[Reader-list] NYTimes: As Security Cameras Sprout, Someone's Always Watching (Dean E. Murphy)

[Harsh Kapoor]

The New York Times
September 29, 2002  

As Security Cameras Sprout, Someone's Always Watching
By DEAN E. MURPHY

ORTERVILLE, Calif., Sept. 27 ‹ This is the kind of place, small and 
out of the way, where people keep count of things taken for granted 
elsewhere.

Three McDonald's restaurants, including the one in the Wal-Mart. One 
Starbucks, new. Nine screens at the Galaxy theater. Seventy-three 
jobs at Mervyn's department store.

But even in this town, pushed against the parched foothills of the 
Sierra Nevada, where oranges and dairy cows seem as plentiful as 
people, at least one big-city item creates little excitement.

"Surveillance cameras?" asked Donnette Carter of the Porterville 
Chamber of Commerce. "Offhand, I couldn't tell you."

With the recent arrest of a woman in Indiana whom a security camera 
videotaped beating her daughter in a parking lot, the presence of 
electronic eyes across America has drawn new attention.

But what security and privacy specialists have long known might 
surprise people in towns like this: the surveillance equipment is 
everywhere, not just in big cities and at obvious places like Times 
Square or outside the White House, but also in Porterville and 
Mishawaka, Ind., and hundreds of other places.

More often than not, private rather than public hands are controlling 
the lenses, as was the case in Indiana.

"There is the very deep notion of private property in our culture, 
that if you own it, you can do what you want with it," said William 
G. Staples, a University of Kansas sociology professor who has 
written two books about surveillance. "That has contributed to the 
proliferation of surveillance cameras on the private side. It is only 
since Sept. 11 that the public side has been catching up with what 
the private sector has been doing for a long time."

There has been much discussion since Sept. 11 of the growing role of 
government as Big Brother, with law enforcement agencies turning to 
tools like face-recognition technology at airports and closed-circuit 
television systems in public buildings. But Professor Staples and 
other surveillance experts suggest the general debate should include 
"Tiny Brothers," a term he and others use to describe the many 
private security cameras that most people quietly tolerate or do not 
think about.

Tiny Brothers might be less known, but they disturb people who worry 
about civil liberties.

"I don't know if we want to uncover everything that goes on," 
Professor Staples said. "The cameras function as a net-widening 
effect, catching all kinds of activities they may not have been 
intended to catch. Those cameras in the parking lot could zoom over 
someone in a romantic tryst in a car. Do we really want to know all 
of this?"

The Security Industry Association estimates that at least two million 
closed-circuit television systems are in the United States. A survey 
of Manhattan in 1998 by the American Civil Liberties Union found 
2,397 cameras fixed on places where people pass or gather, like 
stores and sidewalks. All but 270 were operated by private entities, 
the organization reported. CCS International, a company that provides 
security and monitoring services, calculated last year that the 
average person was recorded 73 to 75 times a day in New York City.

"We went out and counted every camera we could find," said Arielle 
Jamil, a company spokeswoman. "Some have dummy cameras, but the real 
one is looking at you from a different direction."

Here in Porterville, four cameras are mounted above the entrance to 
Wal-Mart. Mervyn's has one outside and one inside its front door. 
Some dangle above the tellers in banks on Olive Avenue, and others 
capture images of visitors and patients strolling the halls at Sierra 
View District Hospital. The town's biggest employer, the Wal-Mart 
Distribution Center, has cameras perched like pigeons on its 
warehouses.

The list goes on, and it is growing. For about a year, Tom Barcellos, 
a dairy farmer, has had them watching his employees in a milking 
parlor on the outskirts of town. A few months ago he turned to the 
videotapes to resolve a dispute that had ended in a shoving match 
between two employees. Pleased with the result, Mr. Barcellos is 
adding cameras to monitor what goes on outdoors on his farm, which 
has about 800 cows.

