May 09, 2005 | Noah in Surveillance Wonderland

SSN pal Noah Shachtman (of DefenseTech fame) went to Chicago to get on the viewfinder side of the city's police departments' network of video cameras.

The story has been out in print in Wired magazine for a few weeks now and I've been dying to blog it, but didn't want to tease anyone with a story they couldn't read online.

Noah got superlucky and super scared I'd imagine while out on patrol and got to be part of a police chase.

Today the piece came online and here's what Noah had to say about it:

Over the winter, I spent a week and a half riding around with the police in the great city of Chicago. 2,250 spy cameras, 466,000 pieces of evidence, four suspected drug dealers, and one giant car chase later, the report I filed for Wired magazine on my trip is finally out. Here's how it starts.

On a warm afternoon on Chicago's West Side, a young African-American man leans against the wall of the One Stop Food and Liquor store at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Homan Street. His puffy black jacket is so oversize that the collar hangs halfway down his back. Thirty feet up, a camera mounted on a telephone pole swivels toward him.

Three miles away, in a bunkerlike, red granite building near Greektown, Ron Huberman watches the young man on a PC screen. "You see that guy?" asks Huberman, the 33-year-old chief of Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications. "He's pitching dope - you can tell. Fucker."

Nicely done, Mr. Noah.

Posted by Ryan Singel at May 9, 2005 11:06 AM

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