Sunday, April 23, 2006

"POLICE OFFICIALS INSIST LAW-ABIDING HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR"

25 September 2002, Randy Kenner, News-Sentinel - An Ohio man filed a
$1.5 million lawsuit Tuesday against the Knoxville Marriott hotel after
finding a hidden camera in a bathroom light fixture in July. Bryan
Brewer discovered the small video camera after noticing a tiny black
spot -- which he thought was an insect but turned out to be a hole -- in
the fixture, according to the lawsuit. At the time Brewer, the vice
president of a California company, was staying at the Marriott while on
business. His attorney, K.O. Herston, filed the lawsuit in Knox County
Circuit Court. Named as defendants are Marriott International Inc. and
Columbia Sussex Corp., a Fort Mitchell, Ky., corporation that operated
at least 28 Marriotts with more than 8,500 rooms.

1 July 2003, Overton County, Tennessee: Overton County parents upset
that their children were filmed undressing in school locker rooms have
filed suit, charging that school officials allowed surveillance cameras
to be installed and then failed to secure the images. The lawsuit was
filed last week in U.S. District Court in Nashville. The parents have
asked for $4.2 million in damages. They contend that the school system
in Overton County, on the Upper Cumberland Plateau, violated students'
rights by putting hidden cameras in Livingston Middle School's boys and
girls locker rooms. The cameras reportedly captured students, ages
10-14, in various stages of undress.

11 July 2003, Atlanta, Georgia: Associated Press: A woman who says she
noticed a video camera in the ceiling of an Alpharetta Toys R Us
bathroom is suing the retailer for invasion of privacy. Tamara Perez
says she noticed a hole in the ceiling above the commode while visiting
the suburban Atlanta store on March 21. According to her lawsuit, Perez
quickly left the womens restroom and asked her husband to investigate.
Walter Perez moved a ceiling tile and found a video camera with a
transmittal device, according to the lawsuit.

6 August 2003, Wilton Manors, Florida - A man is suing the city of
Wilton Manors because he said police were watching him when he used the
bathroom. The lawsuit claims restroom cameras at Colohatchee Park
violated the unidentified man's rights. Police had arrested the man and
charged him with public exposure based on evidence collected from the
camera, but later dropped the charge.

10 September 2003, Beaufort, South Carolina - A wall-mounted camera used
to videotape the men's bathroom of a mid-island bar has invaded the
privacy of bar patrons, according to a lawsuit filed in the Beaufort
County Courthouse last week.

12 September 2003, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The traffic camera featured on
Comcast Cable's Channel 45 was showing more than just traffic early
Friday -- it was following people on the Strip. The Crimson White
learned at about 1:45 a.m. Friday that the traffic camera at the
intersection of University Boulevard and Reed Street, which usually
remains stationary, was panning, tilting and zooming in on people and
objects along the Strip. The Strip camera operator(s) manipulated the
camera to zoom in on several college-aged women's breasts and buttocks
as they walked down the street. The operator(s) also captured a group of
young men who had spotted the camera's movement and were making various
gestures and movements.

15 September 2003, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: AP -- Images from a traffic
camera that was used instead to monitor passersby near the University of
Alabama led to the arrests of three people allegedly misbehaving on the
street, police said Tuesday. Meanwhile, officials said they were still
investigating who had diverted the focus of the camera from traffic --
where it normally is used to monitor vehicles -- to pedestrians,
particularly young women.

18 October 2003, South Carolina: A security camera installed in the
men's bathroom at Vic's Tavern was put there to protect against
vandalism and did not violate anyone's privacy, says the owner of the
Hilton Head Island bar in a response to a lawsuit filed by two bar
patrons. The patrons, Pawey Suchocki and Vince Bryant, are seeking
$200,000 each for invasion of privacy and $200,000 each for infliction
of emotional stress. A surveillance tape recorded Suchocki, of Hilton
Head, ripping the camera from the wall in late May, according to a
Beaufort County Sheriff's Office incident report

4 December 2003, Pittsford, New York: Videotapes discovered in the
alleged pornography case involving a Pittsford Sutherland High School
custodian show about 12 unsuspecting female students and staff members
in a restroom, a Pittsford school district official said Wednesday. . .
"It appears that the videotapes were taken from inside one female
restroom at Sutherland high school and that the people on the videotapes
were unaware they were being recorded," Superintendent Mary Alice Price
said in a prepared statement issued Wednesday.

13 January 2004, Oak Bluffs, In the wake of public concern over the use
of a surveillance camera in the high school, officials have decided to
turn the camera off until a written policy on its use is adopted. . .
The decision by the principal comes after questions were raised by
students and members of the community following the use of the
surveillance camera's videotape in an investigation into a threatening
prank written in one of the school's girls bathroom last month.

1 April 2004, New York City, New York: A confidential police video that
shows a young rapper kissing his girlfriend goodbye before blowing his
brains out in a Bronx housing project turned up on a porn Web site --
and cops have launched a probe to nail the sicko who leaked it.