"It is more or less a precautionary thing, something to fall back 
on," he said. "I understand the arguments against them, but I don't 
worry because I am not doing anything wrong. I consider it security. 
The people with the biggest problem seem to have a guilty conscience 
and have something to hide."

This summer, the Sierra View hospital added cameras to cover a 
parking garage for doctors and employees. The system is connected to 
a computer, which a security official can use to focus the lenses to 
show the faces of people inside cars. Across town, school officials 
were so upset when the new Burton Middle School was covered with 
graffiti before it opened that they decided to install four 
surveillance cameras on the grounds.

"There is a great increase everywhere," said Ronald L. Irish, vice 
president of S.T.O.P. Alarm, a Porterville security company hired to 
install the school's cameras. "I even get calls about two or three 
times a month from people wanting to put cameras around their homes."

One of the nation's biggest suppliers of video security equipment, 
Pelco, is based just north of here in Clovis, Calif. Company 
officials said commercial uses for the equipment far outnumbered 
public uses, even with new concerns about terrorism.

Dave Smith, Pelco's vice president for marketing, said many companies 
were still evaluating their needs after Sept. 11, so an expected 
surge in sales had not yet occurred.

Even so, a market research firm in Connecticut that specializes in 
security, the J. P, Freeman Company, estimates that the digital video 
surveillance market is growing 15 percent a year, about four times as 
fast as the security industry as a whole, as companies seek better 
surveillance systems and images.

"That growth is quite remarkable against the soft economy," said Joe 
P. Freeman, the company's chief executive. "In the end, a picture is 
worth a thousand words. All other forms of security provide you with 
data, not pictures. People want images stored in a huge storage file 
so that if anything is discovered later they can go back and see what 
happened."

Law enforcement officials almost everywhere have encouraged the 
trend. Videotaped images generally strengthen criminal cases and take 
a big load off the investigators trying to piece together a crime.

In some cases, trade organizations have also become involved.

Michael Marsh, the chief executive of the Western United Dairymen, 
said his group had recommended surveillance equipment to help deter 
animal rights extremists and more recently to cope with threats of 
bioterrorism. Private security officials in gambling towns, like 
Reno, Nev., informally share data from cameras mounted outside 
casinos. Wayne Harvey, chairman of the Reno-Sparks Security Directors 
Association, said new cameras were constantly being added in areas 
not related to gambling.

"The surveillance systems are just as important in the back of the 
house," Mr. Harvey said. "There is talk of getting Big Brother, but 
it is a necessary evil in this day and time."

Mr. Staples, the Kansas professor, said public attitudes about the 
cameras had changed and tended to be generational. When he speaks 
about his research to older audiences, he said, he inevitably hears 
cries of outrage and complaints about the infringement of civil 
liberties. Younger audiences, like a high school philosophy class he 
addressed recently, are far more accepting, having grown up with 
images of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles officers and 
reality television shows, like "Big Brother," that extol 
camera-driven voyeurism.

The Sept. 11 attacks might also have created a sense that it is 
unpatriotic to oppose surveillance. In Quincy, Calif., a tiny 
mountain town in rural Plumas County, a three-term county supervisor 
is facing a recall by his constituents because of his stance on 
surveillance cameras. The supervisor, Robert A. Meacher, unplugged 
some surveillance equipment set up by the sheriff's department at a 
music festival last July. It was apparently intended to monitor drug 
sales.

Mr. Meacher has since apologized for having used some extreme 
language in criticizing the sheriff's department's tactics, and he 
said he might not have opposed the equipment if someone had told him 
about it in advance. Nonetheless, the recall petition accuses him of 
being against law enforcement, and many people in the sheriff's 
department are still angry with him.

"The very fact that you raise a question makes you suspect, makes you 
anti-American," Mr. Meacher said. "It's, `Whose side are you on?' It 
shouldn't be like that. I can't help but think of the Buffalo 
Springfield song: `Step out of line, and the man comes and takes you 
away.' "


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