Kashmir Hill reports:
A few years back, Thomas ‘T.K.’ Kinsey was having a late, inebriated night in downtown Redlands, a far-flung suburb of Los Angeles. He started climbing a fountain, making the kind of bad decision a late-night carouser makes. Suddenly, he heard a voice coming from above telling him to stop. It wasn’t a good angel on his shoulder; it was a member of the police department speaking to him through a speaker in a city surveillance camera. Redlands has over 140 surveillance cameras around the 70,000-person town that have helped the police spot and stop drunk drivers, brawlers, vandals, and people illegally smoking in parks, according to a case study on the site of Leverage Information Systems, the company that provided the camera system. After his encounter being watched by the cameras, Kinsey, a security engineer, decided to gaze back at the system. He and Dustin Hoffman, his boss at IT firm Exigent Systems, discovered that the police were not the only ones who could peer through the eyes of the city’s cameras.
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