Making the City more secure... but less private

Last Tuesday, we attended a presentation at the NYU Center on Law and Security: Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterrorism Force-- The NYPD, featuring Christopher Dickey, Newsweek editor and author of a recent book by the same name, and moderated by Dina Temple-Raston, NPR's national security correspondent.

Since moderator Temple-Raston covers the FBI, she kept steering the conversation in that direction, which we found a bit annoying, since we wanted to hear more about the NYPD. Given the name, we were hoping for some insight into what the NYPD does to protect the city (and the privacy trade-offs involved). There wasn't a whole lot of discussion of privacy trade-offs per se, but there was a lot of other information of interest to us.

Dickey touched on the NYPD's innovative (and recent) employment of public-private partnerships. One example is the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI). Of the 3,000 cameras used to create a CCTV network south of Canal Street, more than half are private cameras, operated by businesses in the area who are now feeding their camera footage to the NYPD.

Dickey chose to focus on the NYPD in his book because it's huge--dwarfing the LAPD, for example-- and because New York has been the focus of "terrorism" for much of its history. The JPMorgan building on Wall Street still bears shrapnel marks from a 1920 anarchist's attack that used explosives on a horse-drawn carriage to kill 33 people, said Dickey.

We had a chance to ask Dickey a question about LMSI and why the camera network launched so recently in New York (it is officially up and running as of November 2008, whereas London's Ring of Steel has been in place since the 1990s). Dickey says common knowledge among experts is that London's system doesn't actually work that well, and has had a minimal effect on crime. New York spent longer on theirs in the hope for a more effective system. The LMSI has all kinds of "razzle-dazzle technology," said Dickey, including software that recognizes packages that sit for too long in one spot and cars that circle an area repeatedly.

Tourists who get lost in Chinatown, beware!

The room was mainly full of security and counterterrorism experts, so the question at hand was not how privacy was threatened by advances in security technologies but rather how New York's safety is threatened by a lack of greater security measures.