i had a little something to say to the ci-tay... as always...

oh, paradise city...

wow... adam cohen, surveillance-cam apologist extraordinaire, i am truly impressed by your flood of posts over the last several days, offering "evidence" of the wonders of surveillance.

i would like to make you a proposal. i am willing to consider your position(s) under one condition: that you buy me one of these amazing high-tech spy cams that can do what you claim - work at a slow shutter speed in the dark to capture would-be wrong-doers. i'll set it up in my window, and i'll see how things go. if things get better in the city i'll publicly admit on this very forum that you're not out of your mind. but i get to keep the camera after the experiment is over.

i'm not joking! please buy me a camera. because in truth, i have (for purposes of my own, involving a desire to find out who's outside my door before answering my doorbell) done a bit of research into spy-cams and i have not been able to find anything in my miniscule price range that would actually work in any way. now... i know you have experience videotaping stuff in well-lit rooms and i don't know anything about what experience you may or may not have videotaping in the dark. but i've been playing with cameras for many years and my experience and research have taught me that your claims about the wonders of modern spy-cam technology (as far as what regular people can afford) are a bit exaggerated.

i'll just address the shutter speed issue. i believe you mentioned slow shutter speed as a way to slow down the recording so that one could capture more video on less tape (or hard drive) as well as bring in more light. 2 different issues. the first would actually be addressed by stop-motion, something that's not a feature on all cameras - like having the camera capture one frame every ten seconds, for example. slow shutter speed itself has one major advantage: it brings in more light. but the down-side is that anything that moves will be very blurry. my own video camera has about the best night-mode i've ever seen, but people have to hold still if i want to capture their faces in the dark.

i'd really love it if you bought me a camera so you could prove me wrong. i LOVE being proven wrong! i don't want to be right about how creepy all of this is.

but now onto other serious matters: i have a few things to address and i might as well address them all now.

i am the first person who invoked the spectre of "1984" and suggested people read it. i admitted that it sounded far-fetched even to me, but i stand by my original statement that it would be informative for us all, and help us consider how we react to these incidents. and actually i don't think it's as far-fetched as it sounds. if you don't feel like reading (or re-reading) the book, check out the movie. i just happened to watch the movie for the first time a couple weeks ago (before this spate of fires.) it was shot in london in 1984. watching it, i was struck by how much of it really resembled things that have gone on in this country and others since 9/11/01. consider the fact that all of london, for example, is now under surveillance 24/7. did that prevent more bombings of the subways? maybe, or maybe not. did we ever find out who caused those? the only thing *i* ever found out was that the emergency response personnel had been running mock emergency scenarios involving subway bombings at the exact same time when the real bombings occurred (just like how all of our airborne emergency response teams of the U.S. military were in training scenarios on 9/11, involving mock hijackings, which caused the FAA to be unable to distinguish actual hijackings from mock ones and were the reason why jets were not scrambled in time to intercept the planes that flew into the WTC. EVERY SINGLE military air base was doing practice exercises on that day at that time.)

i say watch that movie, 1984. it's creepy. it's probably a lot more creepy now than when it first came out, because it resembles our current reality much more closely now.

next issue: let's pretend that i'm "the arsonist" (personally i don't think that one or even three people could pull off 9 successful fires and many other attempted fires in 175 minutes, but let's suspend disbelief for this one.) i am on this forum. i am going to the meetings too, and i know everything the rest of you know about how little anyone knows. this is encouraging. but now i realize that there might be more cameras put up all over town. am i worried? no, i'm not! why not? ski mask, that's why not! black clothes and a ski mask. that's all i'm going to need to maintain my anonymity. but boy do i feel like i've got one over on y'all for lurking on the forums.

next issue: i totally second everything caty has said so i won't repeat it but her posts are worth re-reading (not in small part b/c she backed up my own points... heh...)

