A new program in Jackson, Mississippi, demonstrates the imminence of the risk. Police there have a shiny new "real-time command center" from which to surveil the local citizenry. What they don't have is funding to purchase the many thousands of surveillance cameras they'd need for city-wide coverage—there are a few, bought with a federal grant, but most of municipal cameras are too old to livestream their feeds.
The goal is a budget version of the heavy CCTV coverage already in place in London and several cities in China but so far unreplicated even in America's most-surveilled places. "We'll be able to get a location, draw a circle around it, and pull up every camera within a certain radius to see if someone runs out of a building," Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said in October. "We can follow and trace them."
So the Jackson police are working with Fusus, a company whose surveillance cameras can be bought by private parties and then linked to the city network. A "trial program with Fusus was attractive to Jackson officials because it helps save money by passing the cost of surveillance onto businesses and homeowners who purchase devices from the company," NBC reports. The command center can also pull in livestreams from other home security tech not made by Fusus ("just about any kind of camera," NBC says), like the doorbell cameras that have become a popular means of deterring and identifying porch pirates.The goal is a budget version of the heavy CCTV coverage already in place in London and several cities in China but so far unreplicated even in America's most-surveilled places. "We'll be able to get a location, draw a circle around it, and pull up every camera within a certain radius to see if someone runs out of a building," Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said in October. "We can follow and trace them."
Reason.com
reason.com
