WP,pg1: Federal Grants Bring Surveillance Cameras to Small Towns

[DeepModem Mom]

Federal Grants Bring Surveillance Cameras to Small Towns
Village in Vermont Has Almost as Many as D.C.
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 19, 2006; A01


BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. -- This snowy village, in the shadow of Fall Mountain and alongside the iced-over Connecticut River, is the kind of place where a little of anything usually suffices. There are just eight full-time police officers on the town's force, two chairs in the barbershop and one screen in the theater.

A little of anything -- except surveillance cameras. Bellows Falls has decided it needs 16 of those.

Using federal grant money, police plan to put up the 24-hour cameras at such spots as intersections, a sewage plant and the town square. All told, this hamlet will have just three fewer police surveillance cameras than the District of Columbia, which has 181 times Bellows Falls's population.

Similar cameras are already up in the Virginia communities of Galax and Tazewell, where police can pan right down Main Street, and in tiny Preston, Md., with two police officers and five police cameras. An interest in public, permanent video surveillance -- as well as the federal dollars to pay for it -- seems to be flowing down to the smallest levels of American law enforcement.

So far, the growth of small-town surveillance camera systems has not received much national notice. But it already seems to be changing the way such Mayberry-size places are policed....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011802324_pf.html

[SpiralHawk]

1. "All your privacy are belong to us." - BushCo NeoCON Fascists

eom

[OneBlueSky]

2. I read somewhere about a spray-on product that makes . . .

license plates virtually invisible to these cameras . . . and apparently they're selling a whole lot of it . . .

[CountAllVotes]

5. interesting!

Let us/me know if you find the name of it and where you can get it!

Thanks!

:kick:

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. I'm looking to buy a bee-keeper kind of hat

You know, something wide brimmed with a veil entirely covering my face. With a tall peak, to disguise my height. Or maybe a male version of a burqa. I wonder how long it will take the neo-fascists to prohibit wearing any kind of head or face covering in public.

[TechBear_Seattle]

4. I'm looking to buy a bee-keeper kind of hat

You know, something wide brimmed with a veil entirely covering my face. With a tall peak, to disguise my height. Or maybe a male version of a burqa. I wonder how long it will take the neo-fascists to prohibit wearing any kind of head or face covering in public.

[mongo]

6. I'm all for camera's in the public square

It's a good crime deterrent and there is no expectation of privacy walking down a public street.

If I had the money, I'd put a camera on the street corner behind the store, connect it to the internet and give the URL to the local vice squad.

[TheWraith]

7. Oh, hell no.

There's a big difference between no *expectation* of privacy, i.e. the knowledge that there are other people around, and the possibility that your every move is being videotaped and analyzed. The latter, I would certainly argue, is a violation of the 4th amendment. While you may be in public, your person is still inviolate against unreasonable searches, and be extension unreasonable surveilance. When a private individual does this, it's called stalking.

[hang a left]

8. Am with you on this. n/t

[kenny blankenship]

9. Wait...I know this story

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
...
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen.
...

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

[DeepModem Mom]

10. Wow, kb. Thanks for posting. nt

[Sven77]

11. cameras are everywhere, for new tax on driving

soon you will be taxed by the mile, toll roads everywhere. given to private corporations. RFID in the inspection stickers. GPS tracker hookups already in every car. This will be a nightmare.

[NVMojo]

12. I am fucking getting sick and tired of paying for the NEOCON AGENDA!