Photo: akenekal

So the NYC Police announced they're expanding their downtown surveillance network to midtown, from 30th to 60th streets. One wonders when they'll just admit that they'd like to put surveillance cameras throughout the entire city.

I'll admit that I'm a supporter of congestion pricing, and that would necessarily require cameras to take shots of license plates and such - around the area perimeter, anyway. But one difference in that setup is that it would be run by the DOT or some other agency, which would hopefully have defined data retention policies, and have to respond formally to law enforcement requests for info. Having the police run the network means that they could just keep the info and pictures for whatever, whenever, however long they want - I've never seen the NYC Police department's 'data retention policy' for it's surveillance cameras (somebody please prove me wrong on that).

When even the NYC Police are putting together dossiers on protesters and other 'troublemakers', do you really want them indiscriminately tracking everyone? Sure, we'd all like to catch the real crazies, and prevent whatever the next attack might be, but at what cost to our basic rights?