ENG 301-03

10 February 2015

Smile, You’re on Security Camera

In the March 2004 edition of the Boston Globe, correspondent John McElheny wrote a piece on video cameras and the action that unfold both in public and behind the scenes. The opening of the article starts talking about how one private detective Rob Selevitch has had many years, 25 to be exact, going about the city of Boston questioning witnesses and handling crime. McElheny introduces Selevitch as being one of the first people he’s come into contact with in conducting his interview. Selevitch gives account of how video cameras are pretty much everywhere and that you’re under surveillance all the time (81). The examples McElheny allows Selevitch to provide are good factual and experienced observations, but he allowed Selevitch to boast a little too much in his interview.

Throughout the majority of this article, there were a lot of statistical data being thrown into the mix. This information broadens the spectrum of the article with these numbers and utilizes the time spent to research factual data. In paragraphs two through eight, Selevitch gives detail into the layout of every building, parking garage, and supermarket that were used to solve crimes while he served as detective (81). The article itself shows that John McElheny may have felt amused by the fact that cameras captured much of our daily lives that we practically failed to even pay attention to. His argument in concern to cameras being in such offset places even when we notice them is a way getting the attention of readers to “be careful what you do when you think no one else is watching.”

McElheny goes on by interviewing John Hogan Jr., chief of the MBTA’s operations control center and how they plan on having more cameras on bus transit in hopes of surveying passengers as they move about. Not only has this article been made a valid and legitimate source of reasoning, it comes from the people in the position that monitor these actions. Even Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) director of subway operations, Jeffrey Parker added input in articulating that the use of those cameras would make it safer for police to review the scenes of an crime in aspirations of finding who did it (82). This statement affirms the initial plan that cameras are not meant to discredit or fraud a person, but to be a witness when no other witnesses can be found.

Although some people feel that surveillance cameras are a useful tool, many disagree with its usage of privacy. McElheny now transitions from a “for” security cameras to a “opposed” the use of them. Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, feel cameras are to a sense faulty and that many individuals abuse the rights of seeing who’s who that is looking at the action taking place (83). McElheny discloses that facts behind his arguments with again resourceful entails. In correspondence to those opposed of security cameras, Rose expresses her own personal concerns to show that the use of these surveillance cameras be used for the stated purposes of they go up for.

Essentially, it is to my knowledge that the use of security cameras isn’t for passenger surveillance, but instead prohibit toll-cheaters or reduce the wait time of people waiting on trains by redirecting them (84). Security cameras can pose both a positive and negative, but I’d rather be one of the one’s for them. At most because you never know where you can end up or what might happen to you afterwards. If no one witnessed what happen then you’re completely out of luck, on the other hand, the usefulness of the camera would have captured everything and possibly saved your life. So the angle I view it is practically having a third eye watch my back when neither friend nor foe can.