Daily Loaf

(for full Heatwave coverage, click here)

Do you ever feel like Big Brother is watching you?  If you’ve been to 7th Avenue in Ybor City, you’re probably right. The street is lined with CCTV surveillance cameras. That’s why a group of concerned USF art students, in conjunction with the Tampa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, is performing in the Camerahead Project at WMNF’s Tropical Heatwave this Saturday, May 16.

To raise awareness of the increasing “mission creep” of government through surveillance cameras, USF art students in colorful costumes with oversized surveillance cameras for heads will conduct super-slow “missions” along Ybor City’s 7th Avenue, calling attention to the multiple surveillance cameras along the street. The camera heads are scheduled to do their surveillance on 7th Street on their way to the 9th Street venue, so you can see the six Camera Heads without paying to get into Heatwave.

The goal of the project is to raise public awareness of the real threats to privacy that exist as we move closer to a surveillance society. “We are constantly being filmed and photographed, but people may not even realize how much,” said USF grad student Justin Martin, who is the director of a group of USF art majors producing the project. ACLU Board member Brian Becker adds: “We hope that through these performances we can raise awareness in the community and bring the dialogue about camera surveillance into the light of the day.”

The ACLU and the USF art students hope to get you thinking about what it means to have your public spaces under constant surveillance. If we don’t put a stop to this now, who knows how far it could go…

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” 1984 by George Orwell

For further information, click here or contact: Brian Becker, Greater Tampa Chapter of the ACLU, (813) 835-4472  or briangbecker@earthlink.net

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