Bags over Birmingham surveillance cameras 'farcical'

Putting bags over cameras linked to counter terrorism in parts of Birmingham has been described as "farcical" by a privacy campaign group.

Big Brother Watch described the 218 cameras, put up in predominantly Muslim areas, as "excessive surveillance".

The Safer Birmingham Partnership (SBP) said it would not switch the cameras on until after a public consultation.

Plastic bags are being put over some of the overt cameras to reassure the public.

A number of the cameras installed are hidden.

The SBP said bags would not be placed over these because it did not want their locations revealed.

Dylan Sharpe, campaign director of Big Brother Watch, a group set up by the founders of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "Without a doubt I think some of these (cameras) should be removed.

"It is a farcical situation sticking plastic bags over them."

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NYC’s Terror-Spotting Spycams Stuck in Traffic

The New York Police Department thinks it may have caught the wannabe Times Square car bomber on tape — and is hoping to use a $24 million phalanx of surveillance cameras to stop future attacks in midtown Manhattan. It’s a goal that’s unlikely to be reached anytime soon. New York’s original spycam array is running behind schedule. And the track record of large, metropolitan surveillance networks pre-empting terrorists is weak, at best.

“NYC is a high risk area,” New York officials note in a homeland security grant request, obtained by City Limits magazine. “One threat in particular involves a vehicle-borne improvised explosive” — a car bomb.

In 2006, the New York Police Department announced a three-year, $106 million plan that promised to prevent attacks on New York’s financial district with a web of license-plate readers, chemical sniffers, radiation detectors and 3,000 publicly and corporately owned cameras. All the information would then be channeled into a single coordination center. Specialized video intelligence algorithms would be used to spot would-be attackers as they case their targets. “This is aboutidentifying and eliminating a threat, rather than dealing with the consequences,” NYPD assistant chief John Colgan told me as planning for this Lower Manhattan Security Initiative got underway. “I’m not in the consequence-management business.”

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Senate Subcommittee Considers Update to Wiretap Laws

A Senate subcommittee is looking at whether wiretap laws need to be updated to include secret video surveillance.

The field hearing in Philadelphia, which is being led by U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., comes amid a lawsuit accusing a Pennsylvania school district of spying on students through webcams installed on school-issued laptops.

An electronic privacy expert scheduled to testify, Kevin Bankston, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is urging Congress to include videotaped surveillance under federal wiretap laws, giving the same protections that are given to secret audio recording.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in February, involves the Lower Merion school district, which is accused to activating built-in webcams to spy on students. The district claims that the feature in question can snap a picture of the operator and the screen if the computer is reported lost or stolen.

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‘Covert’ Surveillance Cameras Coming To Chicago

Blue-light surveillance cameras in Chicago's high-crime neighborhoods will someday be augmented by "covert" cameras that "fit inside of a match box" and keep the bad guys guessing, Police Supt. Jody Weis said.

Now that crime-ravaged communities have been saturated with hundreds of blue-light cameras, Weis says it's time to take Big Brother technology to "the next level."

That means surveillance cameras similar to the hidden cameras used to snare corrupt politicians.

"They are incredibly small. I've seen some that would fit inside of a match box. . . . These can be secreted in locations that nobody would ever detect. It's amazing where we're going with technology," Weis said during a taping of the WLS-AM Radio Program, "Connected to Chicago."

Blue-light cameras virtually announce their presence, giving drug dealers and gang-bangers a heads-up to move out of range. Covert cameras keep them guessing, the superintendent said.

"You use the covert [cameras] to perhaps push them into an area where you have coverage. If we can interrupt their intelligence cycle, we will have the upper hand," he said.

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Police, Hopkins to Share Surveillance Video

Baltimore police are teaming up with the Johns Hopkins Hospital to share data from security cameras, marking the first time the city has partnered with a private agency to share surveillance footage.

Video from 136 cameras around the perimeter of the hospital's East Baltimore campus will stream into the city's surveillance office under a deal approved by the city's spending board last week. In exchange, Hopkins security staff will be able to access video from six city-operated cameras in the area.

"If an incident happens, the police will be able to pull it up in real time and view it," said Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Mayor's Office on Criminal Justice. The office seeks creative ways to work with public and private organizations to enhance safety, she said.

Although the hospital campus is patrolled by more than 100 security officers, violent crime from surrounding neighborhoods occasionally spills onto the campus. In September, two employees leaving the Kennedy Krieger Institute narrowly missed being struck by a stray bullet that lodged in the purse of one of the women.

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Surveillance Catches Woman and Two Children Stealing From Store on Christmas Day

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. Dennis Clark has spent years reviewing videos of store crimes. But nothing prepared him for the video shot on Christmas Day at a Paramount clothing shop.

The surveillance tape shows a woman and two small boys walking into the store. As the woman distracts the clerk, the children grab money out of an unlocked cashier's drawer. The boys are also seen testing the store's antitheft alarm.

"This is the first for me," Clark said. "I've heard of it, but I've never seen it captured on video and with the children this young.

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71-year old women caught on camera stealing out of Church Collection Plate

A 71-year-old church volunteer was caught on surveillance camera stealing thousands of dollars from St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Pontiac Michigan was charged Monday in the crime.

71 year old Salley Crake entered not guilty pleas in a Pontiac courtroom Tuesday to felony charges of embezzlement and larceny. The 71 year old women was caught on camera stuffing money down her pants. When she was arrested Monday she had $800 on her.

Police said the women had been stealing hundreds of dollars once a week from the church .They don't know how long she has been stealing money from the church but suspects it was long before she was caught.

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Internet sales of hidden 'nanny' cameras booming

There’s nothing like a stout mix of fear and falling technology prices to whip up sales of hidden cameras.

