|
Pressure Rises for More Cameras in U.S. 7/28/05 |
NEW YORK (AP) — Pressure is building for greater use of
video cameras to keep watch over the nation's cities — particularly in transportation systems and other spots vulnerable to terrorism — after the bombings in London.
The calls have come over the last few weeks as British Investigators released
surveillance footage of the bombers in the deadly July 7 attacks and then put out frames of suspects in Thursday's failed attacks.
While privacy advocates question their effectiveness, Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton called for New York City subway officials to
install more cameras, even though officials said some 5,000 cameras are already in use across all modes of city travel.
Consider these recent developments:
- Chicago, Illinois, now has at least
2,000 surveillance cameras across its neighborhoods, after leaders last year launched an ambitious project at a cost of roughly $5 million. Law enforcement says they've helped drive crime rates to the lowest they've seen in 40 years.
- In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the city has increasingly relied on
video surveillance, cameras caught an early morning murder that ultimately led to the capture of a suspect. Police say the accused is now a suspect in an unsolved murder from 1998.
-
Homeland Security Officials last week announced they would install hundreds of
surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol at a cost of $9.8 million, months after an effort by local officials to ban hazardous shipments on the line.
In most cases prior to the last few years, street crime — not terrorism — was the driving factor behind the cameras.
There has also been a boom in
traffic-monitoring cameras, and huge reliance on surveillance cameras in private business, especially in retail establishments like convenience and department stores.
They point out that despite London's huge
network of cameras, the bombings weren't prevented. In those two cases, the cameras have only helped in the investigations.
One significant weakness is that the images caught by camera can't automatically link to a list of known terrorist suspects — not that that would have helped in London, as men identified as bombers weren't on any watch lists.
"I haven't heard of anything being successful that allows us to prevent something by flashing up on a screen somewhere a positive identification of someone on a terrorist database," said Jack Lichtenstein with
ASIS International, a Washington-based organization of security officials.
Privacy advocates say the London bombings should persuade policymakers to stay away from
surveillance rather than invest in it. It doesn't prevent terrorism, and at best only encourages terrorists to shift their target, they argue.
It's not much more likely to catch a terrorist than the random searches that New York officials have begun conducting on subways, he said. Better to spend money on intelligence resources to prevent attacks and emergency training to respond to them, he said. Source: cnn.com
|
