Staring Down Terrorism
Juliet Samuel | July 10, 2007, 11:16am
At a start-up cost of $90 million, and maintenance costs of $8 million a year, London-style surveillance is
coming to New York. Having obtained less than a third of the money needed ($25 million), New York's finest are about to install thousands of cameras and license plate readers in Lower Manhattan:
Three thousand surveillance cameras would be installed below Canal Street by the end of 2008, about two-thirds of them owned by downtown companies. Some of those are already in place. Pivoting gates would be installed at critical intersections; they would swing out to block traffic or a suspect car at the push of a button.
Yet:
There is little evidence to suggest that security cameras deter crime or terrorists, said James J. Carafano, a senior fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington.
As is customary in surveillance societies, the whole project is coming in with no public consultation whatsoever.
Julian Sanchez has looked at ever-more powerful surveillance technology; Ronald Bailey protested the total surveillance society, and Katherine Mangu-Ward has examined the extent of surveillance nation. Reason analyzed the advantages of databasification in June 2004.
Dave W. | July 10, 2007, 1:00pm | #
Paging Dave W., we need a cleanup on thread 121293...
Actually, I would rather tell a little story. One time a city decided to install CCTV's everywhere. Very expensive ones. The city was quite concerned about terrorists you see.
Sure enough, a couple of terrorists did come along. We will call them Billly and Kal. They brought a couple of vehicles, filled with gasoline and nails into the city. their plan was to blow up these vehicles remotely in front of a nightclub. It was hoped, by the terrorists, that many nightclub patrons would die. What that was supposed to accomplish is not clear, but: (i) these were nutty terrorists; and (ii) people die in Iraq for no good reason all the time. Whatever their real reasons, and we may never know, Billy and Kal were dedicated to their plan. One summer night they drove the cars and parked them Frank Dreben stylee in front of the nightclub.
Now the CCTV cameras of the city caught Billy and Kal in the act. Nobody yet knew what Billy and Kal were doing, but, of course, the unblinking eye of those expensive CCTV systems see all, and they record it, too. Those cameras did record Billy and Kal and they recorded them but good.
With the cars parked in place, Billy and Kal retreated away from the CCTV cameras and began to attempt remote detonation of the bombs. At this point, the city caught a break. The bombs failed to go off due to faulty design. Making a bomb is hard, and Billy and Kal failed at it, miserably, at least on these first two attempts.
The bombs, unexploded were discovered in both cars in due course. Heroic bomb squadders dismantled the unexploded bombs and the city was safe, at least for the time being.
After the bombs were discovered, the police of the city decided to promptly look into the CCTV footage in order to see what the bombers looked like. They quickly found the footage of Billy and Kal and it was crystal clear. They did not have names, but they had faces -- and that is always a good start to a police investigation.
At this point one of the policemen suggested that the pictures be released to the public so that members of the public could tell the police who these mad bombers were and perhaps also give a location. After all, these bombers at large were a ticking time bomb of sorts -- they could strike again at any time. When you have a ticking time bomb, the one police guy suggested, then you take extraordinary measures to make sure that it does not go off in the form of another attack. This policeman pointed out that the public had helped catch the Unabomber and the notorious DC Snipers -- and in this case there were crystal clear pictures, which is a lot more than they had in those other cases.
The other policemen, sadly, nixed this suggestion that the CCTV footage be turned over to the public. The other policemen were quite confident that the police could handle the ticking time bomb scenario without help from the public. What is more, by handling it themselves, the police would increase their stature in the eyes of the public, and perhaps even get more funding to create more jobs in the police force. Besides, releasing CCTV footage to the public would set a bad precedent. If the public got its footage this time, then they would come to expect it after every terrorist attack. The police decided that they could not have that.
So the police valiantly sought the terrorists at large. They had some nice leads; they did some nice work. Unfortunately, luck had run out. The terrorists used their reprieve after the failed bombing to plan a suicide attack. They scouted a crowded building, out at the airport, that had a nice wide door, and no security bollards blocking it. So, they loaded up another car with explosives (better ones this time) and nails and drove out to the airport in order to set off that car bomb and burn that crowded building down.
Because the terrorists were now willing to commit suicide, they no longer needed to rely on a remote detonator. They drove to the airport, drove into the crowded building through the door, running over several old ladies along the way. Once inside the croded building, before anyone really had a chance to react they detonated the bomb. Dozens were killed in the initial explosion -- ripped aprt by nails and panels. the ensuing fire was worse. Panic among the burning people was rife. Toddlers died. Puppies and kittens smothered in their holding cages on the acrid smoke. People of all colors and creeds perished in that terrible airport fire. When they finally counted the dead, the human death toll, not counting the two terrorists stood at 75. The world was outraged and started many wars where it was okay to shoot people of the same religion as Billy and Kal.
Some conspiracy minded members of the public wanted to know, in the aftermath, whether the police had any CCTV footage. However, more sensible voices drownded these out. It doesn't matter if the police have these images or not because the police would have had to have superhuman powers of ratiocination to understand that the release of these pictures could have been helpful while Billy and Kal were at large between the first and second bombings. The police can't be expected superhuman -- they are just human like everybody else!!! Besides, even if they released the CCTV footage, there is a chance Billy and Kal would have successfully executed the second attack anyway. After all, there was only 37 hours between the first and second attack. It is quite possible that they might not have been seen or recognized in such a short time span. Even Jack Bauer (T.'s hero) gets 24 hours.
Over at the
HnR board, one lone man would not shut up about the CCTV footage, going on about it like it was some kind of indictment of police competence or perhaps something more sinister. One of the
HnR regulars was even inspired to invent a new filter so that this guy's annoying posted were automatically transformed into paeans to the sponsors of
Reason magazine, the people to whom we owe the existence of this very platform. The filter was widely adopted, and it was a small silver lining to a terrible tragedy.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and any similarity to people, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
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farceswannamo.com
