"You Are Under Surveillance"

WASHINGTON -- From a dimly lit room in a secure command center, 21 streaming video feeds from 4,775 surveillance cameras around the nation's capital are projected across three screens and monitored at all hours. Every few seconds, footage from a different location pops up -- a busy road, a picnic bench, the entrance to the new baseball stadium.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is trying to set up one of the most comprehensive centrally controlled visual surveillance systems in the world. In the nerve center, which opened last month, the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency can monitor video from four city agencies -- covering streets, schools, housing projects, parks and roads -- for threats and other nefarious activities.

For those who have accepted the city's fate as a prime terrorist target, this may be cause for relief. But to the many civil liberties groups headquartered in Washington, the move undermines privacy, encourages abuse and represents the first step toward a surveillance system like London's, where a person's every public move can be tracked on about 10,000 government-funded cameras that have been dubbed a "ring of steel."