1 June 2004, Chicago, Illinois: The director of a tutoring center in
Chicago has been charged with manufacturing and possessing child
pornography. Sixty-two-year-old James Bradshaw was arrested Saturday. A
Cook County judge set his bail yesterday at 75-thousand dollars. Police
and prosecutors say Bradshaw operated a sophisticated video surveillance
system in the bathroom of the Beverly Instructional Center. They say
they've recovered numerous videotapes of children in the bathroom.

5 June 2004, Arizona: Two members of Fort McDowell Casino's regulatory
office were fired last fall because one man used casino surveillance
cameras "to photograph the breast area of patrons and employees" and the
other, his supervisor, condoned the action, according to state documents
released this week.

17 June 2004, Adrina, Michigan: A jury quickly decided Wednesday there
is a difference between videotaping nude customers in a tanning room and
using security cameras at convenience stores or banks. After 30 minutes
of deliberations, guilty verdicts in 16 electronic eavesdropping cases
were returned in Lenawee County Circuit Court against Danny Eugene
Daulton, an Adrian nail and tanning salon owner.

2 July 2004, New York City, USA: When lawyers from the Legal Aid Society
made their way into the federal detention center in Brooklyn in the fall
of 2001 to meet with detainees, they said, they were alarmed to see
video cameras on the walls. Concerned about the confidentiality of their
conversations with their shackled clients -- immigrant detainees who
were rounded up after the Sept. 11 attacks -- the lawyers asked whether
they were being taped. Prison officials assured them, they say, that the
cameras were turned off. But the cameras were running. The federal
prison was intentionally recording the lawyer-client conversations in
violation of federal law and prison policy, according to a December
report by the inspector general of the Justice Department, Glenn A.
Fine.

27 August 2004, Ithaca, New York: A college student called police after
discovering a pinhole camera in the bathroom of the apartment she shared
with three women, and now her landlord is charged with unlawful
surveillance.

25 September 2004, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Borough Manager Anthony
Truscello has announced his resignation amid an investigation of the use
of surveillance cameras to spy on police. . . A private investigator . .
. found several pinhole cameras placed in smoke detectors -- one in a
hallway, one in the squad room and one in the evidence room. One of the
cameras had a microphone installed in it, making it capable of
eavesdropping, according to an affidavit filed by county detectives in
May.

24 February 2005, New York, New York: CBS 2 has obtained a videotape
that the New York City police department doesn't want you to see. It
shows cops on surveillance just before last year's Republican Convention
in Manhattan. But it is what they were checking out that is a little
disturbing. . . The police dutifully survey the area, but then they
focus on a couple in a passionate embrace kissing and fondling each
other on a roof top terrace. The police infra scope stays on the scene
for a while and then pulls away, but then it comes back a second time to
watch the couple and then a third time. .

21 April 2005, San Francisco, California: A San Francisco police officer
has been suspended from the department for nine months for reportedly
using surveillance cameras to ogle women at San Francisco International
Airport, according to a spokesman with the San Francisco Police
Commission.

26 April 2005, Atlantic City, New Jersey: Four more surveillance camera
operators at Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino used the equipment to
ogle women, according to a complaint filed Tuesday. In December, the
same casino was fined $80,000 for similar incidents involving two other
camera operators who trained their eye-in-the-sky cameras on low-cut
blouses and revealing clothing instead of craps games and slot parlors.

18 May 2005, New York City: Police found a so-called "skirt cam" under a
subway grate at 88th Street and Lexington Avenue Tuesday afternoon after
a woman called police saying she had noticed suspicious wires protruding
from the grate as she passed by.

2 August 2005, Newark, New York: An 11-year veteran of a Wayne County
police department resigned Monday, two days after he was arrested on
suspicion of using a spy camera to photograph girls changing clothes in
a Greece shopping mall.

22 December 2005, New York, New York: A man and woman who shared an
intimate moment on a secluded, dark rooftop one August night last year
have learned that they were secretly watched, an intrusion made possible
by increased police surveillance of protest rallies and other events and
also by advanced technology intended to fight terrorists. That night,
police officers tracked bicycle riders moving through the streets of the
Lower East Side from a custom-built, $9.8 million helicopter equipped
with optical equipment able to display a license plate 1,000 feet away.
With the night vision of the helicopter's camera, and permission to make
videotapes, an officer also recorded nearly four minutes of the couple
on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse.

10 April 2006, London, England: Teachers are preparing to protest
against surveillance cameras and microphones that are being installed in
classrooms across the UK. Surveillance firm Classwatch has installed
more than 50 CCTV systems with microphones across the UK, said the Times
Educational Supplement on Friday. Draconian headteachers, who have had
teachers watched through two-way mirrors as well, grade teachers
according to their performance under observation. Occasional observation
is necessary to ensure lessons meet quality targets set centrally by the
Department for Education and Skills.

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