taking away people's normal lives," says Fruilan Cruz, a janitor at the fortress-like New York Stock Exchange, where his every move is recorded by hidden cameras as he sweeps up each day. There are even cameras in the lampposts, he says -- "Everywhere." Indeed, New York's financial district is awash with cameras as well as police vans and security barriers, which guard a city still on edge five years after 9/11, when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center. It's not just New York. Chicago has spent about $5 million on a 2,000-camera system. In Washington D.C., Homeland Security officials plan to spend $9.8 million for cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol. And yet, many visitors here don't realize they're being monitored. "What? I didn't know," says tourist Patricia Garrett, when shown the half-dozen cameras mounted on the side of the stock exchange. "That's kind of creepy." Garrett, from Orlando, Fla., is a shift manager at an Arby's that has a security camera -- only it doesn't work. "We actually just got robbed a few days ago," she says. Might cameras that do work stop crime? "Yeah," she says sarcastically. "If people ever check on them." Most of the cameras are set up not by police but by private companies protecting their property. And these private cameras often videotape more than simply a building's entrance or lobby, civil libertarians warn. They may also cast their gaze outward to the public streets and sidewalks, to the park across the way, even into someone's apartment. "Right now there are no restrictions in place that prevent a private individual and a private entity from filming from its own property what goes on in whatever is within sight," says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "And given the technological advances, you could film for miles."
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