Move over, Big Brother looks at the democratization of surveillance:
The speed and ubiquity of digital cameras lets them do things that film-based cameras could not. In October, for example, the victim of a robbery in Nashville, Tennessee, used his camera-phone to take pictures of the thief and his getaway vehicle. The images were shown to the police, who broadcast descriptions of the man and his truck, leading to his arrest ten minutes later. Other similar stories abound: in Italy, a shopkeeper sent a picture of two men who were acting suspiciously to the police, who identified them as wanted men and arrested them soon afterwards, while in Sweden, a teenager was photographed while holding up a corner shop, and was apprehended within an hour.