D.C. forging surveillance network

Source: Washington Post

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 1, 2008

The D.C. government is launching a system today that would tie together thousands of city-owned video cameras, but authorities don't yet have the money to complete the high-tech network or privacy rules in place to guide it.

The system will feature round-the-clock monitoring of the closed-circuit video systems run by nine city agencies. In the first phase, about 4,500 cameras trained on schools, public housing, traffic and government buildings will feed into a central office at the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Hundreds more will be added this year.

By making all those images available under one roof, officials hope to increase efficiency and improve public safety and emergency response. But civil libertarians and D.C. Council members say the network is being rushed into place without sufficient safeguards to protect privacy.

"The planning has been wholly lacking," said council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, who plans to hold a hearing on the project.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003430.html?hpid=moreheadlines

trampling on their Rights, Liberty, and Privacy.

I just wish they could be as awesomely free as we are.

Can you imagine having to worry about a full blown Police State springing up in our own back yard? Being spied on indiscriminately by an out of control, fascist government that starts wars with sovereign countries for fun and profit?

Oh wait.....

Checks & Balances

were created

in a deep mistrust

of the abuse of power

We have them on trains looking up and down the carriages and above the doors for going in and out.

We have them on buses.

we have them on the stairs of multi-story car parks.

(These are some I have noticed)

I think I read the statistics the other day that you guys are the most surveillanced people on the planet. The average Londoner has an average of 350 Security Cameras trained on them at any given moment in the day.