The District’s plan to centralize 5,600 security cameras creates the potential for privacy abuses such as those occurring in New York and London, where bored officers have become Peeping Toms and citizens have been subjected to embarrassing eavesdropping, experts said.

George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, author of “The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age,” spent a week in England inside the surveillance rooms watching the watchers.