Subscribe RSSNow set aside the celebrity between anonymity and privacy, which some Libertarians do, and consider the cases where cameras have helped catch bad people. And here we define bad people as very hostile to individual liberty (murderers, rapists, terrorists).
Most recently, security cameras identified Faisal Shahzad , the would-be anarchist of Times Square in April 2010. The murder of Sandra Cantu in early 2009, now in the headlines because the avowed killer confessed, was partially solved using surveillance camera images of Sandra skipping to run around at the killer's home. Joseph Smith would still be free but for a security camera which filmed him with a girl he murdered in February 2004: "Smith's friends and co-workers testified that he was the tattooed man pictured in a reconnaissance video from a car wash security camera who grabbed Carlie's wrist and led her away."Surveillance has both an enforcement operational and a deterrent effect. As for the erosion of privacy from this new technology, it exists only by conflating the definition of privacy with that of anonymity. And American people does not recognize a right to anonymity. Privacy in the public sphere strikes me as oxymoronic.
