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Comment by Kevin Burrell on July 23, 2008 at 10:20pm

Art, Tech and surveillance...

Plan to use private cameras to help city surveillance

July 23, 2008
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BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Businesses, high-rises and even private homes with exterior surveillance cameras could share their video with Chicago’s 911 center to create a panoramic view of disaster scenes, under a plan advanced Wednesday that could dramatically expand the city’s Big Brother reach.

No other city in the nation would have more surveillance cameras at its disposal if banks, bars and convenience stores take the city up on its unprecedented offer.

London has 500,000 cameras monitoring virtually every public move its citizens make. Chicagoans could someday approach that total, thanks to the ordinance sponsored by Mayor Daley and advanced by the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee.

It authorizes the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications to reach out en masse to private businesses and sign agreements with them to share video from their privately-owned surveillance cameras.

“We obviously can’t put cameras everywhere in 232 square miles of Chicago. But, during a major incident, video is extremely important,” said Jim Argiropoulos, acting executive director of the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

“This is the bakeries, the grocery stores, the bars that have outside cameras. …If you allow us to backhaul your video into the OEMC during a time of crisis, we could take a Homeland Security camera, a [police] pod and potentially a bakery, corner grocery or 7-11 and build a 360-degree view around that incident…so we can better see, better manage and better provide information to the people out on the scene.”

The public-private hook-up was made possible by software tied to Operation Virtual Shield. That’s the security grid that linked existing fiber optics into a single network and paved the way for hundreds more surveillance cameras, sophisticated software capable of spotting suspicious behavior and for mass transit cameras to be monitored by the 911 center.

“You’ll have a piece of network gear that will talk to a piece of network gear from us and, through software, we’ll establish that point-to-point relationship on a dedicated pipe that’s talking language only you and I can talk….What we’ll do is ride the Internet. It’ll be fully-encrypted video” that cannot be compromised by hackers, Argiropoulos said.

The American Civil Liberties Union was none too pleased about Chicago’s latest plunge into the Big Brother world of video surveillance.

Chicago has at least 2,250 cameras in the downtown area, 104 red-light cameras and 680 cameras in high-crime areas.

“When is enough going to be enough with regards to surveillance in this city?” ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka said.

“You see surveillance cameras on the streets, in schools, in buses. To inter-connect all of those systems with private systems really raises a question. Peoples’ behavior changes when they know they’re being watched. A city that has such pervasive surveillance sends the message that government is looking at them or has the potential to look at them wherever they are.”

Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce President Jerry Roper welcomed the city’s offer, calling it an alternative to the more radical plan that Mayor Daley once embraced to require every licensed Chicago business open more than 12 hours-a-day to install indoor and outdoor cameras.

“It’s voluntary. That’s where the business community believes it should be. You’ll find more businesses willing to embrace a voluntary program versus the old program, which we estimated was gonna cost anywhere from $400 to $600 per business,” he said.

Roper noted that the Oklahoma City bombing was solved, in part, by “a camera on an AT&T building that helped to target that van that had the bomb in it.” With that in mind, the chamber will promote the mayor’s plan and encourage its members to join the city’s camera network.

“It’s like you’re helping each other out. You’re watching my front door. I’m helping to watch your back door. We would embrace that. …It gives us those eyes when our police and fire can’t be in those locations,” Roper said.