Loss of Privacy

The city of Atlanta, Georgia is home to the Video Integration Center, allowing city police to monitor over a hundred public and private CCTV cameras. This isn’t enough, however, for the police. They want more monitoring.

Talks are underway to link up with more cameras at CNN Center, Georgia State University, the Georgia World Congress Center and MARTA, along with cameras in Buckhead.

Officials say hundreds or thousands more private-sector cameras will eventually feed into the center.

“This is just the beginning,” said Dave Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which helped raise money for the center. “This is going to grow by leaps and bounds over the years. The goal, of course, is to have the entire city blanketed.”

Officials insist cameras linked to the center will only watch areas the public could already see. The city’s law department is drafting rules for the center, Ferguson said.

Unfortunately, officials are not talking to each other as you cannot blanket a city yet only have cameras where the public can already see. The two statements are incompatible. Yet, city officials are okay with tracking innocent people as they go about their daily lives.

“I should hope the public is not okay with it,” said Brett Bittner, executive director of the Libertarian Party of Georgia. “We’re talking about filming every aspect of people’s lives once they step out of the house.”

This is never acceptable and it doesn’t help fight crime. One only need to look at the massive test case of the United Kingdom where people are already on camera once they leave their homes. Crime hasn’t dropped there as a result of intruding cameras at all.

More cities and states are fighting back against the use and misuse of red light cameras.

Opponents of the cameras often argue that they are really just revenue engines for struggling cities and towns, silently dinging motorists for mostly minor infractions. And while guidelines issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say revenue is an invalid justification for the use of the eyes in the sky (see box at right), camera-generated citations do spin off a lot of money in many cities — the nearly 400 cameras in Chicago, for example, generated more than $64 million in 2009, the last year for which complete figures were available.

Los Angeles hasn’t been so lucky.

The city gets only a third of the revenue generated by camera citations, many of which go unpaid anyway because judges refuse to enforce them, the city controller’s office reported last year. It found in an audit that if you add it all up, operating the cameras has cost $1 million to $1.5 million a year more than they’ve generated in fines, even as “the program has not been able to document conclusively an increase in public safety.”

Studies have shown that red light cameras increase accidents. Lengthening the time of a yellow light actually decreases accidents. Unfortunately, most places that install red light cameras decrease the yellow light time in order for more tickets to be produced, thus making driving around the red light camera more dangerous.

Red light cameras continue to be a bane to drivers. There is no right to face your accuser, you are guilty until you can prove your innocence, and little due process.

Red light cameras have been and always will be money generators. They are not about safety. Until this actually changes, cities are going to be hard-pressed to convince people they are about anything except revenue.

From 2008-2009 TSA officials unfairly targeted Mexicans and Dominicans at Newark’s Liberty Airport. It was done solely to make the airport’s Behavior Detection Officers statistics look better. The BDOs have since been retrained or let go.

According to the Star-Ledger, the report said TSA agents stationed at the Newark airport would stop Mexicans and Dominicans, asking them additional questions, reviewing their passports and visas and searching their luggage. The report did not specify how many agents were involved, but “leaves no doubt that the process was widespread,” the newspaper said.

The racial profiling was so prevalent in 2008 and 2009 that some TSA employees at the airport referred to their colleagues as “Mexican hunters,” a Star-Ledger story based on the 2010 internal report said.

A TSA spokeswoman described the situation in Newark as “isolated” and said the agency took action to fix it.

It seems that numerous “isolated” incidents keep cropping up at Newark airport. If the government refuses to get rid of the TSA, they, at least, need to get rid of the workers at the airport and hire some competent people.



Michael Arato, a former Newark TSA supervisor at the B-3 checkpoint in Terminal B, was sentenced last week to 30 months in prison for taking bribes and kickbacks to look the other way while another employee regularly stole items from passengers at the airport. The two men believed they had a great scheme going.

Prosecutors said the two agents often targeted foreigners and subjected them to additional screening, during which time they would pocket cash found in their carry-on bags.

This is absolutely appalling. These passengers have come here on a vacation and are, most likely, confused by some of the rules and regulations we have. So, while they are being compliant and doing as they are asked to do, a TSA agent, who believes that he is above the law, steals from them.

The scheme unraveled as passengers began to complain about missing money. The co-worker, Al Raimi, 29, of Woodbridge, told authorities he had been stealing money from passengers passing through the B-3 checkpoint since October 2009, and that Arato knew about it and agreed to the kickbacks, the government said.

The B-3 checkpoint serves international passengers, including those traveling on AirIndia, which has a daily non-stop flight from the airport to India, departing around 6:20 p.m.

Starting in August 2009, Transportation Security Administration officials and Port Authority police received numerous complaints from passengers scheduled to fly AirIndia reporting that money and other valuables were missing after their baggage was hand searched by TSA employees at the B-3 checkpoint.

Arato worked at the B-3 checkpoint from Sept. 2009 to October 2010, and during that time permitted Raimi to steal between $10,000 and $30,000 in cash from travelers, the government said. In exchange, Raimi would “kick up” a portion of the stolen money to Arato.

Over a three-week period in September and October 2010, surveillance video captured Arato accepting approximately $3,100 in bribes, the government said.

While Arato believed that Raimi was stealing, Raimi could have just as easily been placing items, such as drugs, weapons, or explosives in the bags as well. For a mere $3,100, Arato could have been making himself a much bigger accessory than just theft.

Raimi told investigators that if a passenger left the airport without noticing that their money was missing, he and Arato would go into an office and divide the stolen cash, the government said. Raimi also told investigators that when he and Arato worked the same shift, he would steal $400 to $700, on average, from passengers and kick back $200 to $400 to Arato, the government said.

During the investigation, which was conducted by investigators from the Port Authority and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Raimi secretly recorded conversations with Arato, and can be heard complaining in a recording from Sept. 15, 2010 that he had not been able to steal anything because all the passengers whose bags he had checked had “no more than two three hundred tops.” Arato tells Raimi on the same recording that “if I find an envelope, I’m taking it, I swear to my kids,” the government said.

Raimi is to be sentenced on September 20, 2011. Arato will also be subjected to three years of supervised release and pay $24,150 to those he stole from.

They also discussed how they did not feel bad stealing from foreign travelers, who they said were “leaving this country with our money.” Arato accepted $1,200 from Raimi during the shift captured on the recording, the government said.

Apparently, Arato and Raimi believe it’s okay to steal from people on their vacation because, you know, they’re just foreigners.

What these men did is far more than just steal from foreign travelers. They undermined any respect anyone has left for the TSA. They have put people at risk, shamed the government, and generally showed a huge disrespect for anyone not American. Yet, the politicians in Washington don’t understand why no one else in the world has any respect for the United States, nor why tourists are continuing to head elsewhere on vacation.

Red light cameras have been controversial throughout their lifetime. Besides angering motorists, there isn’t much evidence that they work as intended. Los Angeles is now considering getting rid of the cameras as more and more evidence shows that accidents increase at intersections with red light cameras.

An audit last year questioned the effectiveness of the program, finding that a majority of citations have gone uncollected. Commissioner Alan Skobin says that since the courts don’t pursue drivers who refuse to pay the tickets, the camera program lacks enforcement power.

The board’s decision could shut down the cameras in days unless the City Council decides to strip the commission of its authority on the issue and decide whether to continue the program.

I suspect if the city of Los Angeles had a way to enforce these cameras and collect the fines, they might not be taken down as a waste of money.