The eyes have it - for now

There are other sides to the equation, of course. For one thing, Big Brother isn't lurking around the corner. "We're not being watched by some conspiratorial government, we're watching each other," says Ken Goldberg, a professor of operational engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and author of "Beyond Webcams," a book on remotely guided robots. The surge in surveillance "definitely is going to erode some elements of privacy and increase elements of paranoia that go with that. On the other hand, having the control in the hands of private individuals may be a good thing."

Last month, Mr. Goldberg wired his own house with off-the-shelf security cameras. "Hopefully, it will act as a deterrent," he says. "Is that so bad? I don't think so."

Neither do many other people in these uncertain times. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, camera surveillance has been on the upswing around the world, according to a recent joint report by London-based Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.

And public outcry has been muted.

In Britain, the developed world's leader in video surveillance, many residents have accepted, even welcomed, the technology. One study, catalogued by a crime-reduction charity in London called Nacro, found that even when Britons were fed a series of antisurveillance questions, they still supported cameras by 56 percent. When fed prosurveillance questions, support tipped 91 percent.

How much cameras really deter crime remains an open question. When the Scottish Centre for Criminology studied their effect on two communities, it found crime fell in the small town but rose in the large city (Glasgow). Nacro also found mixed results. The technology seems to have a lifecycle, the charity found, initially reducing crime but often with diminishing effect as time went on.

And they reinforce discrimination in Britain - a key concern among US civil-liberties groups. The Nacro study found the cameras disproportionately target men, particularly black men.

"They are indiscriminately surveilling people," says Brown, who - besides counting cameras and giving surveillance tours - also directs the New York Surveillance Camera Players. Since 1996, the group has staged various plays in front of surveillance cameras. Sometimes the actors exorcise the technology; sometimes they pray to it, all to raise the issue in a kind of dramatic protest.

Will the US follow in Britain's footsteps? As wired as this country is, it has nowhere near Britain's ratio of cameras to people. With less than one-quarter of America's population, Britain has an estimated 1.5 million surveillance cameras (some reports suggest 2.5 million or more). But antisurveillance activists are also realists.

"I can get the subject on the mainstream political agenda, but that's about it," says Brown. "In 50 years I would hope that the movement I am building has won," he adds. If it doesn't, "I fear that New York in 50 years would become a dystopia in a sci-fi way."

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