Surveillance

From a desk full of monitors in the basement of the Baltimore County courthouse, Lt. Tony Chambers watched one recent morning as lawyers argued a case, people got on and off the elevators, and an incarcerated defendant preened and danced in a holding cell. Then, using a device similar to a video game joystick, he panned across several blocks in Towson that surround the courthouse, zooming in on buildings and license plates of individual cars. "It's an amazing system," Chambers said of the security surveillance cameras recently installed in the five-story Circuit Court building.

Bus operators are being encouraged to call police and stop the vehicle at the first sign of disruptive behavior as part of a plan to curb violence on public transit, the Maryland Transit Administration announced yesterday. Responding to a series of assaults recently on its buses in Baltimore, the MTA also said it would step up patrols by its police force and forge a closer working relationship with the Baltimore Police Department and the city school system. Among other steps, the MTA plans to speed notification of city officers when an incident occurs on a bus or other transit facilities in the city.

WASHINGTON -- Congress is considering a change to the laws governing domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency that would close a new intelligence gap recently revealed by U.S. officials. Top intelligence agency officials went to Capitol Hill in mid-July and informed lawmakers that a new data collection problem had been discovered, congressional aides said. That gap, according to the officials, is preventing U.S. intelligence agencies from legally collecting "a significant portion of what we should be getting," said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat.

Once again, federal assurances that anti-terrorism surveillance tactics respect the limits of individual privacy rights have been proved worthless. Listen in. Here's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last December defending a program that collects and saves for up to 15 years information about the travel habits of innocent Americans: "What we are doing is a sensible, totally constitutional and privacy right-respecting effort to make sure...

Surveillance Jonathan Raban Pantheon / 258 pages / $24 Cross Lincoln Steffens on the Russian Revolution ("I have seen the future and it works") with Pogo ("We have met the enemy and he is us"), and you pretty much come out at Jonathan Raban's new novel. "I have met the future and it's the enemy and it's us," in other words. This is the dystopian theme of Surveillance, a current that does not so much run beneath the fiction as flood it. The compass virtually pre-empts the ship, eclipsing such features of an ocean trip as sunlight on cobalt waves, storm clouds on black ones, salt air, flying fish, seasickness and the onboard affair.

LAST WEEK' S ISSUE: -- Responding to growing concerns about crime at light rail stops in northern Anne Arundel, County Executive John R. Leopold called on the state's transit administrator to place permanent patrols at three stations and bolster other security measures. In a letter sent to Maryland Transit Administrator Paul J. Wiedefeld, Leopold said his administration has received several complaints from residents and riders of the light rail in Anne Arundel. A month ago, a twice-convicted rapist was charged with raping a 22-year-old woman at the Nursery Road stop in Linthicum.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Three federal appeals court judges hearing challenges yesterday to the National Security Agency's surveillance programs appeared skeptical of and sometimes hostile to the Bush administration's central argument - that national security concerns require that the lawsuits be dismissed. "Is it the government's position that when our country is engaged in a war that the power of the executive when it comes to wiretapping is unchecked?" Judge Harry Pregerson asked a government lawyer.

Michael E. Bennett will take the center seat at City Hall tomorrow night when he is sworn in as the next mayor of Aberdeen. Giving a preview of his administration, the former state trooper said he will be less involved in day-to-day activities than his predecessor and offered a different perspective on the unfinished initiatives that S. Fred Simmons leaves behind, such as the use of surveillance cameras, a desalination plant, and the city's ownership of...

ISSUE: Responding to growing concerns about crime at light rail stops in northern Anne Arundel, County Executive John R. Leopold has called on the state's transit administrator to place permanent patrols at three stations and bolster other security measures. In a letter sent last week to Maryland Transit Administrator Paul J. Wiedefeld, Leopold said his administration has received several complaints from residents and riders of the light rail system in Anne Arundel. One month ago, a twice-convicted rapist was charged with raping a 22-year-old woman at the Nursery Road stop in Linthicum.

Baltimore County police are seeking two men in the beating and rape of a Middle River woman and the robbery and beating of her male companion in Essex in the early morning of Jan. 23.The men offered rides to the victims at 2 a.m. from My Friends Tavern on Woodrow Avenue, off South Marlyn Avenue.The wanted men, who had been seen previously at the bar by patrons, drove the man and woman to an isolated, wooded area near Schaffers Road, where the male victim was beaten with a blunt object, robbed and left behind.