Surveillance experts say sales of “nanny cams” are exploding, fueled by distrust and easy access to inexpensive, quality equipment from Web sites around the world.

Businesses are buying the tiny cameras to catch malfeasant employees or spy on competitors. Individuals are snapping them up to watch homes, children or suspected wayward spouses.

“People do not trust people anymore,” said Helen Bowser, who, with her husband, Chris Bowser, owns The Protection Pros, an online retailer of surveillance equipment based in Morristown, east of Indianapolis.

Tim Wilcox, who owns International Investigators Inc., a private investigation firm in Indianapolis, said easy availability is merging with fears as old as humanity itself.

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Hotel staff take action during stabbing attack

The Prince George Hotel's staff and management are being praised by the RCMP for aiding in a weekend stabbing.

The victim, a 43-year-old man, and the assailant, a 46-year-old female, happened to get into an altercation on George Street in front of the hotel. Owner Ted Coole stressed that the two were not on the hotel's premises that day, and in fact they had both been ejected and barred from their property for past behaviour.

It was the hotel staff's quick action and the use of their surveillance video that halted the nasty situation and brought the help everyone respectively needed, said Coole.

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Where will Google send its new Street View tricycles?

They might almost be men selling ice cream.

They ride around on tricycles, a big fridge-like box perched on the rear wheels, a brightly colored logo on its side.

And yet that 10-foot-tall mast between the rider and the box tells you that this isn't pistachio peddling. No, this is surveillance, Google-style.

Those nice people at Google Street View became frustrated that their cars couldn't access every single corner of the world. Indeed, earlier this year the company removed footage of one of its cars after it transgressed traffic regulations. Then there are those pesky pedestrian areas and fine places of historical interest that don't allow cars within their boundaries.

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Surveillance Cameras Simply Relocate Crime

As with so much encouraging news these days, the success of the surveillance cameras at Pioneer Park comes with a caveat of concern.

To begin with, the cameras have done exactly what they were supposed to do. They have reduced crime. Calls to police about drug-related problems have been cut almost in half. And because the cameras at the corners of the park are so visible, only two dealers have braved them. Both were arrested.

All that is a plus.

The concern comes later — when dealers begin to disperse and do their business in surrounding neighborhoods instead of congregating at the park.

In short, criminals don't go away. They just go elsewhere.

Read the rest of the article here.

Visual Management System Unveils Cost Effective, Portable, Wireless, Digital Surveillance System

FlexTH is the first of its kind to deliver an affordable monitoring solution that just about anyone can install and requires no wiring. FlexTH can be used to remotely monitor just about any location including, but not limited to, homes, small businesses, vehicles and mobile services such as police and emergency responders.

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CA Supreme Court Allows Employee Surveillance

The California Supreme Court has ruled in an invasion of privacy suit that a company isn’t liable for installing secret video equipment in an employee’s office for legitimate business reasons.

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Home Surveillance Cameras Catch Robbers in Act

Two men kicked in the back door of a man's house and robbed the house...and much of it was caught on the homeowner's surveillance cameras.

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Bush's Surveillance Plan Under Scrutiny

Not enough relevant officials were aware of the size and depth of an unprecedented surveillance program started under President George W. Bush, let alone signed off on it, a team of federal inspectors general found.

The Bush White House pulled in a great quantity of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, the IGs reported. They questioned the legal basis for the effort but shielded almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

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Old Fashioned Surveillance Helps Close Sex Offender Loop Hole

For weeks, Pierce County sheriff’s deputies watched the small house in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood, making sure their man was there.

He was a sex offender, convicted of second-degree rape in King County in the 1990s. Under state law, as a Level 3 offender – considered likely to offend again – he had to register with the county and state where he lived so his neighbors could be alerted.

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Congress Concerned About NSA Email Surveillance

The US' National Security Agency is facing scrutiny over the breadth of its domestic surveillance program. According to critics in Congress, its recent penetrations of private telephone calls and emails are broader than previously stated, The New York Times reports.

A new law, enacted by Congress in 2008, gave the NSA greater freedom to collect American's private messages as long as such collections were an incidental byproduct of investigating people "reasonably believed" to be overseas. But it is difficult to distinguish between email being sent by ordinary Americans and being sent from foreign countries — a gray area that's driven some lawmakers to question whether the privacy of Americans in general is being adequately protected.

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CA Debating Privacy Issue

The California Supreme Court seemed unlikely to authorize employers to spy on their workers with hidden cameras.

At the same time, some members of the court appeared skeptical that two women who discovered a surveillance camera in their office had suffered serious harm.

Meeting for oral argument this past week, the court considered a lawsuit brought by the women against their employer for installing a hidden camera in their office.

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Man Opens Fire on Woman After She Rejects Him at Bar

A manhunt is underway for a man who opened fire on a woman after she rejected his advances at a Cleveland bar.

Surveillance cameras were rolling as the man approached the woman inside the bar on St. Clair Avenue Sunday night.

Cleveland Police say the suspect started a conversation with the woman and asked her for a date.

When she declined, his reaction was chilling.

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City Establishes Surveillance System to Catch Criminals

A decision last week to buy and install surveillance cameras at key Lake Elsinore locations has marked a new stage in the city’s graffiti-fighting efforts.

“It’s a big piece,” said Mark Dennis, the city’s communications manager. “I think it’s a unique approach that Lake Elsinore has taken.”

To date, a city graffiti task force has spent about a year studying the problem and evaluating various responses.

Since a newcomer’s reaction to a community is often based on first impressions, the task force gave the city’s graffiti problem a high priority, Dennis said.

During their study work, task force members frequently ran across media reports and government accounts that favored the use of surveillance systems.

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