By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.
The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.
If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.
This should send a tremor of fear through us all. This road, once begun, has only one ending, universal surveillance, and Big Brother will deliver all it has promised. In defending such a surveillance move, we already see black being white, that this perpetual eye is simply there to limit criminality.
This should be intolerable. LM
Larry,
The US government is determined both to invade the world and invite the world. Thus, ever greater security measures are accepted by a cowardly populace.
Anyway, have you ever seen Dick Wolf’s TV show Law & Order? Manhattan is apparently full of upper-middle class white people raping and killing each other. This Initiative will go a long way towards stopping the carnage.
Then again, the ACLU will haul the city into court, won’t they?