Cameras sprout in an Alaska town on the edge of nowhere - The Boston Globe

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Cameras sprout in an Alaska town on the edge of nowhere
Antiterror funds monitor the few in a remote area
By Tomas Alex Tizon, Los Angeles Times | April 2, 2006
DILLINGHAM, Alaska --

From Anchorage, it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state's southwestern edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine.

This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People live in outposts such as Dillingham (population 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone.

So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera's shape and design resemble a robot's head.

Workers on motorized lifts installed seven cameras in a 360-degree cluster on top of City Hall. They put up groups of six atop two light poles at the loading dock, and more at the fire hall and boat harbor.

By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more, all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against terrorist attack.

Now the residents of this far-flung village have become, in one sense, among the most watched people in the land, with, as former mayor Freeman Roberts puts it, ''one camera for every 30 residents."

Some don't mind, but many others are furious and have banded together to force the city to take the cameras down.

''You better smile. You're on camera," said Roberts, 64, a barge captain. Roberts himself isn't smiling as he points out a camera on the side of a building. The camera is aimed toward an alley.

''It's amazing, isn't it?" he said. He drives around town in his pickup, spying on the cameras that he believes are spying on him. ''Everywhere you look, there's one looking at you."

Roberts, mayor of Dillingham from 1972 to 1978, says the cameras constitute an invasion of privacy, and beyond that, they're just plain creepy. He scratched together a petition demanding removal of the cameras, and collected 219 signatures within days. He carries the ragged sheaf of names next to him in the truck.

The City Council, which supports the cameras, threw out the petition, saying Roberts had not followed the law, which requires that the signatories be registered voters. Now Roberts is working with others to put together a legal petition to force the issue on the October ballot.

Roberts is a square-jawed man with a slow, deliberate way of talking. He looked out at Nushagak Bay, which remains frozen until the end of April. No boat can enter or leave the harbor until the ice breaks up. He shook his head. ''This is Dillingham, Alaska, folks," he says. ''I don't think we have to worry about Osama bin Laden."

That is, unless bin Laden wants to go salmon fishing.

Dillingham is a hub in the Bristol Bay region, which is famous for its sockeye runs.

The inhabitants of about 30 nearby villages come to town for supplies. Slightly more than half the residents of Dillingham are Native Alaskans.

The rest are white or mixed, like Roberts, who is Dutch and Yupik Eskimo.

The village is in the middle of what some might call nowhere, which, according to Police Chief Richard Thompson, is why residents must be vigilant. Terrorists intent on attacking the United States could, he says, ''backdoor it" through a nowhere dot on the tundra, like Dillingham.

Thompson, with the blessing of the City Council, applied for the Homeland Security grant last year.

''If I have the math right, we're closer to Russia than we are to Seattle," he said, pointing out that Dillingham could be the first stop in shipping a contraband nuclear device to Seattle.