Keeping an eye on security cameras

October 9, 2002

Free Market Foundation

With the recent arrest of a women in Indiana, USA caught by a security camera beating her daughter in a parking lot, the presence of electronic eyes across America has drawn new attention.

Surveillance cameras are most often operated by private companies and private landowners but government agencies have been stepping up their own operations since Sept. 11.

Once confined to big cities and places like Times Square and the White House, they have proliferated and are now found in many a small town.

The American Security Industry Association estimates that at least two million closed-circuit television system are in operation in the U.S.

A survey of Manhattan in 1998 by the American Civil Liberties Union uncovered 2,397 cameras fixed to places where people pass or gather with all but 270 of them being operated by private entities.

This shouldn’t be surprising, according to one surveillance expert, who says there is a notion about private property deeply imbedded in American culture if you own it, you can do what you want to with it. However, some critics believe the web of private cameras should be as much a part of the civil liberties debate as the burgeoning use by government of surveillance cameras.

CCS International, a security and monitoring-services company, calculated last year that the average person was recorded 73 to 75 times a day in New York City.

Experts estimate that the digital video surveillance market is growing about 15 percent a year four times as fast as the security industry as a whole.

Source: Dean E. Murphy, As Security Cameras Sprout, Someone’s
Always Watching, New York Times, September 29, 2002.

For text http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/29/technology/29TAPE.html
For more on Privacy issues http://www.ncpa.org/iss/eco/

FMF Policy Bulletin\1 October 2002