h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/dorset/3440649.stm

"Police are appealing for witnesses."
(Well, there are two ways of reading that sentence )

A few years ago, two thieves who were targeting homes empty during the day in a particularly posh area of Austin were nabbed when they were caught in the act by someone's webcam I don't know if it was actually wecasting at the time, but it saved plenty of incriminating images to the hard drive (of course, if they'd nicked the PC too they'd not be in chokey now, but I guess they were looking for small, expensive items like jewellery and such).

I believe that a lot of NYC cabs now have small cameras which point out of the front windscreen and record to a small memory chip, perhaps some kind of flash memory. The capacity of this memory is limited, so it continuously loops. If the driver is involved in accident he presses a button and the last 30 seconds are captured for evidence. It's the same kind of thing you get in police cars which give us those clips you see on programmes like 'World's Scariest Police Videos' and 'Polce, Camera, Action', but without the need for a VCR.

And in a report from the Consumer Electronics Show a few weeks ago I saw a personal version of the same thing which can be clipped to a pair of glasses.

With the advent of G3 mobile phones, we'll soon be able to stream images continuously (if we can afford the connection of course) to a base station, so that in the event of something happening to us, the evidence will be sitting on a hard drive far away from the incident.

Which all gets us back to the original story. A small webcam, well hidden, would soon nab the milk thief.

Here's a question though: Do we want a society where everyone is surreptitiously filming everyone else? There have already been problems with camera phones - paedophiles have been using them to get pictures of kids, dirty old men have been using them to get pictures of women, and many companies have banned them from their premises because they can be used to steal trade secrets. What if we can hide a camera and stream live images to anywhere in the world? Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing.

When someone invents a device, they can often have no idea how it will be used.

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Albert Einstein would agree with that if he were not, alas, dead.

However, stuff that's even scarier than what you describe has already been featured on "Max Headroom" and elsewhere. (Not that these things are actually happening, or likely to happen. It's just that people tend to imagine possibilities, and then try to make them real )