This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 5th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Cameras have clear limitations in preventing terrorism or crime.

That's not to say they can't be excellent forensic tools, but where cameras have

clear value, protecting you from some of the abuses of police is where they are often

conspicuously absent.

Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst David Ritker's comments.

So a man left an SUV parked in Times Square close to it with the hazards blinking in a parking spot near some vendors and one of the vendors

notified a nearby police officer that the back end of the vehicle was in fact smoking and due to a quick police response the

bomb squad came and took apart the propane tanks and hodgepodge of potentially

explosive items in the back of the vehicle.

This has led a lot of people to call for additional scrutiny and to evaluate the use of cameras.

Maybe if we'd had additional cameras watching this particular

spot that this would help.

Yes, and police commissioner Ray Kelly of New York City has called for expanded cameras to cover everything from Times Square down

to 34th Street with a view of every spot on the block, every alleyway.

And this is in addition to a 2006, about a hundred million dollar

outlay for an expanded set of not just cameras, but also bomb sniffing devices, chemical sensors, an attempt to preempt

and prevent these types of attacks.

And as we've seen, that technology has not been applied everywhere, but even where it's been applied that hasn't been the real deterrent.

And as a general rule, people deter and prevent attacks and cameras are more useful in piecing together what happened after the fact.

To play Devil's Advocate, we have a vehicle that is smoking. The street vendor identified the fact that the vehicle was smoking and alerted police.

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