Chicago moving to 'smart' surveillance cameras

A highly advanced system of video surveillance that Chicago officials plan to install by 2006 will make people here some of the most closely observed in the world. Mayor Richard M. Daley says it will also make them much safer.

Last I checked, London has been installed cameras all over the place, and its citizens are now the most surveiled nation in the world. But they are also having serious crime problems, and the cameras don't seem to be helping.

"Cameras are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes," Daley said when he unveiled the new project this month. "They're the next best thing to having police officers stationed at every potential trouble spot."

The difference between a pair of police eyes and a camera is that the camera can't pull his gun and save your ass if he sees something happening. Worse, criminals will learn to spot and avoid cameras, just as they learn to spot and avoid policeman... except it's harder to move the cameras.

Oh, and if you stationed a police officer at every potential trouble spot, you've be living in a police state. I guess Chicaco now qualifies.

Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor's new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap.

Over two thousand cameras. How long before they are calling for one in every home? And what will these cameras be watching for? Serious crimes, like muggings, murders, terrorist incidents? Well, here's the criteria:

Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately.

Well, hell. I occasionally wander around aimlessly in circles. Does that make me a terrorist? And I linger outside public buildings, too. And wait... I've pulled to the side of the road more than once! Oh my god! Where can I turn myself in?

When the system is in place, Huberman said, video images will be instantly available to dispatchers at the city's 911 emergency center, which receives about 18,000 calls each day. Dispatchers will be able to tilt or zoom the cameras, some of which magnify images up to 400 times, in order to watch suspicious people and follow them from one camera's range to another's.

I wonder how many times that tilt and zoom functionality will be used to watch some nice T&A... and I don't mean "Terrorists and Asphault!" For that matter, I pity the ex-wife whose husband works in the surveillance center.

City officials counter that the cameras will monitor only public spaces. Rather than curb the system's future expansion, they have raised the possibility of placing cameras in commuter and rapid transit cars and on the city's street-sweeping vehicles.

"We're not inside your home or your business," Mayor Daley said. "The city owns the sidewalks. We own the streets and we own the alleys."

That's the best argument I've ever seen for privatizing the roads.