[...] Call me neurotic, but have you seen those devices that look like spy cameras, installed above all the traffic lights at intersections in West Hartford Center? Perhaps you've been down Park Street in Hartford recently and looked up at the surveillance cameras at every intersection, funded with a $400,000 grant from state taxpayers.
"I think it violates my civil rights," Jorge Figueroa told me when I stopped to talk with him at a hot dog cart near the corner of Park and Lawrence, not far from a camera's watchful eye. "I feel like somebody is watching."
You've got that right, Jorge. Increasingly -- and notably since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the federal Department of Homeland Security opened the funding spigot -- the government is filming and recording us. It's all to make you feel more secure, but there's not much research that suggests cameras reduce crime.
The latest issue of Popular Mechanics confirmed my fears. "There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week," James Vlahos writes in a feature story. "Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere."
Just think how much fun all this makes going out on the town, knowing that some rent-a-cop -- or Homeland Security snoop -- is tracking you.
Bill Brown, co-founder and director of the Surveillance Camera Players, which monitors the growth of government video snooping, said all this should worry us. "Right underneath our noses, our cities are changing," Brown said. "People know there are cameras, but they don't know how many there are" [...]
(Written by Rick Green and published in the 22 january 2008 issue of The Hartford Courant.)
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