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Washington, D.C., puts itself under surveillance James Hohmann WASHINGTON -- From a dimly lit room in a secure command center, 21 streaming video feeds from 4,775 surveillance cameras around the nation's capital are projected across three screens and monitored at all hours. Every few seconds, footage from a different location pops up -- a busy road, a picnic bench, the entrance to the new baseball stadium. Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is trying to set up one of the most comprehensive centrally controlled visual surveillance systems in the world. In the nerve center, which opened last month, the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency can monitor video from four city agencies -- covering streets, schools, housing projects, parks and roads -- for threats and other nefarious activities. For those who have accepted the city's fate as a prime terrorist target, this may be cause for relief. But to the many civil liberties groups headquartered in Washington, the move undermines privacy, encourages abuse and represents the first step toward a surveillance system like London's, where a person's every public move can be tracked on about 10,000 government-funded cameras that have been dubbed a "ring of steel."
(Article continues below) Soon, Fenty hopes, the system will include feeds from 5,625 cameras run by eight agencies, including the Metropolitan Police Department. But critics, including members of the District of Columbia Council, want to slow down. "The program was announced without any detail or planning around who would have access, for what purpose, and what would happen with any video or digital archive," said Councilman Phil Mendelson, who spearheaded a measure, approved June 3, to strictly limit how the cameras are used until the council can approve standards. The video program's future is somewhat blurry. Darrell L. Darnell, director of the agency that runs the new monitoring center, told the council: "All policies are still in draft and awaiting formal legal review." At least until that review is complete,the council has ordered the consolidated system to use the standards created in 2006 for the Police Department's camera program. The standards require that footage be kept only 10 days unless it is believed relevant to a criminal investigation, and that the public be alerted as cameras are installed.
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