LANCASTER, Pa. – Residents in Lancaster fear that Big Brother has come to them in the form of a small liberal-arts college.
Franklin and Marshall College has installed a system of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras to monitor areas around the campus and ensure the safety and property of its 2,000-strong student body.
Some neighbors, however, oppose the school’s security initiative because the cameras capture images of residential private property along with sidewalks and nearby parking lots. As a compromise, the college plans to electronically mask cameras views of the more sensitive areas of people’s homes, such as windows and doors, so that monitoring dispatchers would be unable to see inside them.
Currently, more than 300 closed-circuit television cameras pepper the city, including about 50 owned by a hospital.
