Security Cameras Multiply in Manhattan

Law enforcement officials in the Big Apple are thrilled, but civil libertarians are dismayed as the use of surveillance cameras continues to grow in one of the nation’s biggest terrorist targets.

The Associated Press’ Tom Hays is reporting that the cameras are “multiplying at a dizzying rate all over Manhattan.” Hays says the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has enlisted a number of college students to find the cameras placed all over the city to “bolster their side of a simmering debate over whether surveillance cameras wrongly encroach on privacy, or effectively combat crime and even terrorism — as in the London bombings investigation, when the cameras were used to identify the bombers.”

According to Hays, the NYCLU found 2,397 cameras in the city in 1998, and at last count, have currently found more than 4,000. This preliminary total “only provides a glimpse of the magnitude of the problem,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman told Hays. “Nobody has a clue how many there really are.”

Hays is also reporting that The Metropolitan Transportation Authority “plans to spend up to $250 million to install new surveillance cameras in the city's vast subway system,” he says. Other cities are following suit, including in Chicago, where officials recently spent roughly $5 million on a 2,000-camera system, and in Washington, D.C., where Homeland Security officials have announced plans to spend $9.8 million for surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol. To read the full article, click here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050813/ap_on_re_us/terror_eyes_on_the_city