TechMan has been meaning to comment on Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's plan for putting surveillance cameras all over the city as detailed in the PG story by Rich Lord.
Although it is hard to be against an idea aimed at improving law enforcement and public safety, there is something unsettling in the idea of a city that is watching its citizens constantly.
The mayor's plan calls for linking already-existing private cameras into a network, then adding license-plate-scanning cameras, then more cameras Downtown, then cameras in high-crime locations.
It doesn't seem very threatening if you are a law-abiding system. But think into the future if cameras become ubiquitous. Now combine that with face-recognition software and soon it becomes possible to trace the movements of individual citizens.
Does that information then become available for use in civil suits, for example?
Like many other things, the danger is that surveillance technology moves a lot faster than the agreement on how the resulting information should be used.
First Published: July 4, 2007, 5:00 a.m.
