Criminal Camera

Chicago has installed 30 cameras across the city to record, prosecute, and deter crime. This article makes the system sound like the type of super-spy system seen in movies, but having worked with enough large, networked databases it's probably *much* more kludgey than described. David Brin has written at length about this sort of ubiquitous surveillance in "The Transparent Society" and its interesting to see it get rolled out in the US. Brin would like to see the cameras go up, but then make the feeds open to everyone via a browser. That way the police and civilians can use the camera to track each other.

I wonder if recorded surveillance footage can be called up for a trial on police brutality. Having the incident recorded will help secure a conviction in those cases, as well as making them rarer.