[118397] in Cypherpunks
IP: Protesters turn tables on city's security cameras
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Sun Sep 26 18:13:49 1999
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Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:28:52 -0400
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From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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From: "Dan S" <ds1999@subdimension.com>
To: "IP" <ignition-point@precision-d.com>
Subject: IP: Protesters turn tables on city's security cameras
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 15:38:18 -0400
Sender: owner-ignition-point@precision-d.com
Reply-To: "Dan S" <ds1999@subdimension.com>
Status: U
>From the Boston Globe,
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/266/region/Protesters_turn_tables_on_city:.s
html
-
Protesters turn tables on city's security cameras
By Tom Hays, Associated Press, 09/23/99 13:41
NEW YORK (AP) Big Brother, whether he likes or not, is watching Bill Brown.
In the subway, parks and dark corners where government and businesses point
security cameras around Manhattan, Brown and his cohorts pop up like
annoying Little Brothers with props: crudely drawn placards cryptically
quoting Orwell ''We will meet in a place where there is no darkness'' and a
boom box sounding mock emergency broadcasts.
''America is now under martial law,'' one broadcast warns. ''Shut up. Be
happy. Obey all orders. Relax. Everything is done for you.''
Part performance art, part political protest, Brown's theatrics are the work
of what he calls the Surveillance Camera Players.
SCP is composed of about two dozen self-described anarchists. According to
their manifesto, members view hidden cameras as ''a tool of social control.
... The group intends to explode the myth that only those who are doing
something wrong fear surveillance cameras.''
Brown, 40, is a media-friendly, chain-smoking subversive with a sense of
humor, a former literature professor who now gets by as a legal proofreader
on a graveyard shift. He views Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a ''mean bastard''
who has turned City Hall into his own Ministry of Love, manipulating the
masses under the banner of ''public safety.''
The native New Yorker founded SCP in 1996 in response to the proliferation
of video surveillance around the city.
''It's hard not to view it all as a conspiracy,'' he said.
SCP's early guerrilla productions mainly performed in subways until broken
up by police included rapid-fire, dumbed-down versions of ''1984,''
''Waiting for Godot'' and ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'' Since then,
the group has been a regular feature on an anarchist Website
www.panix.com/~notbored gotten international media coverage and started
writing its own plays.
''It began as a few people fooling around,'' Brown said. ''Now, we're a
serious group.''
The SCP has had no trouble being watched: A 1998 survey by the New York
Civil Liberties Union found more than 2,300 surveillance cameras trained on
public spaces in Manhattan. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
alone reportedly operates more than 1,200 cameras throughout airports,
bridges, tunnels and terminals, most monitored from a control room in the
World Trade Center.
The group's latest stage is popular Washington Square Park, a notorious
drug-dealing spot in the heart of Greenwich Village where police have
installed high-tech, remote-control cameras designed to look like ordinary
street lamps. Zoom lenses feed monitors watched by police officers in a
mobile command center at the park's south end.
On a recent Saturday, the officers were treated to the premiere of
''Headline News.'' The performance, a send-up of a newscast, included Brown
slowly banging a drum while other players silently flashed placards showing
a NATO bomb and titled ''World News,'' an assault rifle ''National News''
and a horned-and-fanged Giuliani ''Local News.''
Passersby were handed fliers warning, ''You are being watched. ... Not only
can you and your movements be tracked wherever you are in this open-air
prison, but every one of your facial expressions is visible too.''
The mayor and police officials deny any sinister motives. They have defended
the cameras' use in housing projects and other areas, touting them as an
effective and popular crime-fighting tool. Besides, Police Commissioner
Howard Safir has argued, ''You have no right to privacy in a public place.''
In an interview, Brown disagreed. Rampant video surveillance, he argued,
infringes on a right New Yorkers hold dear: anonymity.
''We're in a place where people want to blend in,'' he said. ''It runs
against the very texture of New York. ... The society I would like is where
people police themselves, not where people police us by increasingly
impersonal means.''
Asked about a magazine article describing him as ''mildly paranoid,'' Brown
set the record straight.
''I'm VERY paranoid,'' he said.
--
Dan S
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
