As a small subset of surveillance, people-counting is nothing new. Biodata Ltd., based in the UK, recently announced that customers can now go wireless—with Wi-Fi—instead of spending precious dollars on pesky things like wiring. According to a brief on BuildingTalk, the Wi-Fi option also speeds installation, and is particularly useful in electrically noisy and hostile environments.

Video surveillance makes perfect sense when one generally considers security, especially since 9/11. I don't mean that 9/11 could have been prevented by such means; in reality, the opposite was true, what with the hijackers having been caught on cam at airport security checkpoints, for example.* Wait. I'm contradicting myself. If it didn't help prevent 9/11, and served only to give the Commission ammunition to point fingers, what's the point? In the context of 9/11, I mean only that surveillance—more likely in the form of RFID, not video—would have at least told emergency workers where and how many people were located in the Towers.

I don't know about you, but if someone's going to record my every movement, I want them to spend money, dammit. A lot of it. Hire technicians, fish cabling, connect things -- and at least put something back into the freakin' economy in the process. Put a little effort into it, huh? That's one of the scary parts about Wi-Fi, in this case, and RFID. No effort. Spend some money and Velcro some widgets to walls and ceilings and—voila!—you're in the surveillance business.

I can't help but see video surveillance as Big Brotheresque, obviously tied into 'Homeland Security.' Actually, I'm about to contradict myself again, since security is clearly the fastest growing part of our economy. So, what's the downside? The data. It's all about the data. See this article in Wired, for example, which mentions…

"Data aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases -- and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people. Because laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance. Congress needs to close such loopholes, the ACLU said, before the exchange of information gets out of hand."

Before scoffing at my paranoia about Homeland Security itself, consider this from The Brookings Institution, for example…

"Homeland security is now big business; costing less than $10 billion a year in the early 1990s, it had already grown to $20 billion before 9/11 and will surely cost the United States $50 billion a year well into the future."

Anything amounting to $50 billion is cause for concern, no? Hey, look at this way: at least it's a wonderful thing for investors.

Funny. Surveillance is increasing, technologies including wireless make it easier, and Homeland Security poised to take over the planet. Yet people still rob 7-11s and terrorism is on the rise.

But we feel safer, and that's what matters.

* Then again, according to this extensive article, the security checkpoint video that all of us watched in televised horror was not filmed at Washington Dulles International Airport. Joe Vialls, author of that article, refers to the 9/11 Commission as "…a deliberately misleading government whitewash derided by all Americans with an IQ higher than fifty." Huh. I have an IQ a tad higher than that—and I love conspiracy theories. Maybe this requires more attention? Maybe it's all part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy? Or is this guy just a government-slamming crank?