Mexico City and the “Eyes that Look After You”

If you don’t like the feeling of being followed, we recommend avoiding Stockholm, Dubai, Almaty, and – this just in – Mexico City. All are major destinations under constant and growing surveillance by public cameras.

Izabelė Pukėnaitė at Cybernews reports that Mexico’s capital is now launching a mass surveillance CCTV plan with the suitably creepy name of “Eyes That Look After You.”
Let’s break that down: 30,000 new cameras, 15,200 new poles, a $19 million budget, and a whole lot of connectivity. Each pole will have two cameras, one fixed and one capable of tilting/zooming.

All of this comes as Mexico’s ruling Morena party moves to eliminate numerous independent regulatory and oversight agencies. One of those was a body that functioned as an ombudsman for the population, with the power to force government departments to hand over information citizens had filed requests for – a sort of Mexican version of the Freedom of Information Act.

As is always the case when such moves are enacted, the powers that be resort to doublespeak. “There will be more transparency,” declared Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, adding, “the public will be able to easily review the functioning, the spending, and everything the Mexican government does.”

An equally disturbing maneuver is the Morena party’s radical overhaul of the country’s judicial system that critics say could easily lead to unabashed one-party rule.

Color us skeptical, but we’re having a hard time seeing how a party that is voraciously concentrating its own power is going to use a new mass surveillance system to somehow make people freer – especially a camera system that the cartels have already used to target and kill informants.

These “eyes” aren’t designed to “look after” anyone. “Look for” is more like it, which, thanks to new legislation mandating a single biometric ID for all Mexican citizens, will soon be easier to do than ever. It is not hard to imagine these systems being used by Morena-controlled officials for political surveillance.

You might be tempted to think at least that could never happen here. It already is. Washington, D.C., beats out Mexico City as the global city with the most government-controlled cameras per capita.
​
Oh well, Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente – What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve.

DONATE & HELP US PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS