[...] Courts have declared that being visually snooped on in public spaces is just fine, since you have no meaningful presumption of privacy there. Thus the awesome proliferation of video surveillance cameras. No one seems to know exactly how many are out there -- national estimates range from 2 million to 11 million. In New York, the Surveillance Camera Players, a guerrilla theater group, is trying to change the social consensus about these cameras. Members count cameras and, when they find them, map them on the World Wide Web. Such grassroots activism and information-sharing might do more to help individuals make their own choices about how much privacy means to them than will any national legislation [...]
(Written by Brian Doherty and published in the August-September 2003 issue of Reason.)
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