Bloomberg drinks Kool-Aid served by Ken Livingston
October 1st, 2007Billionaire Kool-Aid drinker says Big Brother is desired:
LONDON – Residents of big cities like New York and London must accept that they are under constant watch by video cameras, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday.
Bloomberg, holding talks with his London counterpart Ken Livingstone, said such measures as London’s “ring of steel” — a network of closed-circuit cameras that monitors the city center_ were a necessary protection in a dangerous world.
“In this day and age, if you think that cameras aren’t watching you all the time, you are very naive,” Bloomberg told reporters at London’s City Hall.
“We are under surveillance all the time” from cameras in shops and office buildings, “and in London they have multiple cameras on every bus and in every subway car,” he added.
“The people of London not only support it, but if Ken Livingstone didn’t do it they would try to run him out of town on a rail. We live in a dangerous world, and people want to have security cameras.”
During his visit, Bloomberg was getting a demonstration of the ring of steel, a system of cameras and road barriers introduced during the years of Irish Republican Army bombings to protect London’s central business district.
London has one of the world’s highest concentrations of surveillance cameras. An estimated 4 million CCTV cameras operate in Britain, and some civil liberties campaigners have warned the country is becoming a “surveillance state.”
New York has far fewer, but the number is growing. Authorities hope to implement an $81.5 million version of the ring of steel for lower Manhattan, featuring surveillance cameras as well as barriers that could automatically block streets.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071001/ap_on_re_us/bloomberg_surveillance
First of all, “Residents of big cities like New York and London” do not have to accept anything like this; especially when it does not work to prevent crime, costs a fortune in money and costs everyone their dignity and liberty.
London doesn’t feel like it used to. Having cameras on you all the time has a dibilitating effect on a city and everyone in London is suffering from the ill effects of CCTV…wether they know it or not.
Check out these Google results. The jury (we still have those for the moment, at least rhetorically) is out on this matter. CCTV doesn’t work, and the next step is dismantling the entire CCTV network. Most of the cameras operating in the UK are illegal in any case.
You will note that the future is not one of all pervasive Big Brother surveillance. There are many examples where the future is free of the insane fear that is gripping the ‘democracies’. This era will pass and the totalitarian apparatus dismantled, just like the Soviet Union was dismantled. It is a question of WHEN not IF. Certainly the issue of wasted money and lack of results will be one of the key reasons why this will happen.
I don’t even have to go into the causes of this irrational fear and the real solutions to putting an end to this insanity do I? We have gone over it so many times!
CCTV is Security Theatre. To have real security, you need to remove the thorn from the lions foot and do all the other things that are reasonable and moral.
That is how you stop people from doing bad things in your city.
As for crime, you need to take care of the endemic problems in the police forces, and then double the numbers. You need to stop locking people up for no reason and end the insane prohibition that has been destroying America for generations.
Lastly…