The city that never sleeps wants to become just like the city that always peeps. New York City plans to install more than 100 cameras in Lower Manhattan by 2008, as part of a surveillance architecture that would also wire thousands of public and private cameras into a central command hub. The idea is to would mimic the ubiquitous and all-seeing camera and traffic monitoring system in London, according to the New York Times.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London's so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects following the London subway bombings in 2005 and after the car bomb plots last month. If New York City succeeds in getting the estimated $90 million to build the full network, it will include not only license plate readers but 3,000 public and private security cameras, a coordination center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks. "This area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of this nation," New York's police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said in an interview last week. "We want to make it less vulnerable."

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Woe be it for this blog to sound conspiratorial, but should a police department that arrested a guy for having a chalk printer on his bike and infiltrated peace groups to create dossiers on them ahead of a political convention really be trusted with a network of thousands of video cameras? Think of the storage costs for all those dossiers...

Photo: Pete Toscano