In the early afternoon of Tuesday 29 April 2003, Bill Brown of the New York Surveillance Camera Players (SCP-New York) had a very telling interaction with the security guards at 3 Times Square (7th Avenue between 42d and 43rd Streets in Manhattan). The premise for this fascinating bit of improvised "street-security theater" was the fact that Bill had obviously been giving a two-person video team a guided tour of the surveillance cameras in operation on the exterior facades of that very building: he'd been standing directly underneath the surveillance cameras, pointing at them, and talking to the video team about them; the cameraman had obviously been taking pictures of the cameras. Very suspicious.
Nothing out of the ordinary for Bill, who ends every walking tour his gives of Times Square at 3 Times Square, because it consistently makes for a very dramatic ending: 3 Times Square is one of Manhattan's first "smart buildings." (Another one is the brand-new student recreation center built by New York University on the south-side of Washington Square Park, which is also a highly surveilled part of the city.) A "smart" or post-September 11th building is one in which 1) the video surveillance system isn't something added "after the fact" (after the building has been designed and built), but is instead part of the original design and thus is an integral part of the final architecture; and 2) the video cameras themselves A) are very sophisticated (they're fairly small digital cameras whose sneaky little remote-controlled movements are hidden from public scrutiny by the darkened plastic globes that cover, protect and disguise them), and B) are very liberally dispensed, to the point of over-kill (four or five cameras on each side of the building, thus making the total somewhere between 16 and 20 cameras -- and remember this total doesn't include the 100 or so cameras that are surely in operation inside the building).
What follows is a transcript of the conversations that took place on 29 April 2003 between Bill and various security guards. These conversations were recorded by the (Austrian) video team for whom Bill was giving the tour, and later transcribed by him. Enjoy.
Bill [speaking to the two security guards who have approached and are now standing next to him]: Do you wanna do this on-camera or off-camera?
First Guard: Off-camera, off-camera, off-camera, off-camera. . . .
Second Guard: What's this about?
[Cameraman stops taping.]
Bill: What's just taken place, off-camera: two guards asked us what we were doing. [Out here, on the street] they have no right to ask us any questions whatsoever. And part of the [post-September 11th] mood here in New York is that you shouldn't be asking questions, pointing out cameras, or anything like that. You should be acting as if nothing is wrong and go on [about your business]. If you do something "suspicious," security guards are on top of you immediately. To me, that's not a problem because I'm used to it, but for an ordinary person, such an experience is very, very traumatizing. I'm not afraid; very many people are afraid of security guards and police officers, and that type of behavior [being confronted by security guards] makes people feel afraid, not afraid of Al Qaeda, or "terrorists" [in general], but afraid of our own police and security forces.
[Thinking the show is over, the cameraman stops taping.]
Bill [to the security guards, who have returned to ask him about something he said the first time the guards talked to him: i.e., Bill had claimed that he'd called earlier in the day and talked to someone who said it was OK. Exactly to whom did Bill speak?]: They referred me to a Public Relations person. I'm sorry, I forget the name.
Guard: Because I just checked with people in the building and nobody authorized nothing.
Bill: There was no official authorization, because they said as long as we were outside --
Guard: Who told you this?
Bill: -- and not filming inside, it would be OK.
Guard: It has to be authorized by the building's security.
Bill [to the camera team]: You wanna show them the press credentials?
[Cameraman stops taping.]
Guard: Yeah, but you're filming our security system, our cameras; you're filming everything around this building. This is a high-profile building. In order to film anything around this building, you have to have authorization.
Bill: I thought this was all set, all taken care of.
[Guard speaks into his radio.]
Guard [to Bill]: This is a high-profile building. Times Square. This is a number one target for terrorism.
[Guard speaks into his radio.]
By e-mail SCP@notbored.org
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
