

Rafael Boldo, 25, and Camila Sierra, 27, visitors from São Paolo, were holding a pink Sony at arm’s length and snapping themselves as they faced south on West 43rd Street.

“Even if you took away all the liability concerns and all the privacy concerns, the video’s not in the same format.”

“For the government to tap into multiple proprietary databases - it’s not actually possible without a subpoena,” Mr. Others are actively monitored, he said, but by people who have been staring at the screen so long they have lost focus - what you might call the airport baggage screener problem.Īnd forget about collecting all those video streams in one central place, like they do in the Bourne movies. Many closed-circuit cameras are set up just to record, for review as needed. Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent, no one was paying attention at all. agent was monitoring me - and half the rest of the city - on some master console in a secret Midtown office. Staring into that shiny oculus outside the Starbucks a few days after the bombing attempt, I figured I was being watched by a sharp-eyed security guard in the building’s basement. But is Times Square ready for its close-up? Am I? The bomb scare was a stark reminder of the risks New Yorkers take every day and of the crucial role that cameras can play in the first few hours after a crime. And those are just the cameras the city owns.
#Times square video camera driver
While the search was still on for the driver of that smoking Nissan Pathfinder, one of the Police Department’s first moves was to review footage from cameras between 51st and 34th Streets - all 82 of them. In Times Square, perhaps more than any other place in the city, our movements are being recorded a hundred different ways: from a few stories up the side of the Bertelsmann building, from inside the plate glass of the Bank of America branch, as we pass through the turnstiles of a subway station, at the point of purchase in seemingly every store. Staring into one, I was startled to see something staring back: a lens swiveling toward me for a better view. Start looking for them and they really are everywhere: the New York Police Department cameras, which announce themselves with bright insignia a cluster of three orbs, hanging like fruit outside Blue Fin on West 47th Street and Broadway a pair of glass spheres stacked outside the Starbucks across the street. But I felt pretty sure those cameras had a clear view of me. I would not have seen the countless electronic eyes had Christopher Falkenberg, the president of a firm called Insite Security, not pointed them out. There’s one, over by the Walgreens entrance, and there’s another, just below the King Tut banner - video cameras, installed by private companies to survey the public spectacle of Times Square.
