80 Eyes on 2,400 People-"one camera for every 30 residents."

80 Eyes on 2,400 People
If terrorists come to tiny Dillingham, Alaska, security cameras will be ready. But privacy concerns have residents up in arms.
By Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer
March 28, 2006


DILLINGHAM, Alaska — From Anchorage it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state's southwestern edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine.

This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People choose to live in outposts like Dillingham (pop. 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone.

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By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more — all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack.

Now the residents of this far-flung village have become, in one sense, among the most watched people in the land, with — as former Mayor Freeman Roberts puts it — "one camera for every 30 residents."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-secure28mar28,0,3284078.story?track=tothtml

a bridge to nowhere. Soooooooeeeeeee....lotsa pork.

is partly legitimate and partly scam. It transfers a lot of tax money into the pockets of certain individuals in the so-called security business who sell these cameras and audio alert devices.

Oh, and on a related topic: security guards. The other day I had to pass a phalanx of five of them when entering a public building. I wondered how many of Bush's "new jobs" are for security guards. Security is a full employment gimmick. Security guards do useless work for very low pay. They do not create a product that anyone needs or can even use. They virtually never find weapons or whatever it is they are looking for. Most people don't carry weapons in their daily lives. The security guards' work is a little better than just sitting and watching people go by because the guard gets to have the feeling of control over another person for just a few seconds. What a total waste of money, time and human resources. Even if security is needed, one guard and some electronic equipment could do the trick. Does every person who enters a public building really need to have their bags and shoes checked? Isn't that overkill?

It is amazing how the amount of cameras in our country are proliferating. Corporate cameras, government cameras, traffic cameras, red light cameras, security cameras, school cameras. And always the excuse is that this all somehow protects the people. Yet crime rates are up, security is down, even as we continue to put up more and more cameras.

What is really going on here is that we are weaving a web of total surveillance in our cities and towns. And it's a web that is over halfway completed. From the time I enter the city limits of my nearby midsize city(100,000 pop), unless I'm sticking to completely residential backroads, I cannot travel more than 1 block without being seen by a camera of some sort. And this is true in virtually all major urban centers.

And now the push is on to start putting up cameras in the residential areas too, all for "better security" As we've seen, this sort of security isn't preventing crime, no, this is the sort of "security" that is being used to invade privacy. Peer into houses, watch you on the street, make sure that you aren't doing anything subversive.

In short, a society with a preponderance of cameras is a society that is transforming into a police state. Welcome to your new America.