The radio introduces a Persistent Surveillance System which uses planes with cameras to video the whole city. There are obvious benefits of this system: In big and populous cities like New York, there are crimes like homicide, rape and assault happening everyday. Compared to traditional police operations, this system can go back in time and locate the criminals in minutes, hugely retrenching the cost of manpower and resources. More importantly, when a crime organization is too big to tackle, this ‘sky eye’ is essential in providing comprehensive details of criminal members’ traces in order to crack the crime cartel at one stroke. Furthermore, as common sense indicates that people would not dare to commit a crime when they know police are watching them, this system can not only trace malefactors, but also deter potential criminals.

However, many people object, on the grounds that as conventional wisdom shows, the system would soon trickle from military use down to ordinary people’s daily life. Because of the cameras,we will actually live under total exposure. With access to this volume of information, this system actually asks us to give an exorbitant level of trust to government which, as history can prove, may bloat to totalitarianism or even worse. In addition, not everybody can stick to moral choices. For instance, J. Edgar Hoover, with unparalleled status and power as the first director of FBI, committed personal assaults, blackmails and even assassinations in the name of protecting people and fighting crimes, the same excuses might given by any government. Now, with government’s loosened policy about surveillance and the abusive actions by special agencies, handing more information and power to government is unimaginable.

In sum, though the benefits of this system are concrete(decreased crime rate) and the weaknesses are conceptual(invisible privacy invasion), we still need more careful consideration.