Superbowl Means Time For Spy Cams, Hazmat Squads and Bomb-Sniffing Dogs

Toe, The writes "The New York Police Department has quietly installed about 200 temporary surveillance cameras in midtown Manhattan to help spot trouble along 'Super Bowl Boulevard,' a 13-block street fair on Broadway that's expected to draw large crowds during the windup to the game. The temporary cameras for the Super Bowl festivities will supplement a system of thousands of permanent cameras covering midtown and Wall Street that the NYPD monitors from a command center in lower Manhattan. The department has pioneered analytical software that allows it to program the cameras to detect suspicious activity, such as a bag or other objects left in one place for a long time. Hazmat and bomb squads will be on standby. Others officers will patrol with bomb-sniffing dogs. Still more will watch from rooftops and from police helicopters. At a recent security briefing at the stadium, police chiefs and other officials said success will be measured in part by how well authorities conceal all the concern over potential threats." Now it's a proven tradition: Superbowl crowds are a good place to test people-watching gear.

Re:Temporarily, it's the Terrorists

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll go back to pedophiles, or maybe communists or witches. Or better yet, we can go back to the 80's and be afraid of pedophile witch communes sacrificing children (which do not have to be proven to have ever existed in the first place) to Satan. Now those were the good ol' days; that was an irrational fear you could really get behind. Some of those people are still in prison - real prison, not that pussy Guantanamo crap - based solely on the testimony of preschoolers that were interrogated for 12+ hours at a time and fed leading questions. Just let it slip to the local pastor about how rock music was encoding messages backwards and *BLAM*, ten people arrested for accusations made by the congregation and convicted on confessions beaten out of them with phone books. Sure, we have waterboarding now, but it's just not the same. I want to see character assassination, not just regular assassination. If you don't break them before killing them, then where's the fun in that?

Too bad that Janet Reno isn't in the Capitol anymore. It's a sign of the moral decay that the country is in since we stopped lynching the gays and blacks.

Well of course. They have to make sure that

[Ellis D. Tripp]

the fans coming in from Washington and Colorado didn't bring any weed with them....

Re:Welcome to your police state

[DerekLyons]

America has had it so good for so long that one act of mass violence happens

Oklahoma City, Boston, Aurora.... One act? I just counted three, and I'm not even halfway through my first cup of coffee.
 

Or am I being too naive in thinking that they haven't considered this and decided they want it this way?

No, you just need to adjust your tinfoil chapeau, it's a little tight and the resulting lack of bloodflow to the brain is causing hallucinations.

Re:Rock and a hard place...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. So they're just covering their asses, like any employee

So, you are saying the road to hell is paved with covered asses?