Put More Cameras on the Streets

 Steven Simon is an adjunct senior fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the co-author of “The Age of Sacred Terror” and “The Next Attack.”
Video surveillance would not have stopped the Times Square attack. Does this mean that it would be useless? Not necessarily.

The challenge: exploiting this visual information while protecting the privacy of citizens.

Swift and accurate analysis of video surveillance information might prevent the next attack, even if it is powerless to stop the last one. Imagery can be used to assist in the identification and location of individuals at the scene of the crime.

It can also be used to track the progress of the bomb-laden vehicle from the its point of origin, or the point at which the truck was weaponized, to the place the terrorists have targeted. In combination with physical evidence acquired from the vehicle — fingerprints, hair, cloth fibers, soil, trash, forgotten personal items or a host of other bits of evidence — video surveillance can lead to the arrest of the bombers and to the unraveling of cells or networks and, if the attackers are foreign, the ratlines they exploited to enter the country.

At this point, the U.S. does not have the kind of pervasive surveillance systems in place that, say, the British have deployed. In the U.K., there is about one surveillance camera for every thousand residents. It took British authorities years to reach this level of intensive surveillance.

The U.S., as anyone who follows the debate over privacy loss in this country knows, is studded with cameras, but most of these are in stores to track consumption habits to facilitate marketing or deter shoplifters. They’re not where they’re needed, which is on the street. The two smallest jurisdictions in the U.K., very rural areas indeed, together deploy more surveillance cameras than the San Francisco police department.

The U.S., of course, does not have to match Britain camera for camera. Surveillance can be enhanced in areas that are assessed to be likely targets, a category that can be inferred, at least in a general sense, from targeting patterns and what the terrorists actually have said about the desirability of attacking this or that; and they do discuss this in their literature and on their Web sites.

More problematic, is the need to organize our law enforcement capabilities in ways that enable this visual information to be exploited effectively, while protecting the rapidly fading privacy available to ordinary citizens. Therein lies the real challenge.