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Kingdom, that such cameras deter crime.”
    “I’ve seen the cameras.”
    “You can see some of them. Not all. In any event, the cameras themselves are not really the issue. What is behind them is what matters. After the events of September eleventh in the United States, the Metropolitan Police Force undertook a major initiative to link up these informal networks of cameras with a central database that runs advanced facial recognition software. The software reads characteristics that are difficult or impossible to obscure—the distance between the eyes, for example, or the precise angles of the triangle formed by the corners of the eyes and the center of the mouth. Now, when a camera gets a match for a photograph from the database, an alert is automatically sent to the appropriate authorities. What had been primarily a psychological deterrent is now a potent anticrime and investigative tool.”
    I knew of the existence of the software Tatsu was describing, of course. It was being tested in certain airports and stadiums, particularly in the United States, as a way of spotting and preempting known terrorists. But from what I’d read, the early tests had been disappointing. Or perhaps that was just disinformation. In any event, I hadn’t known Japan was so far ahead in deployment.
    “The cameras are tied to Juki Net?” I asked.
    “Possibly,” he answered in his dry way.
    Juki Net, a vast data snooping and centralization program, went live in August 2002, perhaps inspired by the U.S. Defense Department’s similar Total Information Awareness initiative. Juki Net assigns every Japanese citizen an eleven-digit identification number, and links that number to the person’s name, sex, address, and date of birth. The government maintains that no other information will be compiled. Few people believe that, and there have already been abuses.
    I considered. As Tatsu noted, if word got out, the efficacy of the camera network would be compromised. But there was more.
    “Weren’t there protests about Juki Net’s introduction?” I asked.
    He nodded. “Yes. As you may know, the government introduced Juki Net without passing an accompanying privacy bill. Attempts to do so belatedly have been less than convincing. In Suginami-ku there is a boycott. Nonresidents are now seeking to establish an address in that ward to escape the system’s dominion.”
    Now I understood why the government would take such care to maintain the secrecy of Juki Net’s connection to the network of security cameras. After all, even if you know it’s there, avoiding video surveillance is hell, so the danger of inadvertently tipping off criminals would be a marginal problem. The real issue, no doubt, was the government’s fear of the protests that would surely result if the public were to learn the announced scope of the system was really only the tip of the iceberg. If the security cameras were tied together with Juki Net, people would rightly think they had a serious Big Brother situation on their hands.
    “You can’t blame people for not trusting the government on this,” I said. “I read somewhere that, last spring, the defense ministry got caught creating a database on people who had requested materials under the new Freedom of Information Act, including information on their political views.”
    He smiled his sad smile. “When the news broke, someone tried to delete the evidence.”
    “I read about that. Didn’t the LDP try to suppress a forty-page report on what had happened?”
    This time his smile was wry. “The Liberal Democratic Party officials involved in the attempted cover-up were punished, of course. They had their pay docked.”
    “Now there’s a deterrent to future abuses,” I said, laughing. “Especially when you know they were greased with twice what got docked.”
    He shrugged. “As a cop, I welcome Juki Net and the camera networks as a crime-fighting tool. As a citizen, I find it all appalling.”
    “So why swear me to