Hidden cameras capture public dramas

Security cameras spotted the two men charged with killing UNC student leader Eve Carson, but their watch extends well beyond the random sightings of criminal suspects.

We all are being watched.

A string of surveillance cameras keeps us under observation throughout the day -- driving to work on Interstate 40, parking in garages, trudging up the steps to school or our office buildings, not to mention the lunchtime treks to the ATM or the sub shop.

Passers-by rarely identify or acknowledge the discreetly domed cameras tucked in the corners of convenience stores or mounted on the corners of public buildings. But their grainy security videos and snapshots have to come define many public dramas.

Cable news networks fill the 24-hour cycle with clips of convenience-store clerks who fight back and accidents caught on tape. The crucial video image of a highway bridge collapsing last year in Minnesota came from a security camera, while an ATM photo helped a Duke lacrosse player establish his alibi in a discredited sexual assault case.

The images and the cameras that capture them are inescapable, yet few people stop to think about their own performing roles.

Take the tiny camera mounted in the back corner of a Quizno's sandwich shop off downtown Raleigh's Fayetteville Street. It didn't even register with bondsman Shonda Ryals as she stepped up to pay for her Caesar salad Thursday.

"I don't really think about it, but in the back of your mind you know it's there," Ryals said.

Ryals said she accepts surveillance as the price of safety. In her bond agency's office, at the jail where she escorts charges and elsewhere, she assumes she's under watch.

'Cameras are everywhere'

London set the lofty standard for public surveillance, erecting in the 1990s a "ring of steel" featuring a collection of barriers and a reported 500,000 cameras. U.S. cities such as New York, Washington and Chicago have followed suit.

In the Triangle, the cameras are spreading.

N.C. State has installed 400 cameras and plans another 100, Associate Vice Chancellor David Rainer said. Durham installed 13 "Eye in the Sky" video-monitoring cameras in the northeast central part of the city last year, while public and commercial Web cams offer Internet users birds-eye views of Triangle sports arenas and downtown areas.

"Cameras are everywhere, and you can still see them. In 10 years, they'll be so small you can't see them," said Bruce Schneier, author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World."

Critics question where the demands of public security overstep into violations of privacy. The bank machine and convenience store photos that helped identify Carson homicide suspects Demario Atwater and Laurence Alvin Lovette are not the type that concerns groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"At some level, all that's good for law enforcement, obviously," said Jim Dempsey, the Washington center's vice president for public policy. "On the other hand, we know that the people monitoring the cameras often will zero in on attractive women. We know that they will use racial and other unacceptable forms of profiling in zeroing in on people. ... The very fact that this data is so easily copied, transmitted, manipulated, means that increasingly these images leak out in non-law-enforcement contexts, in contexts where they do embarrass people."

Orange County District Attorney Jim Woodall said security videos are more important as an investigative tool than as courtroom evidence. "They help police departments narrow down leads if they have a case where, in a sense, the whole world is a subject," Woodall said Friday.

Zooming in

Walking the length of Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh on Friday morning, Carolina Video Security President Brad Silvernail spotted at least a dozen cameras keeping track of bank entrances and the sidewalks outside federal and state government buildings. That's not counting the four cameras with zoom capabilities he saw mounted under the roof of the N.C. Museum of History.

All four appeared to offer clear views of the busy plaza between the history museum and the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences.

"A lot of kids come through here, so that's a good thing to have more cameras," said Silvernail, whose company installs commercial and industrial surveillance security systems.

"Standing right here, those dome cameras probably could zoom in and almost read what you're writing in your notebook," he told a reporter.

Poking his head inside a downtown Port City Java coffee shop, Silvernail quickly noted two domed cameras mounted atop the counter.

"Man, you can't even have a cup of coffee," he said.