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Privacy United States

New York To Install Surveillance Cameras in Every Subway Car (nbcnews.com) 37

New York, home of the largest rapid transit system in the country, will install surveillance cameras in every New York City subway car by 2025, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced earlier this week. From a report: The move is aimed at increasing riders' confidence in subway safety, Hochul said, as ridership numbers are still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. It also follows several highly publicized crimes that have occurred in the transit system, including the rape of a tourist on a subway platform this month; a mass shooting on a subway car in Brooklyn in April that left 10 passengers wounded; and the fatal shooting of a Goldman Sachs employee on a train in May.

But the decision to install cameras on subway cars worries some privacy advocates, who say it will increase the level of surveillance of New Yorkers without necessarily making the subway safer. Subway stations in the city already have surveillance cameras. "It's awful. This just seems like a terrible surveillance PR stunt just to boost ridership," said Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a nonprofit aimed at reigning in digital surveillance in New York. "We have no idea how they would be sharing the data with federal and out-of-state partners," Fox Cahn said.

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New York To Install Surveillance Cameras in Every Subway Car

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  • Hand-wringing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Friday September 23, 2022 @04:26PM (#62909041) Homepage

    Is this strange? The BART system in the Bay Area has had cameras in every car for years, if not decades. And are their really no cameras on the NYC subway platforms already? Methinks the "privacy advocates" may be clutching their pearls a little bit.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Thanks for the kind of information I was thinking I needed on this topic. But I can't help but ask "Do the cars have WiFi, too?" I might even count that as a good tradeoff...

      But I'm a crank. I think they should have talking cars, too, where it's okay to use your smartphone to make calls. I'm pert' shure it would be noisier than bedlam in there, but a lot of the young kids would love the "social atmosphere" of it.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Plenty of public transport has had all that for years and years. It's more or less a given in many places. That doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea.

      You'd think we could look at all those public transport systems and all the surveillance tape they're filling, and how much it actually contributes to safety. Actual safety, as opposed to the nebulous blather about "feelings of safety", that can easily go either way.

      Could even put a price tag on it, though to do that honestly is a tad hard. So many mug

      • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Friday September 23, 2022 @05:01PM (#62909151) Journal
        It's not automatically a bad idea either. Whether it's good or bad depends on a few things:
        - Are the camera's only monitored, or is the footage also recorded?
        - If recordings are being made, what are the rules for access and retention? Is there an audit log for access?
        - Who can watch the footage and for what reasons?
        - Who oversees the proper use of these, and are there penalties for mis-use?

        It is possible to have surveillance like this with a minimal impact on privacy, as long as there are some rules in place that are actually being enforced.
      • by ac22 ( 7754550 )

        It's a deterrent. If New York subway cars had had surveillance cameras back in 1984, nobody would have tried to rob Bernhard Goetz.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • That's the biggest threat! What if they feed the cameras to the fashion police? In Iran, that could be a death sentence. Can you imagine how the Iranian Fashion Police would react to pictures from the New York subways?

          And, no, I never said I could write funny jokes, but I'm sure there's one lurking around here somewhere.

    • When I was living in SF in 2003 there were definitely cameras on the BART.

      And my medium sized city had already had them for years on all buses by them.

      If it didn't solve an important problem... it wouldn't be expected to increase ridership! Most people don't really like being on camera. It is only when there is a worse problem that it becomes a good thing.

      • Do the cameras even work? They are more than likely broken or with nobody watching or recording.
        • They work where I live.

          But then, we fund public transit and the buses are all well-maintained.

          So I guess it depends on if you live in a modern society, or an anti-tax backwater.

    • by Askmum ( 1038780 )

      And are their really no cameras on the NYC subway platforms already?

      Yes there are, you probably read the article wrong. There are cameras in subway stations, probably on platforms too. The article is about cameras in the trains.

  • Do you even notice the "surveillance camera" signs anymore? I think we're already too far down that rat hole. Or is it more of a rabbit hole?

