200 ‘Temporary’ Surveillance Cameras To Scrutinize Super Bowl Fans

Smile, Super Bowl
fans! The New York City Police Department has you under even closer
and creepier surveillance than usual. The New York Civil Liberties
Union reported finding over 2,000 surveillance cameras on
the streets of Manhattan alone, before the stepped up
security for the big football game. Now the NYPD is deploying an
additional 200 or so “temporary” surveillance cameras in midtown in
anticipation of the festivities.

Reports the AP’s
Tom Hays:

The New York Police Department has quietly installed about 200
temporary surveillance cameras in midtown Manhattan to help spot
trouble along “Super Bowl Boulevard,” a 13-block street fair on
Broadway that’s expected to draw large crowds during the windup to
the game. Banners promoting the fair compete on the same lampposts
with decidedly less festive signs reading, “NYPD Security Camera in
Area.”

Counting and mapping the cameras that were already in place is a
project of the
NYCLU. The organization’s activists tallied 2,397 cameras
watching public places, just in Manhattan. Outer-borough counts are
yet to come. But the vast majority of those 2,000+ cameras are
privately owned. Only an estimated 300
were installed and maintained by government agencies. So the 200
new additions represent a major upping of the ante, even if they
remain temporary.

Private cameras are usually used to protect property and deter
or record crime against specific people and businesses. But public
cameras can be networked together and monitored by people who have
the coercive power of the state at their command.

“Government has the power to investigate, prosecute, and
potentially jail people and that’s a very different thing from
doing what officers did in Boston which is responding to a known
crime by reviewing existing footage,” Peter Bibring of the American
Civil Liberties Union of Southern California
told Reason TV last May.

So, the installation of 200 new police-controlled cameras may
not be such a positive thing.

See Reason TV’s post-Boston bombing take on the new enthusiasm
for surveillance cameras.