Smile, you're on the telescreen: universal surveillance meets universal exhibitionism.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Rant

REALITY TV HAS many lessons to teach us, but there is one it reiterates with a frequency even parrots can't match: If you want people to behave badly, stick a camera in their faces. It doesn't matter if they're stranded on a South Pacific island or huddled in the back of a police car; there's something about the intrusive, unblinking gaze of a Sony Betacam that makes people feel invisible, beyond censure.

Apparently our legislators and law enforcement officials have little time to watch Survivor or Cops. They still operate under the notion that surveillance acts as a deterrent. In that enclave of unchecked liberal permissiveness known to the world as San Francisco, for example, the police commission just approved a plan to bolster the city's current network of 33 public surveillance cameras with 20 more mechanical eyes.

In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley has promised to transform his city from a barely scrutinized sanctuary of privacy--there are only 200 police-operated cameras in service there now--into a virtual panopticon. "By 2016, I'll make you a bet. We'll have [cameras] on almost every block," he crowed to reporters in October.

In other words, if a criminal attacks you in 2016, it will be a much more theatrical experience than it is now. Your assailant will flash his tits at you and eat live cockroaches on command before engaging in a teary, drunken monologue about how much he misses his kids and just wants to go home.

But other than that, who knows? Surveillance cameras certainly lead to more surveillance cameras, but do they lead to less crime? In England there are now approximately 5 million public and private surveillance cameras, a fact that has turned every resident of the country's capital into surrogate Madonnas and Prince Henrys. "The average Londoner going about his or her business may be monitored by 300 [surveillance] cameras a day," Brendan O'Neill reports in an October issue of the New Statesman. The national surveillance state, it seems, is a pretty democratic place.

Some English cameras verbally reprimand offenders who litter. Others, O'Neill writes, will soon have the ability to "recognise whether people are walking suspiciously or strangely, and alert a human operator."...