Barbara Thalhauser of Prospect Park doesn't object to the city's installation of security cameras at strategic spots to deter crime as part of its new WiFi system.
But she said she's "unnerved" by a camera hanging on a light pole 10 feet from her bedroom window.
City officials' assurances that officers monitoring the cameras won't try to peep haven't helped.
"You just never know when 'Mr. Creepy' is going to end up at that police station," she said.
The city received funding for 10 cameras, and they're going on light poles to protect city installations subject to vandalism or other high-crime areas, Information Technology Director Victor Curfman said.
"We're not trying to be Big Brother," Curfman said. "We're just trying to protect our assets."
The city will program the camera near Thalhauser's house to rotate from a view of Prospect Pool to one of a nearby cemetery to deter vandalism, which has been a problem in both places, he said.
The monitoring equipment is in the office of the police shift commander, the only one authorized to view it, he said.
And while an operator can override the programmed movements, none will be for illicit purposes, Curfman said.
"No one's looking in anyone's windows," he said.
The placement of the monitors in an office where the door is never closed will help ensure that, he said.
"It would be awfully stupid to be sitting there peering in someone's window when someone could walk in at any second," he said.
If a shift commander looked anyway, he'd deserve to be fired, Curfman said.
That doesn't satisfy Mary Catherine Roper, attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU has heard "dozens, hundreds of stories" of police abusing security cameras, Roper said.
Thalhauser's justified not to trust, she said.
An officer told Thalhauser that the presence of the camera shouldn't be any more oppressive than the potential for someone walking by her first-floor window, Thalhauser said.
She doesn't buy it, "because the camera is there 24/7," she said.
Curfman said if she's doing something she doesn't want others to see, she can draw the blinds.
You can't keep them drawn all the time, Thalhauser said.
Curfman asked the Mirror to keep the whole issue quiet, for fear of making the cameras a target for vandals.
Roper said that request is appalling.
"Now we don't just have government surveillance," she said. "We have secret government surveillance."
Privacy expert E. Casey Lide of Washington, D.C., sympathized with Thalhauser's discomfort.
"It's a pretty provocative thing to have a camera perched right outside your bedroom window," he said.
Thalhauser said if she gets the "runaround" from the city, she may consult a privacy attorney.
"When you're in your home, you should not have the ... government looking in your window," she said. "It's an eerie feeling."
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.