next issue: i'm assuming that the mad scramble for citizens to purchase their own cameras to spy on their neighborhoods is due to an assumption that there are no resources for such surveillance within the policing community. that is probably true in terms of northampton itself. but will someone PLEASE explain to me, then, how it is possible that a friend of mine who lives on main street (and is involved in NO illegal activities whatsoever, although there are surely one or two drug users in any given apartment building and his would be no exception) has been having to live with daily surveillance of his building for the last several months? when he first told me about it (he watches the watchers with his binoculars) i thought perhaps he was just really sleep-deprived, but i've seen enough to know that it's true, as have at least two of his other friends. for some reason his building has been under surveillance for a while. it seems very clear that the spies (i'll use that term because i don't know what agency these people are from) come from out of town. i suspect south boston, simply because of the "undercover" dress the spies wear (which is unlike how anyone in northampton dresses - it's a true southie style) and because of the transponders in the windows of the SUVs they arrive in, which indicate that they drive on the mass pike. every day he has watched as these SUVs start arriving at 6am and they stay until nightfall. those of us who have gone outside to have a closer look have noted some high-tech gadgetry inside... i'm talking remote-controlled cameras that follow movement, monitored on laptops. i'm talking hinges and ball-bearings. i'm talking about people with money, or people tryign to justify getting some money from homeland security funds. or something. whatever... there's money involved. there is no other way to have multiple spies devoted daily, for months, to the surveillance of one building. these people must be making some sort of salary and the equipment and vehicles cost money...

so there is money for surveillance out there somewhere. why it is being spent on spying on innocent people is a mystery to me. but i'm NOT making this up. in fact, i've seen them watch me as i left his building and walked back to my own, and then saw them waiting for me to come back out, hours later. when i made eye contact w/one of them who was smoking in the usual non-vehicular hangout, by the side door of one of the municipal buildings, he immediately tossed his cigarette to the ground & ducked inside the building. but he was not a local person (seriously... a local undercover agent would be more likely to dress as a hippie than to wear a baseball cap with a hoodie over it & a big puffy jacket over that, which is the uniform-du-jour of the high-tech SUV spies.)

i know that mr. cohen and others will react to what i am saying with some retorts involving my wild imagination. so i will preemptively retort to that. you know how you may never notice a mazda miata until you decide that you want to buy one, and then all of a sudden you see them everywhere? it's like that. i am indeed hyper-sensitive to surveillance people and surveillance cameras, in large part because of my own personal situation in the building i live in. i already wrote about how much i do not like having a camera on me when i take out my garbage & recycling (and yes, i've run into a "hobo" at the dumpster myself but he wasn't setting it on fire... he was trying to survive by scavenging and my immediate impression was that he was ahead of the game, because more and more of us will be living that way as time goes on.) but i've had other issues. for example, the management of my building had a surveillance camera aimed at my own door for several months. it was there, in theory, to stop homeless people from coming in the hallway and resting their weary souls. it was also there to try to catch the bad, bad person who kept using shims to prop open the hallway door so that delivery people and/or guests could get to their destinations, i.e. the very sturdy dead-bolted doors (w/peepholes for extra security!) of their target residents. so the camera was supposedly looking at the entrance to the hallway, but it just happened that i was the only person on my floor who could not enter or exit my own apartment without being on camera, due to my proximity to that hallway entrance (every other person on the floor had the option of avoiding the camera by using the other door. i could not get to the other door without first passing by the camera.) i took offense. and then the management installed wireless doorbells for everyone as a solution and insisted that we keep the hallway door locked at all times. this made my apartment door's peephole useless, and i had a big problem with the situation because if the doorbell rang there was no way for me to find out who was there without revealing my presence (and often much of myself, if i happened to be coming out of the shower & just wearing a towel.)

i have my own personal stalker in town, so i petitioned the management to allow me (at my own expense) to install a spy cam in the hallway so that i could see who was ringing my doorbell. they refused, and the only option they offered me was to remove my doorbell entirely. this is how i wound up researching spy cams in the first place and finding out that they were too expensive for me - and those were the ones with no options on shutter speed and no low-light features,etc. (i don't mean to ream the management of my building personally, but they were also major backers of the BID and i did the head hancho the honor of singling him out for violation of my privacy, at a city council meeting.)

