Even though George Orwell foresaw a world where surveillance cameras existed in every home he could never predict how sophisticated that idea would become. The prison city of New York will be brining a new system online that combines surveillance technologies with a police database and monitoring software to spy on every man, woman, and child in the city:
The New York Police Department will soon launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the city developed the software with Microsoft.
Kelly says the program combines city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases.
He says it will be officially unveiled by New York’s mayor as soon as next week.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) claims that the system will be used to track criminals and terrorists, which are meaningless criterions because everybody is a terrorist. You really have to give NYPD credit, they took 1984 and ramped it up to 11. I wonder how long it will be until they begin flying helicopters around the city to peek into peoples’ windows.