A view of computer screens during the opening of the new C4I4 Emergency Operations Centre in Mexico City October 25, 2011. The centre will coordinate actions against organised crime and deal with natural disasters. The centre will be staffed with intelligence and research personnel and will be connected to more than 8,000 video cameras generating more than 13,000 images per second which have been strategically placed around the quake-prone metropolis of 20 million people, reported local media. REUTERS/Bernardo Montoya
Mexico City opens massive public-surveillance center (Los Angeles Times):
There are 13,000 surveillance cameras dispersed across this megalopolis, capturing everything in view, in real time and around the clock.
The cameras peek at streets and people from the tops of light poles, inside buses and over subway platforms, watching in the name of public safety.
The local government, headed by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, this week unveiled an intelligence center where all these video feeds are monitored. It is a state-of-the-art “integrated” hub with a name that sounds like a futuristic space vessel: the C4I4.
Speaking inside the building’s circular nerve center — where 600 video screens carried scenes of residential streets and choked intersections — Ebrard told reporters that the C4I4 is one of the largest and most advanced public-safety command centers in the world.
It would serve as a hub in case of a major earthquake, an eruption of one of the nearby volcanos or an outbreak of the kind of intense drug-war street violence that has been seen in other parts of the country.
All of the city’s databases, such as vehicle records and home addresses, are at officials’ fingertips inside the C4I4. Forty-seven public-safety agencies, from firefighters to the bank police, now have a single home base in case of a major emergency.
And every image captured by the center’s cameras — movement in the city’s prison yards, commuters on the jam-packed Metrobus lines – is stored for up to a week, making for a gigantic ongoing intelligence operation blanketing the urban obstacle course that is Mexico’s capital. Hence the center’s name, signifying four Cs (command, control, communications, computing) and four I’s (intelligence, integration, information, investigation).
Ebrard said the center would help “guarantee safety in our city.”