and then... i've videotaped our local cops occasionally when i've seen them "in action" (harrassing hippie kids in the park, etc.) and they have always been on the defensive & asked me if i was part of "copwatch". i have told them in all honesty that as long as we citizens are under surveillance (bush at the time was pushing to grant local police the power to infiltrate "suspected terrorist organizations" and spy on innocent citizens - and if you haven't checked out the way terrorist is now defined, let me inform you that it includes vegans, animal-rights people, and anyone opposing big pharma, for starters) that i thought we citizens should be surveilling them right back. the cops didn't even know about bush's plan. when we talked about it, they were nice, i was nice, we worked it out, i didn't film more than a few seconds... we have nice police here. but they're just local cops. there are larger forces at work.

and it is my personal opinion that all of us should be thinking hard about exactly what forces might be at work in this current situation. what i said before about getting people to relinquish their rights willingly is something i stand by, as it is a proven technique for sneaking fascism in under people's noses. but that's only one possibility. we do not know what the motive/s of the arsonist/s are/were. but to assume that the motive was just "evil" or "destruction" would be naive. what has happened so far was carried out thoughtfully (not humanely, but with thought. could any of you - i mean aside from the villain/s who is/are surely lurkign here as you read this - seriously pull off such a stunt without getting caught? whoever did it had some brains and/or some backing and most likely some forethought.) given that, i have to assume that there was a larger motive at work as well. someone who could cause such destruction so successfully without getting caught very likely was looking for a partiuclar outcome.

i posit that the outcome of the mystery villain (or phase 1 of the desired outcome, anyway) has been successful so far. we're all up in arms, people are terrified and pointing fingers and blaming "hobos" and the "mentally ill" (i don't know how on earth that arsonist-profiler even got away with posting that description of the mind of an arsonist, as it did nothing but help people point more fingers, stigmatize mental illness - a term we already know is entirely relative - and i did not see any reference to primary research articles or anything else to back it up.) people are leaping onto the spy-cam bandwagon. people are willing to give up their privacy rights (which are already well eroded. see: patriot act. see: RFID chip in your passport.) so, let's think about why someone or someoneS (like an agency of some sort) would want to cause a whole town to start freaking out. i don't have the answer for this, but i'm pretty sure it would have to be something more than just enjoying watching people freak out. that can be done without murdering people. that can be done without harming a fly.

to sum up:

1) adam cohen, i'll take you seriously after you buy me my very own camera that can actually capture discernable images of moving people in the dark. oh - and thank you in advance! i really love when people buy me presents, especially cool gadgets. as it's such a rare occurrance, i'm super-duper-extra grateful in advance.

2) adam cohen, why don't you buy me a camera just for the hell of it, because coincidentally my favorite camera was stolen from that very building that was under surveillance, WHILE it was under surveillance. it only seems fair.

3) adam cohen, not to single you out here, but regarding your defense of single-family homes with 2-car garages and happy motoring, i'll get back to you on that later. i believe it was ellen who already pointed out the obvious - that more people would ride buses if they had useful routes and sensible schedules. the fact that our buses don't run at good times, stop running at night (and many of them take 2-hour breaks right around noon as well) and that we don't even have late-night cab service here does not in any way mean that cars are the solution. but that's a discussion for another day.

4) SOMEONE has the money to spy on one apartment building using high-tech gadgetry and multiple spy personnel. and i think it's state and not city funding.

5) OBVIOUSLY whomever is behind all this is lurking at meeings and in every forum possible so let's keep that in mind. (hey lurker/s: you can buy me a camera too, if you like. i'm willing to put on a good show of acting hysterical and pointing a terrified finger at every person crossing my path who looks "off" in any way. but i expect a really extra-super-cool, expensive camera with hinges and ball-bearings, if it's coming from you.)

6) it has already been pointed out that it took a lot of marbles (all in one place, i.e. someone/s had their marbles together, not bats in the belfry) to set 9 successful fires in such a short time span without getting caught.

end of today's rant! coming next from yours truly - keep your eyes peeled, your teeth gritted and your fists clenched - a manifesto on the duty of northampton's citizens to stop the destruction of our city (die, hilton, DIE!!!) no matter what it takes, propriety be damned (to any dyslexics reading this: i said "propriety" not "property" so don't accuse me of being a wannabe property-destroyer. i'm a wannabe historic landmark-saver!)

all my love and kisses too,

jenna