Aside: The Security Camera

No single device in a modern or science fiction setting causes as much paranoia (both justified and not) as the security camera. And this should come as no surprise, for regardless of what kind of force ratios your team can bring to the party at an instant of your choosing, the fact is that the amount of force that any particular society can bring against an individual is practically infinite in any modern or futuristic setting (as opposed to medieval settings with barest nods to science fiction window dressing like Warhammer 40K). So any object which promises the heavy hand of eventual retribution by the whole of society against transgressors should be a scary thing, and indeed in Shadowrun it is.

There are three main camera setups that one must concern yourself with in the day to day criminal operations of Shadowrun: the solitary camera; the networked camera; and the low resolution camera. The solitary camera is exactly what it sounds like: it's a trid recorder that is completely self contained. It's fairly trivial to smash it with a baseball bat or hack it into oblivion and since it's entirely self contained that's the end of any data the recorder had on you. The network camera is attached to a network, which means that destroying the device itself won't do anything at all to the trid already recorded. It'll have to be hacked if you want to get rid of the data already stored (but good news: hacking any part of the network will allow you to edit any of the data from any of the recorders on the system). And finally the low resolution camera takes basic video and sends it one way by low density signal to some storage system that may be very far away. You can do anything you want to the recorder itself and it won't do a thing to any video already recorded and sent unless you get direct access to the storage systems (wherever they are). Fortunately for the criminally inclined, this last type takes the kind of crappy security camera footage that we get in 2008 – so the security forces who go back and review it will have such wonderful information as “two orks and a human committed this crime.”