SMART CITIES WILL SEE IT ALL

For a major U.S. city today, you are generally talking about thousands of government-operated cameras, and in the largest highly integrated surveillance systems, tens of thousands of cameras potentially accessible to authorities. And that's before counting ordinary private cameras on shops, office buildings, homes, parking garages, doorbells, etc. For a smart-city/privacy discussion, I think the more interesting metric isn't simply “How many cameras?” It is “How many cameras can the city access, correlate, and analyze?” A city with 2,000 integrated, AI-searchable cameras may have substantially greater surveillance capability than one with 20,000 disconnected cameras.