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:"Temporary"

[interkin3tic]

No, they're one upping Orwell and successfully framing it as a new thing. In airports they say "Due to heightened security..." implying security is higher than normal at airports despite the fact that it has been that way for a decade and will never decrease. The national security level system had lower levels of threats on it, but pretty clearly no one ever intended to tell the public they were finally safe and could stop funding the military industrial complex.

With a conflict that has always been going on, people will accept it. But they'll be apathetic about it too, so you can get less money out of it.