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CNN Live At Daybreak

Civil Libertarians Bristle Over Use of Surveillance Cameras

Aired February 14, 2002 - 05:45   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: As safety here becomes a priority, surveillance is becoming a reality. You can expect to be monitored by cameras stationed at various locations across the nation's capital and other major cities. And that is creating quite a controversy.

CNN's Jeanne Meserve takes a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Outside Washington's Union Station, suspicious activity is picked up by a surveillance camera monitored by law enforcement at the city's joint operations operation command center.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well why don't we have one of the Capitol officers roll a car by there, all right?

MESERVE: When the car arrives, the man is gone. All appears to be fine. The District of Columbia has spent $7 million on this state- of-the-art facility, with the ability to monitor 88 cameras simultaneously.

TERRANCE GAINER, EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT CHIEF, D.C. METROPOLITAN POLICE: It really gives us the eyes that we need to see what's going on in the city.

MESERVE: The system was designed to monitor events like this, protests against the World Bank. The World Bank bristles with cameras, as do many other buildings in the city. They belong to federal law enforcement, private business, the transit and school systems.

And the new center can link up with several hundred of them. That makes civil libertarians fear that this country could become like Britain, where it's estimated that the average citizen is caught on surveillance cameras 300 times a day.

JEFFREY ROSEN, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: It increases the danger of discriminatory and voyeuristic surveillance. In Britain they found that the cameras tend to focus on younger women and also on minorities. So far from being an alternative to racial profiling, the cameras can actually exacerbate that danger.

GAINER: I don't think we can go overboard and should go overboard. And I think it's fair for people to question us.

MESERVE: Although Britain's system did capture the famous image of young Jamie Bulger being abducted, Rosen says it has not done what was intended.

ROSEN: In the city of London, where the cameras were implemented to catch terrorists after a bunch of attacks in 1993, they actually haven't caught a single terrorist on the basis of the cameras.

MESERVE: But despite concerns and questions, surveillance systems are already in place in cities like Tampa and Baltimore. The threat of terrorism seems to guarantee that in these places we are seeing the future. And you can almost bet it is seeing us.

Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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