Viewed through the small streaming-video frame on a computer monitor the female inmates look poor, fat and nonplussed as they file out of the cell and stand splayed against the "wall," which is actually a window in the men's holding cell. Hands above their heads against the window, they face the male inmates through the glass. The men immediately flock closer to gawk and taunt.

A "shakedown" at the Madison Street Jail in Maricopa County in Phoenix has begun.

"Put your hands on the glass! Ladies, keep your hands on the wall at all times," yells another officer, as female cops pat down the women and the riot police search the now empty women's cell.

The pat-down spectacle is apparently too much for the male inmates behind the glass watching the free show. "They flashing me! They flashing too much of what they ain't got," complains one of the women. On our computers, we can't see what she sees, but it's not hard to imagine. She sasses back through the window: "Hey, where's your boyfriend at, baby? Are you your bitch?"

Getting arrested in Maricopa County can make you a star -- a star in a sick webcam drama that turns the inside of a local jail into a worldwide freak show for any voyeur with a Web connection. Since July 2000, the county jail's four cameras have served up live images of the facility's search area, the men's and women's holding cells and the pre-intake area. The images are hosted on Crime.com, a site now owned by USA Networks and started by the co-founder of the reality TV show "Cops." Bonus scenes include the shakedown video, which the site bills as "Special Ops," a two-minute low-budget movie that provides extra titillation for Web-enabled prying eyes.

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Watching the video provides the same kind of fascination as a train wreck, but the legality of the world's first jail webcam has come under fire. On May 24, Middle Ground Prison Reform, a nonprofit in Tempe, Ariz., filed suit on behalf of the tens of thousands of inmates who have been incarcerated in the jail since the webcams started rolling on Crime.com. Middle Ground is seeking class-action status for the suit and a whopping $1.375 billion in damages.

"These people's images are being used on a commercial Web site without their permission and, in most cases, without their knowledge," says Donna Leone Hamm, co-founder of Middle Ground. "We're saying: 'Take the webcams down. You can leave the cameras up for security, fine, you're allowed to do that. But you have to take them off the Web site. That is an inappropriate invasion of privacy.'"

Privacy? In a jail? Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the publicity-seeking head of Madison Street Jail, thinks there is no such thing. He characterizes the lawsuit as frivolous and vows: "This is a great program. I'm not going to back down."

The billion-dollar case of the sheriff and his rogue webcams hinges on a single issue: What rights do prisoners in a county jail have to their own images? But it also raises a scarier question: What rights do any of us have to our own images these days? Is your image property you own or something you give up by venturing out in public?

As surveillance by security cameras, in every public space from airports to parking garages to convenience stores, becomes the norm, one estimate suggests that we're each taped an average of 30 times a day. Women seeking abortions are alarmed to discover that their images as they enter a clinic might be broadcast on the Web. Football fans attending this year's Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., were surprised to learn that their images not only had been recorded but had been compared with a database of known criminals using new "biometric" face-recognition technology.

Compounding the problem, video cameras are getting cheaper and smaller. Privacy experts predict that it won't be long before security cameras are networked. Can Big Brother-style tracking of individuals' whereabouts be far behind?

In the early days of the Web, exhibitionists like Jenni of Jennicam couldn't wait to webcast their lives to the world. But like it or not, we're all becoming more like Jenni every day. For as perversely fascinating as it may be to peek in on the spectacle at the Madison Street Jail, we may have more in common with the inmates than we'd like to think.

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