Video game to be based on potential abuses of Camden PD's surveillance system

So tweets from the account for the Ubisoft action/adventure game Watch_Dogs suggest that Camden, N.J., will be the setting of the game's sequel this fall:

Our data indicates surveillance has become more prominent in high-crime areas_ pic.twitter.com/ZvidLNvJMt

— Watch Dogs (@watchdogsgame) July 28, 2014

@watchdogsgame DLC?

— Fatal Rift (@FatalRift) July 28, 2014

@FatalRift Coming this Fall!

— Watch Dogs (@watchdogsgame) July 28, 2014

It would be one thing if this was a standard first-person shooter. But the Watch_Dogs series is a slightly different, more interesting animal. There's still shooting, of course, but the conceit of the first Watch_Dogs game is this, according to developer Ubisoft:

Set in Chicago, where a central network of computers connects everyone and everything, Watch_Dogs explores the impact of technology within our society. Using the city as your weapon, you will embark on a personal mission to inflict your own brand of justice.

Chicago's overarching network is known as the Central Operating System (ctOS), and it controls almost all of the city's technology and information - including key data on all of the city's residents.

You play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker and former thug, whose criminal past led to a violent family tragedy. While seeking justice for those events, you'll monitor and hack those around you by manipulating the ctOS from the palm of your hand. You'll access omnipresent security cameras, download personal information to locate a target, control traffic lights and public transportation to stop the enemy... and more.

Under the heading The City Is Our Weapon:

Watch_Dogs takes place in a fully simulated living city. Using Aiden's smartphone, you have real-time control over the city's infrastructure. Trap your enemy in a 30-car pileup by manipulating the traffic lights. Stop a train, and then board it to evade the authorities. Narrowly escape capture by quickly raising a drawbridge. Anything connected to the ctOS can become your weapon.

In practice, that looks like this: 

The first game wasn't based in a theoretical future Chicago, either. In a blog post, Ubisoft explained the choice of Chicago as a setting for Watch_Dogs:

Chicago is ... one of the most surveilled cities in the States. "There are over ten thousand cameras, all networked together, managed from a central point, and they can use those cameras to track people around the city," [senior producer Dominic] Guay says. "They can read what's on a piece of paper just by zooming in."

Chicago's had this for almost a decade at this point. From the Wall Street Journal in 2009:

A giant web of video-surveillance cameras has spread across Chicago, aiding police in the pursuit of criminals but raising fears that the City of Big Shoulders is becoming the City of Big Brother.

While many police forces are boosting video monitoring, video-surveillance experts believe Chicago has gone further than any other U.S. city in merging computer and video technology to police the streets. The networked system is also unusual because of its scope and the integration of nonpolice cameras.

The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more—police won't say how many—that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools, subway stations, housing projects and elsewhere. Even home owners can contribute camera feeds.

Camden is an interesting choice for a setting for the Watch_Dogs sequel — as it's been widely reported, police efforts to get the insane situation in Camden back under control over the last couple of years involved going high-tech, with $4.5 million investment in rigging the entire city up with surveillance cameras and gunshot-recording microphones. From the South Jersey Times in 2013:

Inside the county police administration building on Federal Street, a room called the "Real Time Tactical Information Center" houses an array of 10, 42-inch televisions giving a view of each of the street-corner cameras, as well as six banks of six computer monitors, where police aides can conduct "virtual patrols," allowing them a near-constant view of the streets of Camden's most crime-ridden corners.

This has actually worked — crime of almost all kinds fell an incredible amount in just a year — but privacy advocates find the possibility of this becoming a widespread thing pretty alarming, in Camden as well as Chicago. The term "surveillance state" comes up a lot, and "Big Brother." Vice even just ended its second season on HBO with an episode on Camden titled Surveillance City: 

We'll be very interested in seeing the what potential ways that Camden's state-of-the-art policing system could be horrendously abused the game developers will come up with.