Tuesday, April 18, 2006 | 7:12 a.m.
Big Brother is watching you in Las Vegas - and not just on the Strip.
While Las Vegas Boulevard is one of the world's security camera epicenters, the surveillance craze is spilling over into other areas, too, from libraries and taxicabs to interstates and elevators.
While many casinos boast well over 1,000 cameras, they no longer hold the monopoly on watching us.
Take the Clark County School District, for example.
The fifth largest school district in the country, its surveillance system rivals that of some gaming companies.
More than 10,000 cameras monitor about 400 sites, according to Bill Wiseman, the School District's intrusion alarm supervisor. That figure does not include the 100 cameras on the district's school buses.
By comparison, MGM Grand has about 3,000 cameras and the Bellagio, 2,000.
The School District's vast network of cameras - double the number four years ago - is designed to keep students and staff safe, and to prevent property damage, Wiseman said.
"The local SWAT team has access to our system," he said. "If there is anything like Columbine, they can tap into that system."
High-profile events like the fatal shootings at the suburban Colorado high school and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, coupled with the falling prices of equipment, have spurred surveillance activity across the country.
Unique to Las Vegas, however, is the gaming industry's influence. The dozens of casinos here - and the cameras that come with them - create an atmosphere in which the presence of so many silent watchers is often met with a shrug of indifference, if the cameras are noticed at all.
"I think people get desensitized by cameras," said Peter Swire, formerly President Bill Clinton's chief privacy adviser and now a professor of law at Ohio State University. "They get used to them in casinos and then are less surprised when they are elsewhere."
Because the casinos create a sort of surveillance hub, other local businesses and industries are likely to pick up on the technology and security initiatives they see on the Strip.
"The reason we have got a lot of that in this town is because it's so common because of the casinos," said North Las Vegas Police spokesman Tim Bedwell. "I think there is some bleed-over of that to other businesses."
Law enforcement loves the trend. The growing number of cameras in the Las Vegas Valley might be one reason most police agencies here have not installed street corner or cruiser cameras as agencies elsewhere have.
By eschewing their own cameras, police can avoid constitutional concerns while almost always finding video from other sources - at ATM machines, banks, parking lots, building lobbies and exteriors, among numerous other spots - that helps place a suspect near a crime scene.
"If you talk to Joe Citizen, they don't think about it, but they would be surprised by how often they are under surveillance," said Ray Flynn, an assistant Clark County sheriff. "I would say each and every time there is a crime, something is caught on tape."
Clark County, for example, operates 84 cameras at government buildings throughout the valley.
Steve Dupont, county security administrator, recalled a time when county security staff caught an oddly behaving car with one of their parking lot cameras.
They alerted police, who arrested the drunken operator and his passengers.
"They thought they were going to City Hall - that's how inebriated they were," Dupont said.
Roadways are one of the most watched places.
The Regional Transportation Commission uses cameras at scores of intersections across the valley to monitor traffic patterns. They also operate 34 cameras on major freeways.
While state law prevents those cameras from being recorded and used by law enforcement, the commission's traffic management center near the corner of Decatur Boulevard and Sunset Road is shared with the Nevada Highway Patrol.
While traffic might be better for it, the trend is unnerving for Troy Lowe.
"Sometimes they do go too far," said Lowe, who, like hundreds of other Las Vegans one day last week, was waiting for a bus at the corner of Sahara Avenue and Maryland Parkway on his way home from his job at Nevada Tent & Events.
Each of Southern Nevada's 360 public buses is equipped with three or four cameras.
The roving cameras capture not only images from within the bus, but also those out the front window - footage sometimes requested by police for investigations unrelated to the bus system, said Sue Christiansen, spokeswoman for the Regional Transportation Commission.
The growing number of cameras is a cause for concern for Allen Lichtenstein, the Nevada American Civil Liberty Union's general counsel.
"The use of cameras is obviously growing to the point where there are very few areas in our society where you're not under surveillance," he said. "It's starting to take an Orwellian cast to it."
The ACLU has fought attempts to increase the number of surveillance cameras.
It successfully opposed North Las Vegas' attempt to lobby state legislators to permit the use of cameras at street intersections to snap a shot of vehicles running red lights. Had the plan been approved, the cars' owners would have been sent tickets in the mail.
The ACLU also opposed a proposed mandate by the state Taxicab Authority that would have required visual and audio recording devices in cabs. But Rob Steward, spokesman for the Taxicab Authority, said that even without the requirement, 80 percent of Clark County's cabs already have cameras in them, up from zero in 2004.
He attributes the fall in reported robberies - from 68 in 2004 to 23 in 2005 - to the growing presence of cameras.
But some drivers are wary of the cameras, fearing they will be used to watch them rather than protect them. Sometimes, the dividing line is thin, Steward said.
"We've actually used (cameras) on three occasions where cabdrivers have blown their money - gambled it or whatever - and then say it was stolen," he said.
He expects the percentage of taxis in the county with cameras to rise soon to 90 percent.
The trend is sad, said Charles Konowal, an independent filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who was in town for Rockabilly Weekender at the Gold Coast, where hundreds of unblinking cameras monitored his activities in game pits, elevators and hallways.
"We've just become a society where we don't trust anyone," he said during a shopping trip to the Boulevard mall, where more than 50 security cameras watched him. "I think it's a little overkill."
But for most Las Vegans, especially the hundreds of thousands who work in casinos, the presence of so many cameras is simply a fact of life.
"A person in this town has got to be especially conscious that they're around," said Jim Johnson, a 27-year Vegas resident and a Circus Circus employee.
The near-omnipresence of cameras in casinos has likely had an impact on privacy law here, said Raquel Aldana, a UNLV professor who specializes in Fourth Amendment law.
Interpretation of the amendment, which protects individuals from unlawful searches and seizures by the government, depends on whether there is an expectation of privacy.
"I do think there is a very strong argument in Nevada that people might be used to cameras," Aldana said. "It becomes a circular argument. The more you place cameras in public places, the less people should expect privacy."
As the cameras continue to roll, so will the debate over where to draw the line between privacy and security.
"What's done in the elevator stays in the elevator," said Swire, the former Clinton privacy adviser, playing on the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's slogan. "Except when it doesn't."
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