Jun 11, 2016 4 min read

If you have the itch to scratch yourself somewhere untoward when you are at The Meadows Casino in North Strabane Township, you’d better not do it.

You shouldn’t do it because it’s uncouth and ill-mannered, of course, and something your mother would admonish you for. But even if you are in the most isolated corner of the casino during the slowest time of the day, someone will see you. You might not see their eyes, but they will have theirs trained on you.

Like other casinos, The Meadows is generously festooned with surveillance cameras. As the Observer-Reporter noted in a story June 3, the entire complex is outfitted with 1,200 of them, and the seven-year-old facility just had its system upgraded. Cameras can now reveal so much detail the serial number on a $5 bill can be seen by casino “bloodhounds” on a sharp lookout for cheats, thieves and other miscreants.

The need for close surveillance at The Meadows is apparent, but cameras are now cropping up in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect. A few days after we reported on The Meadows’ plenitude of cameras, we published a story about how law-enforcement officials in Donora placed about three dozen surveillance cameras throughout the borough and were able to witness drug transactions, sex acts and an assortment of other mischief.

James Brice, Donora’s police superintendent, told staff writer Kathie O. Warco, “You wouldn’t believe what we see. It is like we can be 36 different places at the same time. We can tell the responding officer what is going on before he even gets there.”

Surveillance cameras are a fact of 21st century life. They’re present at just about every place where lots of people gather, whether it’s a shopping center, a sports arena, a university or any other kind of institution. What we haven’t yet fully resolved as a society is whether surveillance cameras provide us with security and comfort or snatch away our privacy.

The quantity of cameras trained from shop windows along the route and the bounty of cameras at the finish line made it easy for law enforcement officials to identify and nab the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013. By the same token, some officials complained cameras give them almost too much information to sift. Greater London, for instance, is monitored by an astonishing 500,000 cameras, with 4.2 million spread across the entirety of Great Britain – that works out to roughly one camera for every 14 people. How many crimes are actually solved by the cameras? Estimates by London police said one is solved per every thousand cameras, which suggests they may be more costly and intrusive than they are effective.

Civil liberties advocates also argue surveillance cameras diminish the freedom of public life by making us more self-conscious, can be subject to abuse and, in many instances, lack appropriate checks and balances governing their use.

Thirty, 40 or 50 years ago, it might have been possible for someone to slip into anonymity and start a new life elsewhere – think of the errant husband who went out one morning for cigarettes and a newspaper and never came back. How such a vanishing act could be pulled off today is hard to imagine, when we can be tracked not only by surveillance cameras, but also by email, social media posts, mobile phones, EZ Pass devices, ATM machines, credit cards and on and on.

Coming to terms with all the issues surrounding everyday surveillance are tricky and convoluted, and will take time to resolve. But one thing is certain – the age of anonymity, if it ever existed, is gone. An age of what could be described as maximum transparency has arrived.