It's Hard to be a Saint in the City

I'll admit I missed this story when it first broke, but caught up last week thanks to the Los Angeles Times and Keith Olbermann. Apparently, so did everyone else.

The News: Turns out my hometown of Lancaster, PA will soon have 165 closed-circuit TV cameras watching our four square miles of land. The total bill is about $3 million, mostly from private businesses and donors. In an LA Times story written by Bob Drogin last week, Lancaster is painted as a quaint locale lost in time (okay, you got us) that is now one of the most watched cities in the country.

Don't worry, there's the sufficient amount of creepiness in the story that one would hope for. One camera operator, Doug Winglewich, watched dozens of camera feeds in silence, waiting for the police scanner to announce an address near one of them.

From that, you get stuff like, "He called up another feed and focused on a woman sitting on the curb. 'You get to know people's faces," he said. "She's been arrested for prostitution.'"

Truthfully, I don't care very much about the surveillance because the cameras are watching public places and are funded mostly by private dollars. It's the funding that's the kicker; as Lancaster loses money with tourism falling across the board, dropping millions on security cameras would be ridiculous.

But as for the privacy part, well, these things are monitoring public streets. I don't see much of a difference between what they are recording and Google Street View. It's just another step in a direction we've been heading for years.

About 125 people showed up downtown for a protest of these cameras, but so what? City officials said before the national attention that few complained. It's fun to protest, but there are many more important topics. And is there anything else to put on signs than "1984"? There must be.

Regardless of personal paranoia and the insufferable "slippery slope" argument, I hope we can all agree on the brilliance of the story's conclusion. Thanks for these two 'graphs, Mr. Drogin.

"But Jack Bauer, owner of the city's largest beer and soft drink distributor, calls the network 'a great thing.' His store hasn't been robbed, he said, since four cameras went up nearby.

'There's nothing wrong with instilling fear,' he said."

Of course Jack Bauer will take whatever means necessary. American heroes deserve all the help they can get.

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The Los Angeles Times story from last Sunday

A followup today on a city rally against the cameras, enjoyable if only for the "TalkBack" comments that always spiral out of control.