Surveillaaaance

The Week published this snippet of news in its "The world at a glance section...":

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/101405/The_world_at_a_glance____United_States

"New York City
Security blanket: A high-tech surveillance network, already in place in lower Manhattan, will blanket midtown Manhattan by 2011, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week. The network, extending from 30th Street to 60th Street and encompassing Times Square, will feed data from high-resolution cameras, license-plate readers, and weapons sensors to a central command center. Funded by a $24 million federal grant, the security system will cover Grand Central Station, Penn Station, the United Nations, and other landmarks. The announcement follows the unraveling of an alleged terrorist plot to explode homemade bombs in New York City. “We cannot afford to be complacent,” Bloomberg said. But civil-liberties activists raised alarms. “The fear is that the NYPD, without any oversight or public scrutiny, is creating a massive surveillance system,” said Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union.""

Crime and response measures have always functioned in some kind of pendulum swing--but since 9/11, the tolerance for the speed and sensitivity of the downswing has shrunk enormously. By all measures that I can tell, as a former New Yorker and general news-following person, New York has gotten safer and safer over the past twenty years. This is due to a number of things, and a certain measure of safety. Mayor Giuliani swept the city clean of drug addicts and homeless people, contributing to a sense of safety for everybody else, but creating another kind of crime against a population in great need of the city's help. Bloomberg has been accused of treading further down the path of Disneyfication, and from my own observations, Manhattan is wealthier and is home to more seemingy-transplanted, un-wacky people every time I visit, and the borders of the working class neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan just keep shifting up. What once began at 96th street now reaches 145th, etc.

So a rational fear of crime--the kind likely to be caught on surveillance cameras--is really not as big an issue in midtown as it once was, yet now this new system is being installed. The praise that politicians welcomed following 9/11 helped to cement a narrative about quick and unwavering action in the face of "terrorism," over which, it would seem to follow, we have limited intelligence control. I'm really interested in the timing of this response cycle, as it is playing out, in this case, in Manhattan.

First of all, it doesn't seem that people really push for empirical evidence that this kind of surveillance works. That would mean questioning the NYPD, and after 9/11, it's quite unpopular to do so when the threat involves "terrorism." Of course, there are instances of success, namely the intelligence operations that resulted in the capture of this latest homemade bomber. Why isn't that intelligence sufficient? This could be settled by a plea for vigilance and the very incidence of such thwarted threats, but Bloomberg's quote really hints at a different, additional can of worms: "We cannot afford to be complacent." The "We" has this massive silencing power, the direct definition of any other action as complacency. There's no way to question it without directly coming up against the issue of the collective good, a historical fear, a weird reverential relationship with authority, and the uncertainty and poor understanding of "terrorism."

For more on the NYCLU and their case, see http://www.nyclu.org/node/2624