Justified Paranoia: Someone Is Watching

Nov. 15, 2004 — -- There was a time when if you got the strange feeling someone was watching you, you could usually write it off to paranoia.

Those days are long gone.

Maybe you've gotten used to the idea that your every move will be recorded as you try to decide which snacks you want to buy in a convenience store or while you pump your gas, but in a growing number of towns and cities, the scrutiny you are under is becoming more intense.

Civil liberties groups estimate there are as many as 3 million surveillance cameras currently in operation in the United States, making it seem that the "surveillance society" civil libertarians warn about is already here. Was George Orwell just 20 years off?

"The case against the cameras is hard to make quickly, because it's more about the long-term effect of a surveillance society," said Jeffrey Rosen, a professor at George Washington University School of Law and author of "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age."

"It is quite feasible and easy to imagine a system of ubiquitous surveillance of anyone at any time," he said.

In New York City, a couple of groups have been trying to do something to help people avoid the attention and to try to bring greater attention to the issue.

The New York Bill of Rights Defense Campaign has begun a project to map surveillance cameras that are pointed at public spaces around the city. The project will initially map all the cameras in Manhattan and selected neighborhoods in the other boroughs, but the eventual goal is to cover the entire city, NYBORDC project director Udi Ofer said.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy, a technological research and development group that says it is "dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination," has created software that can be downloaded from its Web site that it says allows a user to plot a video surveillance-free path between any two points in Manhattan. The information on the location of the cameras was provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union, according to the Web site.

Ofer said the concern in New York is mostly about private surveillance cameras, but in other cities law enforcement itself is stepping up the use of surveillance technology.