Surveillance, online and off

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller met with executives from Google, Microsoft, AOL, Comcast, Verizon…last Friday at the Justice Department to ask the firms to “keep histories of the activities of Web users for up to two years to assist in criminal investigations of child pornography and terrorism,” according to a report in USA Today.com.

Such a request would most likely not surprise the New York Surveillance Camera Players, a NYC-based organization which leads free walking tours around NYC, pointing out the 10,000 plus surveillance cameras which dot the urban landscape:

You don’t notice them until you’re looking for them: the tiny cameras perched above the doorways of buildings, focused on the sidewalks below. But surveillance cameras are everywhere — in the subways, behind deli counters, in dressing rooms, outside housing projects and suspended next to every traffic light in the city,” according to NYC24, a “production” of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

The Players map the locations of surveillance cameras, point them out to participants on the tours, and sometimes perform public performance pieces in front of the cameras.

Surveillance Cameras mapped in Times Square. Source: NYC24.org, with information from Bill Brown, Surveillance Camera Players.

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