Metropolitan Panopticon: More and more businesses these days have some kind of surveillance camera set up, keeping an eye on you while you buy your groceries, deposit your paycheck, fill up your gas tank, or run up more unsecured consumer debt. All those cameras are, apparently, making District officials jealous. So the city plans to [...]

Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Major announced on Monday the arrests of four individuals in connection with the murder of middle school principal Brian Betts.
"We believe the motive of this crime was most likely robbery," says Major, adding that police have surveillance footage showing the suspects using several credit cards taken from the slain principal's [...]

To report part of "The Watchmen," this week's cover story examining the uselessness of the D.C. Police Department's surveillance cameras, I went to the Major Case/Unsolved Homicides page of the department's Web site to check out the addresses of unsolved murders from 2007 and 2008.
Then I went to the Locations of Neighborhood Cameras page to [...]