When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is not busy performing musical numbers for the City Hall press corps, or teaming up with Joe Biden to push for gun reform, he's taking his time gently explaining the permanent surveillance apparatus that will soon cover every inch of New York City.
On his weekly radio show he told listeners,
"You wait, in five years, the technology is getting better, they'll be cameras everyplace . . . whether you like it or not."
And while he seemed confident that cameras would be posted on most telephone and utility poles, he admitted that drones will soon also be used —
"It's scary, but what's the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building? I mean intellectually I have trouble making a distinction. And you know you're gonna have face recognition software. People are working on that."
Coupled with the Domain Awareness System, the city-wide spying/surveillance program the city announced last summer, it seems like New York City is at the forefront of a new world of surveillance, where not a moment goes unrecorded.
The mayor pushed ethics aside in favor of the unstoppable progress of technology:
"We're going to have more visibility and less privacy. I don't see how you stop that. And it's not a question of whether I think it's good or bad. I just don't see how you could stop that because we're going to have them."