New York plans surveillance veil for downtown

The program would include license plate readers and 3,000 security cameras below Canal Street.

The story "New York plans surveillance veil for downtown" published July 9, 2007 at 8:21 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[scdecade]

look on the bright side...

at least the people on the other side of the camera are utterly incompetent government employees. if they had any ambition beyond power they'd have a different and better job in the private sector.

[eeee]

scdecade is totally off topic

your comment is nonsense and totally off topic and this happens to be an important topic.

[suyts]

It is very sad

that it has come to this. Infringments on our privacy will continue until we hear a collective voice to a "no" we will not have an infringment on our security. We CANNOT as a state function with the perils posed today without proper protection. The voice of this nation has to be, as it has in the past, a collective "NO!!" to the lawless nature of people wishing to do us harm. Else, we will go the way of other nations, only a footnote in a history book.

[1548468]

WE ARE TRAPPED

Trapping us in our own FREE country?

[menty666]

Just an inconvience

Frankly the cameras are a bit like DRM on media files, they only serve to inconvenience law abiding citizens. Yes, 100 cameras are cheaper than 100 police officers. Yes, if you set a bomb somewhere you'll now be on camera but wait....the bomb was still set, just now you have footage for CNN. In London, despite all those cameras and roadblocks, the only thing that kept that bomb from going off was someone's inept wiring skills. Otherwise they'd be scraping bystanders off the walls right now.
Determined criminals don't care if you catch them on camera so it's really not a deterrent. Frankly at this point NYC's emergency response infrastructure is overburdened now so I can't see how they could possibly watch all those feeds with any sort of meaningful attention to detail sufficient to actually stop anything from happening. How long before some art group gathers a hundred people in clown suits to each set a box where a camera can see it. Sure they may just be empty boxes, but what's going to happen? Are they going to evacuate Manhattan? And if some clowns can do it, why can't 100 of Al Queda's pals do it?
As for the money woes.....people who work in NYC, not live there, WORK there, have to pay a income tax on their salaries. Between that, food taxes, sin taxes, tax taxes and tax tax taxes, I don't want to hear them pleading poverty.