A Ferndale man accused of installing a surveillance camera in the bedroom of a married couple who live next door was ordered Thursday to stand trial on felony home invasion and eavesdropping charges.
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The Brooklyn district attorney’s office said Thursday that Operation Crown Strike in Brooklyn has ended with the arrest of 15 people allegedly involved in a drug ring.

The D.A. and NYPD say they found several gangs dealing drugs in different areas of Crown Heights.

Officers made the arrests after executing several search warrants last week.

Video, shot by police, shows an alleged dealer scooping cocaine to be packaged.

“The case was particularly difficult because the individuals were enormously sophisticated in their operation – they used counter-surveillance techniques,” said Suzanne Corhan, chief of the district attorney’s Major Narcotics Investigations Bureau. “They used methods to avoid traditional law enforcement detection. In fact, they had crude booby traps in some of the locations.”

Surveillance systems take on a new look with a technology developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Laser-Based Item Monitoring System balances the need for high-resolution monitoring and personal safety with respect for confidentiality and personal privacy. This is especially important today with heightened emphasis on security and privacy and is possible because the system does not use video.

Surveillance cameras have been used in several high-profile police cases in the mid-valley in the last two years.

In response to Sunday’s Democrat-Herald story about surveillance cameras, a reader posted a question on the D-H website: Why with all this “wonderful technology” are cameras not used more often to find car thieves, meth dealers or other criminals?

While certainly not every crime or suspect is captured on camera, investigators have used video surveillance to identify suspects, convict criminals and review police actions.

Recording conversations or listening in to telephone conversations using wiretap is strictly controlled by laws. Understanding how these laws work protects everyone’s privacy and can help prevent needless lawsuits.

Telephone bugging, telephone surveillance, wiretapping: these are just a few names for what is essentially the same thing — listening into someone else’s conversation or recording it for later use. While there are many instances of people whose telephones are illegally tapped, placing a bug on a phone must be authorized by a search warrant or court order. While there are plenty of legitimate reasons to want to listen to someone’s telephone conversation, knowing what the laws are surrounding private conversations is important for anyone who wants to avoid messy lawsuit.

According to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, 1,773 wiretap orders were issued by courts in 2005 alone. Obviously, it is much harder to get accurate statistics on illegal telephone surveillance, although it does occur.
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It’s night in the city and a female shape is silhouetted through the glass of a second floor office door.

“My husband’s cheating on me,” she said as she came through the door.

“Why would he do that?” A guy would have to be crazy to cheat on a dame like this. Her slinky red dress showed she had all the right equipment to keep anybody at home.

It’s the classic opening for a thousand private eye stories, novels and movies. People haven’t changed, but techniques today are different.

PIs, or private investigators, are mostly retired police officers, just like the movies. However many of them are working out of a home office that is run by their wives while they are working.

Video cameras hooked up to computers increase in popularity for home surveillance

When Russell Ricca started having problems with vandalism and trash on his property two years ago, he installed a pair of surveillance cameras on the outside of his house.

Little did he know his home security cameras would record footage of a vehicle burglary across the street, and with his help, police arrested two people for the crime.

A new type of network architecture – Wireless Optical Mesh – makes video surveillance viable in outdoor environments.

In post-9/11 America, we’ve become more comfortable smiling for the cameras in airports, parking garages, lobbies, schools – anywhere that security threats might arise. And now the owners of these facilities are making massive investments in state-of-the-art security technologies, to the tune of $6 billion in 2006 alone, according to strategic consulting firm A4 International.

The ideal security system, according to both security and technology experts, is a single, powerful network infrastructure that maintains live video surveillance centrally, along with other sophisticated applications. With centralized video surveillance, security personnel can monitor video streams from many dispersed cameras in real time. Even more important, video-analytics software can rapidly evaluate threats that appear in any of the video streams and even respond to them automatically.

It’s not just paranoia. You are being watched. The period following Sept. 11, 2001, has been a technological Renaissance Era for agencies and companies that monitor, track and record the activities of everyday people.

By comparison, the legal system charged with regulating these new surveillance systems is still in the Dark Ages, critics say, with technology outpacing lawmakers every step of the way.

Low-cost digital video cameras, Internet monitoring software and myriad consumer tracking systems that convert behavior into data have raised new questions about how far a society should be allowed to go in scrutinizing its members.

In short, when innocuous surveillance becomes ubiquitous, does that make it insidious?

No amount of spying or intrusion substitutes for common sense regarding your child’s development

The “nanny cam” is billed as a device that allows parents to identify an abusive, neglectful or incompetent baby-sitter simply by monitoring their young child’s activities at home by remote Web access. It’s also a hidden surveillance system spying on the activities of everyone who enters the house - from the nanny, to the gardener to the plumber, to friends.

When does personal responsibility begin and the threat to privacy and the false sense of security end?

• Group for Private Investigators
• Group for Process Servers