Lancaster, Pennsylvania, population 55,000, is about to become the most surveilled city in the U.S.
According to the LATimes, Lancaster is about to embark on a project installing 165 closed-circuit TV cameras in all of the city’s public spaces. That’s probably the highest number of CCTV cameras per capita in the U.S. and according to the Times, it’s actually more cameras in terms of raw numbers than are present in big cities like San Francisco and Boston.
This news by itself is enough to engender all sorts of hand-wringing over privacy and security issues and living-in-fear-of-Big-Brother scenarios, but what’s really interesting about the Lancaster story is that the budget-strapped city is relying on an all-volunteer army of Big Brothers (and, one presumes, Big Sisters) — citizen vigilantes who will take turns monitoring all of the public cameras.
Knowing how tough it is to find volunteers to bag groceries at the local food co-op, I wonder about the practicality of finding enough volunteers to monitor 165 different video feeds 24/7 — video feeds that will certainly be astoundingly boring to look at the vast majority of the time — but assuming this crowd-sourcing plan works, it certainly raises some interesting questions…
If privacy is really going away, I for one prefer an open source type of surveillance program to a police state. I’m not suggesting that Lancaster is onto something brilliant — I think the city is reacting out of fear and not thinking through all of the implications of their plan — but I also think the knee-jerk negative reactions to this story should be carefully reconsidered from an if-not-this-then-what perspective. If you think the answer is simply to protect the privacy of citizens from all electronic surveillance, then I say good luck with that plan, Sisyphus Q. Luddite! Let us know how that works out for you.
[...] [This post ws crossposted at The Contrarian] [...]