Camera shy

NEW YORK CITY began as New Amsterdam, but a $90-million initiative by the police commissioner could make lower Manhattan into a new London -- a city under constant electronic watch. The commissioner wants to create a surveillance web with some 3,000 cameras monitoring streets, sidewalks and other public areas in the hope of stopping terrorists before they act.

It may be the most ambitious effort of its kind, but it’s hardly the only one. The federal Department of Homeland Security has made more than $1.4 billion available to cities for anti-terrorism projects in the past two years, much of it going to buy cameras and recording equipment.

In these security-conscious times, most people probably would accept a more watchful government if it reduced the risk of attack. The troubling thing about New York’s move, though, is that the only thing it’s guaranteed to diminish is privacy. There’s little proof that the money spent to equip and operate the system will do more for public safety than, say, hiring more cops. And while surveillance cameras in London and elsewhere have helped identify criminals after the fact, their ability to stop bad things from happening in the first place is widely questioned.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative will start this year with 116 cameras trained on the license plates of vehicles on roadways south of Canal Street, an area that includes TriBeCa, Chinatown and the financial district. Those lenses will be supplemented by thousands of public and private surveillance cameras, whose signals will be monitored live by a team of police and private security officers. The system also will include software that analyzes the video feeds for signs of something or someone suspicious. Such cutting-edge technologies are improving steadily but have yet to be proved effective in stopping an elaborately planned crime such as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Given the stakes involved, New Yorkers may embrace the system. Before they offer their complete support, however, they should insist that limits be placed on how long the recordings are kept and what information is routinely accumulated about people’s movements. Even with such controls, they run the risk that the cameras will be used to combat not just today’s menace, but also activities that fall out of favor tomorrow. The past few decades have been replete with tales of surveillance systems being used to track political and community activists, all under the rubric of guarding public safety. Once the cameras are up and running, who will decide what they’re used for?