You have already seen the private security footage that sparked
the manhunt of the two Boston terrorism suspects, Tamerian and
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The footage shows the value of cameras in
fighting terrorism.

After the images were released by the FBI, representative
Peter King of New York
praised surveillance cameras, calling them, “a great law
enforcement method and device,” and
New York City Police Comissioner Ray Kelly said, “The more
cameras the better and I think the privacy issue has really been
taken off the table.”

But civil liberties advocates like Peter Bibring of
the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California say
that there is a big difference between obtaining private security
footage and government run cameras like those praised by Rep. King
and Commissioner Kelly.

“Government has the power to investigate, prosecute, and
potentially jail people and that’s a very different thing from
doing what officers did in Boston which is responding to a known
crime by reviewing existing footage,” said Bibring to Reason
TV.

Bibring points out that city surveillance cameras don’t just
capture your image. A typical city surveillance system includes
cameras that are networked together that can compare information
from camera to camera and store the images in a central location
for long periods of time.

While you don’t have a privacy interest in being seen on a
public street, you have a privacy interest in information about you
being stored by law enforcement.

“I think the problem that we are seeing now is the technology is
evolving so quickly and there are so many new ways for police to
listen to communications, to monitor people’s location, to get
information about us, that the law is just not keeping up in
addressing what the right answer is,” says Bibring. 

Produced by Paul Detrick. Shot by Tracy Oppenheimer and Zach
Weissmuller.

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