Maryland Transit Administration police have charged a 22-year-old Baltimore man in connection with the detonation of a homemade bomb on a city bus earlier this month, documents show. Alan Weeks, of the 5900 block of Radecke Ave., turned himself in Saturday after television stations broadcast closed-circuit surveillance footage of two men who were on the bus moments before the bomb went off, according to charging documents. Weeks said he was one of the men in the surveillance footage but denied any involvement in the incident.

The police won't get to watch patrons down beers at Shirley's Honey Hole after all. Baltimore's police commissioner is planning to veto a condition worked out by the bar's owner and a city attorney that would have allowed law enforcement to monitor live video feeds from surveillance cameras inside the tavern, according to the department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi. It was one of several concessions the owner, Shirley Barner, had agreed to this week to keep authorities from padlocking her business after a spate of shootings outside and accusations that drug dealers were using the vestibule to sell and store narcotics led police to label the bar a public nuisance.

What Maryland thinks : The Baltimore Police Department plans to install a surveillance camera in a bar on Oliver Street linked to drug dealing and violence. Should the city place cameras inside private businesses as a crime-fighting tool? Yes 45% No 51% Not sure 4% (847 votes, results not scientific) Next poll: : The Supreme Court has signaled that it may do away with long-standing restrictions on corporate funding of campaigns. Should corporations and unions be free to contribute directly to candidates?

The war on terror has accustomed us to the idea of constantly being watched. In airports and train stations, in schools, offices and stores and along city streets, the ubiquitous, unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras daily record our images. We're no longer unduly alarmed by the idea of police video surveillance of public spaces, or of private businesses installing security cameras to tape what's going on inside their premises. Some people feel safer knowing the authorities are watching.

Soon, when you belly up to the bar at Shirley's Honey Hole on East Oliver Street, police will know when you've had your first, second and even third beer. From three miles away at the Citiwatch command center on Howard Street, they will be able to watch you buy a drink for the woman on the corner stool, stumble to the bathroom and challenge someone to a brawl. As part of a settlement to keep police from padlocking her establishment as a "public nuisance" linked to drug dealing and violence, the owner agreed Tuesday to install surveillance cameras not only outside but also inside her bar, complete with a live video feed to police.

These are some of the faces of people robbing banks in and around Baltimore and Washington: A middle-age, balding man with a sand-colored beard wearing spectacles and a striped polo shirt, holding a demand note while leaning across the teller counter. A young man wearing a Detroit Tigers cap, a T-shirt with an easily identifiable slogan, chatting on his cell phone. A man wearing a construction-site hard hat adorned with the American flag and clad in an orange safety vest. A man in a hooded sweat shirt carrying an umbrella under his right arm. A man disguised with a white surgical mask.

Baltimore's expansive police surveillance network has led to a homicide arrest, after a downtown stabbing was captured in real-time by city cameras. In another case, police arrested a suspect in a fatal shooting after a home surveillance system captured a confrontation on a block where a man was gunned down. Authorities monitoring the city's blue-light CitiWatch cameras observed an altercation at about 1:40 a.m. Saturday in the 300 block of N. Paca St. and officers who responded to the scene found 18-year-old David Reese suffering from a stab wound to the chest, according to charging documents.

Dante McCray was detained by police about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday after surveillance camera operators observed him with a shotgun in downtown Baltimore. By lunchtime, he had been charged in the killing of a woman in Fells Point. City police said officers swarmed the 22-year-old after watching him put a shotgun into the trunk of a white Cadillac parked at Eutaw and Lombard streets. The car had stolen plates and was being sought in connection with the shooting a day earlier of Josephine Lewatowski, 48. McCray, who also had a .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol, was detained by Central District officers and taken in for questioning as detectives searched the vehicle and performed ballistics tests on the weapons.

At 11 p.m., a police surveillance camera zoomed in on Eutaw Street, packed with cars and people heading home from an Orioles game. A few minutes later, another camera focused on Saratoga Street as a dispatcher sent cops to a report that "five or six people are outside the location fighting." Within the next half-hour on live video beamed into the Citiwatch command center on Howard Street: Someone was assaulted at Penn and Pratt streets; an undercover cop searched a suspect at Paca and Mulberry; a dispatcher called out "an assault in progress" on West Lanvale.

With a television news camera rolling, the 16-year-old boy quietly recounted an incident in which he said about 15 other teens kicked and punched him at the Inner Harbor, in broad daylight, while he waited for a bus. His head was swollen, his hands cut and his school uniform bloodied - another apparent attack by teens in the downtown area. But police now believe that the boy was a willing participant in a gang initiation ceremony, saying he confessed after a review of surveillance camera footage showed no evidence of an attack.