Next time you are driving down the road in Houston, look up at the poles around town. You’ll notice little white cameras that various government agencies have placed to spy on the citizens. Oh sure, some say they are for traffic monitoring and control, emergency notification, or security, and we can trust Uncle Samies boys in black to only do what they publically say, right? I trust them as much as I trust the government to be fiscally responsible.
Paranoid? Maybe, but only if I’m not right.
So I have started a project on documenting where government run/placed cameras are. I’ll map them, try to take pictures of them, and maybe even identify who is primarily responsible for running them. A fellow non-trusting-of-the-government-type suggested I get a GPS reader and get the coordinates of the cameras also. I may do that one day. NOTE/Update: I don’t think I’ll be taking pictures/GPS readings as that would be a fulltime job. Just driving from Calumet on 288 to 610 to S Post Oak (about an 8 mile stretch of highway) brings you past at least 39 cameras. Even taking as little as 5 minutes each (stop and snap a pic) would take over 3 hours, not including drivetime between shots. And this is a little slice of Houston. These numbers really disturb me. So initially I’ll just be getting counts of the number of cameras in certain stretches of roadway or areas, and later I may actually map/document each one. Total Cameras counted and placed into descriptions below as of 10/4/04: 69
I’m basically dividing the city into 5 sections to start off with for ease of sorting & doing: Downtown and 4 quadrants. For the quadrants basically I-10 will divide north from the south, North I45 will divide the northern half, and 288 will divide the southern half.
Here’s an online realtime traffic camera map: http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/devmap/ This only shows a small percentage of the cameras out there.
Also here’s a related camera list (also incomplete): http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/cameras/
Another blog has also posted some info on this topic: BlogHouston
This place got ticked off enough in Boston to map them and make it interactive. appliedautonomy.com
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