With more surveillance cameras comes debate on their regulation

Some worry that if Big Brother is watching, others could be as well.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
Even as more corners of America's public spaces are coming under the eye of government-run surveillance cameras, few rules or regulations exist to oversee their use.
Neither Congress nor most state legislatures have imposed specific boundaries on how, where or when such video cameras can be trained on ordinary law-abiding citizens as they go about their daily lives.
Nor have they, or any regulatory bodies, set legal parameters for the length of time those images can be kept, who is allowed to see them, for what purposes they can be used, who will enforce the rules, or how violators will be punished. About the only recourse for those who believe their privacy has been violated is a civil suit.
This absence of oversight troubles civil liberties experts, along with camera proponents who fear abuse will obscure the technology's promise as an anti-terror tool. Extortion, blackmail, the compilation of video dossiers and racial profiling are just some of the uses to which the images could be put.
Not just speculation
Already, unauthorized images from security cameras are appearing on the Internet, including those of the suicide of a young man outside a New York City public housing project.
"There is the potential for insidious abuse," said James Ross, assistant criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Brockport, who is an authority on privacy and security issues.
Critics also worry that unregulated camera systems pose a potential threat to some fundamental facets of the American way of life.
"Modern surveillance networks can ... eliminate much of the privacy and anonymity individuals take for granted, chill a substantial amount of free expression, [and] inhibit people from freely associating with others," states a May report by the Constitution Project, a bipartisan advisory group that includes former FBI director William Sessions, former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, former American Civil Liberties Union director Morton Halperin and ex-Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla.
So troubling are the risks that David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Constitution Project leader, said he has abandoned his usual antagonism toward government regulation when it comes to spy cameras.
He said he favors some requirement that cities or police departments that receive federal funds must abide by privacy-protecting standards.
Video security industry manufacturers say the technology exists to forestall many abuses.
Cameras can be programmed to prevent looking into home or hotel room windows, and stops can be installed to prevent panning in a certain direction, according to Kathleen Rhodes, a spokeswoman for Clovis, Calif.-based Pelco