    But on the other hand, I think people do tend to be more polite if they know that someone is watching them. So I guess my basic reaction to this news is that they should have a clear deletion policy with deadlines. If no one reports a problem within a certain time period, then the data gets erased. And there should probably be penalties for false accusations of crimes

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday September 23, 2022 @04:38PM (#62909085)

    I'm genuinely surprised that a subway in any modern city doesn't already have security cameras in every carriage. That's been the norm in many cities around the world for a long time.

    Rather than concern yourself with the presence of a camera how about passing some actual strict privacy laws that limit what can be done with said camera footage. Just whining about cameras existing is fighting a battle that has been lost years ago. You should absolutely expect to have a camera pointed at you at some point when you step off the street, going into a shop, into a subway, hell into people's private houses too. And if you're stupid in public expect people to hold cameras up and point them at you since everyone has one.

    Privacy advocates need to direct there attention to where it matters.

  • They'll be able to edit it down to a 30 minute highlight reel each day and show it on primetime
    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Surreality TV, eh? In line with my earlier attempted joke, how about doing it as a kind of fashion show? Without any Iranian judges, of course.

  • The last time I lived in a city that didn't have video cameras on its public transit rail cars was in the mid 1990's.

    Is New York really that far behind the times?

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      I mean, something that's got me scratching my head is that, if you commit a crime on public transit, your getaway car is public transit. Isn't it kind of, I don't know, incumbent upon public transit to have some information about things like when you got on the train, who you assaulted, when you got off, and so on?

  • I think chicago has them all ready NY is behind

  • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday September 23, 2022 @05:32PM (#62909235)
    I am completely gobsmacked they don't already have cameras. This is a standard safety measure for just about every countries public transport system in the world, and no it doesn't solve safety issues but it is a step in the right direction.
  • You get to know who is watching, under what circumstances, what is done with the video and how long it's kept. And I mean KNOW, backed up by laws that say going outside the established guidelines means jail time for everyone in the chain from the person who ordered it to the tech who made the configuration change.

    If the cameras are only routinely watched periodically to test function (both live and recorded), watched again if a crime is reported (not just random complaints, but something big enough to warr

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      I started thinking about this angle in terms of slippery slope arguments... What if the cops argue for retaining the video for long-term crimes? For example, a murder victim who isn't discovered for two weeks after the killing and where the murderer is thought to have used the subway to escape from the victim's apartment?

      That would even "justify" hooking the system into facial recognition AI to search for the "suspects". Things are starting to look bleak again...

      • And the slope is real.

        As an example, here, seatbelt laws ONLY passed because they PROMISED it would only EVER be used against you if you were pulled over for some other reason and only a minor fine and only front seats. Later, the fines were raised. Later it changed to include back seats. Later it was changed so that, alone could be the reason to pull someone over. And now there are articles about intrusive devices to lock you out if it thinks it smells alcohol, or has built-in speed enforcement, or giv

  • I'm surprised that they haven't been installed in the cars already. Adding them now will give the vandals something new to do in the subway cars, anyway.

  • Chicago has cameras on every train car. Crime on the L dropped the first three months after the cameras went in. Six months later, it was back up to where it was before the cameras were installed. I can only assume that the camera people greased palms in New York for the city to spend this kind of money in the face of evidence to the contrary - unless the police are going to do something different with the footage than they do here in Chicago.

    • >"Chicago has cameras on every train car. Crime on the L dropped the first three months after the cameras went in. Six months later, it was back up to where it was before the cameras were installed."

      Which is EXACTLY what any rational person would expect. Cameras, alone, will do very little to deter or stop crime. It takes police being there to do something about what is happening to matter. Criminals know this. They just cover up some. The crimes typically happen in seconds. Even if ALL the cameras

  • Many other train systems (including my home city of Brisbane, Australia) have had cameras on trains for years. What's the big deal about New York doing it?

    • I'm mid 30s and every public transport I've been on in Australia, going back as far as I can remember has cameras everywhere. Not just the train. Buses and trams too. Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth. All have cameras in their PT systems. Crazy to think somewhere as big as New York doesn't.
  • Why is the employer of that one victim who worked for Goldman Sacs significant when the employers of the other victims mentioned is not?

    Also: Every city bus I've been on in the last few decades has had at least one surveillance camera installed in the passenger compartment.

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