Eric Roper, The Examiner
2008-06-03 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

Lawmakers and privacy advocates lambasted District officials Monday for rushing a plan to unify the city’s 5,200 surveillance cameras under one network without establishing any rules for use of the new system.

Mayor Adrian Fenty announced in April a new program that would consolidate camera monitoring at several city agencies into a single hub in order to improve overall communication and efficiency.

Privacy experts are concerned that the growing camera network could be used to inappropriately track citizens’ activities, citing abuses reported in other cities with similar networks.

In testimony at a Monday D.C. Council hearing on the plan, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini said the Video Interoperability for Public Safety program will facilitate the creation of citywide surveillance policies.

But two months into the initiative, there are still no set rules for monitoring and maintaining the cameras, according to a letter from Darrell Darnell, director of the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, to Councilman Phil Mendelson, who called for the hearing. Homeland Security is overseeing VIPS.

Sharon Franklin, senior counsel for the Constitution Project a think tank, testified that the city took the “cart before the horse approach” by starting without definitive rules.

Councilwoman Mary Cheh said at the hearing that having centralized monitoring and universal policies is the wrong approach for agencies with different uses for their cameras.

“You can’t have a single system because the systems are entirely different in terms of what their objectives are,” Cheh said.

She also expressed concern over the increasingly powerful and invasive surveillance technology used by the city.

“Before we take another step, why don’t we have a good sense of what we’re doing now and where we’re going?” Cheh said. 

Sixty-five percent of the District’s 5,265 cameras are operated by the D.C. Public Schools. They have already relocated their video monitoring to the HSEMA building, along with the Office of Property Management and the District Department of Transportation.