Neither friends nor readers are taking kindly to my plea for thousands of surveillance cameras in the NY subway system "watching every move of mine and everybody elses."
So maybe I wasn't right to predict that after London most people will feel similarly and that privacy concerns will fade away. (Then again, cameras do suddenly seem to be all the rage now.) But whatever the public sentiment about cameras, let me just reiterate my call for plenty of them.
Yes, there should be safeguards. For instance, crude racial profiling = not good. So create the appropriate policies and procedures banning such faux paus. That could ammeliorate some of the concerns. Of course there always could be abuses--it's only reasonable to expect that there will be. But that doesn't mean we should just skip cameras altogther. The risk of abuse can be minimized while the potential benefit of the things could be huge. Consider that not only did the cameras in London ID the four bombers--after the fact, of course--they also picked up a big lead, the kind that could save lives:
British police and intelligence officials have launched a nationwide manhunt for a man identified as a likely bomb maker in last week's London attacks, who was seen on a security tape with the four suspected bombers, according to a U.S. official ...
"They know who No. 5 is," said the official, who has access to substantial intelligence flowing from the bomb investigation but asked to not be identified ...
A video camera in King's Cross Station in North London captured the five men huddling together at about 8:30 on the morning of the bombings. Then, said the official, "The four goons [suicide bombers] went their way, and No. 5 went his."
And it's not like London has a few unobstrusive cams. The Underground is a privacy absolutist's nightmare:
Large Underground stations, such as those close to the attacks, have around 100 surveillance cameras each. And hundreds more cameras line the streets surrounding each station, providing literally thousands of hours of footage for police to comb through.
