Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Reality TV
Thousands of surveillance cameras are watching Boston, but for what?
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

EVER SINCE the Democratic National Convention, held last July, the city of Boston has been wired with more than 1000 government-owned cameras capable of monitoring large swaths of downtown Boston 24 hours a day from a single command post, anywhere in the world. Hundreds of cameras were scattered all over the city before, but only since the big upgrade last summer have they been so numerous and made so effective through networking. Now, law-enforcement and national-security officials, both here and in Washington, DC, can watch you walk pretty much uninterrupted from South Station to the FleetCenter. Police credit this network of cameras with helping to keep a lid on the protesters who many feared would turn violent during the convention. The camera network was redeployed last weekend by the Boston Police Department, according to a department spokesperson, to prevent a repeat of the rioting that marred last year’s Super Bowl and American League pennant victories.

With last summer’s improvements to law-enforcement’s ability to watch the person on the street — on every street — the city has begun to feel like a fishbowl. According to information gleaned from spokespersons and official literature, federal agencies (Federal Protective Service, Coast Guard) have at least 80 cameras watching the city; various state agencies (Turnpike Authority, MBTA, Massport, Highway Department) have about 1000 in the Boston area; and city agencies (Transportation Department, Police Department) have another three dozen or so. That doesn’t include the state police, which will not disclose how many it operates. Nor does it include the city’s colleges and universities, which have proven perfectly willing to supply live feeds from their campus-security networks to the authorities, as Boston University and Northeastern University did this past Sunday. Then there are the thousands of surveillance cameras operated by private companies throughout the city for their own security — any of whose recordings investigators can and often do seize.

We don’t know much more than that. We don’t know when this web of mechanical eyes might be used and for what purposes, or even where the cameras are. "It’s a big mystery," says Urszula Masny-Latos, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. "Depending on whom you talk to, you get a different answer."

The National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others have expressed serious concern about this tremendous intrusion on Bostonians’ privacy, especially since it has occurred with little public discussion or internal oversight. And what has the "surveillance industrial complex," as the ACLU dubs it, given us in return? Violent crime, property crime, robbery, and burglary all occur at pretty much the same rate now as they did five years ago. The cameras have also failed to boost the rate at which police solve these crimes. And yet, more cameras are on their way up.

TAKE A LOOK around the next time you are in Copley Square, the Financial District, Downtown Crossing, any downtown T station, or the DNC’s ground zero: the area around the FleetCenter. Video cameras are now a universal architectural feature. Many can be operated remotely, to swivel and to zoom in on a license plate or a face, and they can take biometric images for comparison and identification. Some are being monitored somewhere at all times. Some save images for a short time and then tape over them (federal agencies’ cameras, for instance, are on a 48-hour loop); some compile endless footage, which is saved indefinitely. Quite simply, when you are out and about in Boston, you have to assume that somebody could be watching you now, and might be able to watch you later.

Before the DNC came to town, the City of Boston, the MBTA, and the Federal Protective Service (part of the Homeland Security Department) awarded contracts worth about $1.5 million to a Newport, Rhode Island, company called LiveWave to set up network video for live monitoring, both in the command center in Boston and back in Washington, DC.

The command center is gone, but the network is still in place. Those cameras can feed their images live over the Internet, which means they can go anywhere. For Sunday’s Super Bowl, the Boston Police Department pulled together a command center with feeds from local universities’ and state-police cameras in the Kenmore Square–Northeastern area, as well as from its own temporarily deployed cameras. "We were tied into Boston University and Northeastern University, with live feed into the command center," says BPD spokesperson Thomas Sexton. "Now those feeds are gone." This was a special-security situation, of course — but as we have learned, it’s easy to define the entire post-9/11 world as a special-security situation. There is precious little in the way of guidelines on when and how the BPD should set up such a command center — an issue that the state’s ACLU chapter is trying to discuss with police officials. Will next Monday’s BU-Northeastern Beanpot final qualify? Graduation Day? Reports of suspicious Chinese nationals who may be carrying dirty bombs?

Even less certain is how the federal government puts these video feeds to use. Based on its existing contracts, the Homeland Security Department is moving ahead with round-the-clock surveillance projects — for example, LiveWave is now developing a system that will allow officials in DC to watch all ships going in and out of all the nation’s ports — so it’s unlikely that it will disconnect systems it’s already hooked up in Boston.

We can hope that the feds are using all this visual information wisely in their efforts to protect us from terrorists — and not, for instance, to randomly snap and save images of Arabic-looking faces for a biometric database.

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: February 11 - 17, 2005
Back to the News & Features table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group