“A small digital camera apparently planted by an unidentified voyeur to shoot up passing skirts caused a brief bomb scare near a Manhattan subway station, police said Wednesday. A pedestrian called police on Tuesday afternoon to report seeing a box with wires sticking out of it under a subway grate in a sidewalk on the Upper East Side. The block was closed off while the police bomb squad investigated. The scare ended when officers discovered that the device was a digital camera. Police said on Wednesday they believe someone positioned the camera to record so-called upskirt images of women and girls in dresses and skirts as they strolled over the grate. Investigators found no evidence that the hidden camera had taken or transmitted any of the photos, which are featured on various Web sites… Video voyeurism, secretly capturing images of another person for sexual purposes, became a felony in New York in 2003. The statute, Stephanie’s Law, was named for a Long Island woman whose landlord spied on her for months by hiding a tiny video camera in a smoke detector above her bed. Under the law, most video voyeurism can result in sentences ranging from one year to seven years in prison. The longest sentences apply to cases in which images are sold or traded.” —Yahoo (US)

For those of you who happen to know Manhattan, this upskirt cam was planted under a subway grate on 88th and Lex, a commercial area near a Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, and a very busy subway station. Cops seem to think it wasn’t the work of an individual perv procuring images for his own pleasure but was rather the work of some entrepreneur running a web site of upskirt images. This theory makes a lot of sense, since so much foot traffic could easily translate into a lot of web traffic — especially since there are some high schools in the area. At 3:00 or so, it’s not hard to see girls in Catholic school uniforms loitering around. (And though you might expect religious schools to teach modesty, for some reason these girls are all required to wear miniskirts — which almost makes you wonder if the clergy enjoy the upskirt thing too.)

Anyway, this isn’t the first time that some perversion has triggered a bomb scare or terror alert. There was the vibrator bomb in the post office, the suitcase bomb that turned out to be a dildo, the chastity belt that set off a metal detector, and of course the hand grenade that some brainiac concealed in her vagina. It all makes you realize that both perversion and terrorism frequently operate under clandestine conditions. Though motivated by lust, voyeurism often takes the same external form as a surveillance operation conducted by a terrorist organization casing a prominent target. People secretly pointing cameras into the public sphere — what are they doing? Getting off? Or planning to kill us? It’s not always easy to tell, so it’s only natural that sometimes the two will get momentarily confused. In the future, you can certainly expect more false alarms that turn out to be the work not of foreign agents but rather of local pervs.

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