Smile for the street sweeper. Mayor Rick Gray’s administration wants to streamline the city’s method of sweeping streets and ticketing motorists who do not move their cars for the posted sweeping times.

Gray said Monday the city is considering adding digital cameras to its sweepers.

Sweeper drivers would snap pictures of license plates on illegally parked cars, and tickets would be issued later, the mayor said. Those images would include the date and time.

“There is no new policy in effect right now,” Gray said, but he added that a change may come later in the spring. “There will be plenty of notice,’’ he said.

Hmmm…I wonder what else they will be photographing with those street sweeper cameras? Or what else they will use it for, in the future?

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Like the calvary rushing to the aid of the wrong troops, four Republican senators who had earlier declared battle against the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping have now proposed to give the surveillance program five years of near-bulletproof protection.

The new measure by Mike DeWine of Ohio, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine would significantly expand the administration’s power to intercept U.S. citizens’ international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining a warrant — even when they have not been implicated in any crime. It also would let the surveillance continue with much less oversight than Congress demanded in previous laws.

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Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt sparked debate with his recent proposal to install surveillance cameras downtown, at apartment complexes and even at some private homes to combat crime. But cameras already are rolling all over the city: at rail stations, schools, malls, highways, banks and convenience stores.

“In a big city, it’s increasingly hard to go throughout the day without being captured on many surveillance cameras,” Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in privacy issues, wrote via e-mail.

Pedestrians on Main Street had mixed feelings this week about the potential for cameras keeping an eye on them.

“I think it’s a great idea to cut down on the crime,” said a man who identified himself as S. Walter and said he has been mugged three times in the past two years. “I don’t mind them watching me at all.”

Others said downtown isn’t the best place to use police surveillance.

“What crime? This is businesspeople out here,” said Tiffany King, who works in the area.

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“This is about families taking their children to feed the ducks in the afternoon and being accosted by men doing things that you and I wouldn’t even talk about on TV,” said Metro councilman Michael Craddock.

But that hasn’t stopped the talk at city council meetings, where members unanimously approved surveillance cameras for parks to prevent public indecency, stopping public sex acts.

“Deviants. That’s what these are. There’s sexual deviance and you know Cedar Hill Park is listed on national Web sites for homosexual behavior as a place to go for an encounter,” Craddock said.

Cedar Hill is one of three parks that will get the new cameras.

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Police in Chicago, and elsewhere in the state of Illinois, are dramatically expanding the deployment of stealth cameras to catch alleged speeders. The cameras may be a massive invasion of privacy, however, according to some legal experts who are calling for precautions to be taken with the surveillance data.

Recent moves to install such technology in Illinois come as other states are taking action to block its use. Some citizens are taking matters into their own hands, using so-called “photo-blocker” spray to shield themselves from the constitutionally questionable speed traps.

“Chicago must afford some way for those ticketed to say, ‘Right car; right license plate; wrong person,’” said Harold Krent, a law professor and dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

“Chicago needs to embrace a system to determine how long its surveillance images will be kept and to limit access to such images,” he added.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called the vans the “police cars of the future.”

Illinois government agencies tried to implement traffic surveillance technology nearly 20 years ago, but civil liberties concerns undermined the plan. Last summer in Virginia, meanwhile, legislators shut down a similar program.

The national office of the American Civil Liberties Union has opposed red-light cameras in Washington, D.C., saying the cameras intrude on the constitutionally protected right to privacy.

The cameras shift the burden of proof from government to citizens and unfairly penalize car owners who may not necessarily be red-light runners, according to the ACLU.

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