John Makely / NBC News

Standing in front of what remains of his aunt's house, Matt Petronis takes in the burned section of Breezy Point, N.Y., where more than 100 homes were destroyed by fire at the height of Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 29. It was his first day back in his hometown from college since the storm.

Matthew Petronis sat in his dorm room on Oct. 29, watching TV in horror as "my childhood burned down."

Petronis had spent the past three summers working as a lifeguard on Breezy Point beach, and had spent the first 19 years of his life learning how to walk, read, swim and throw a baseball in the idyllic Queens, N.Y., neighborhood. A sophomore at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., he thought he was a safe distance from Sandy's unforgiving storm surge. But as the first reports of a devastating fire on Breezy Point began to circulate, fear gripped him. His schools, his friends, almost everything he knew was there. He'd celebrated all 18 of his Thanksgiving Days with family there. 

As the night wore on, it became apparent that the combination of wind, water and fire had dealt Breezy Point a potentially mortal blow. He felt helpless in his dorm room -- but not for long.

A star pitcher at Xaverian High School near Breezy Point, Petronis is now a promising southpaw on the Catholic University pitching staff. So he knows a little about working his way out of trouble.

Only a few hours after the near destruction of his community, Petronis set up the first fundraiser to help the neighborhood get off the mat. Before people routed by Sandy could even begin to assess the damage, he had embraced the new form of crowd-sourced charity and set up an online-donation tool at WePay.com. Within hours, he'd raised a few thousand dollars. He topped $10,000  a couple of days later. 

Follow @RedTapeChron

Offers started pouring in, not just money. Accountants and lawyers offered to help him set up nonprofit status, which was granted by the IRS this week. Others offered to come to Breezy Point and help with reconstruction. Architects, carpenters, construction workers and good-hearted volunteers from across the country have offered to come for a week or two to Queens and help anyway they can. Petronis is managing both the money and the volunteers.

"People are running marathons to raise money for us, having free concerts for us. It's just crazy," Petronis said this week. In a way, the teenager has been the most personal link between Breezy Point, the most local of neighborhoods, and the outside world, full of folks desperate to help resurrect this treasured place.  

John Makely / NBC News

Matt Petronis waits for the bank to open in Breezy Point to set up the account for the donations he has received to help rebuild Breezy Point on Wednesday.

By Thanksgiving morning, nearly 1,400 donors had driven the fund above $78,000, all generated by a few creative clicks on a keyboard. Unlike other Sandy recovery funds, the money Petronis is collecting will go directly toward rebuilding Breezy Point.

In some ways, Petronis is lucky. His family – his parents, two brothers and two cousins they took in who recently lost their parents – has been squeezed into a studio basement apartment in Brooklyn for three weeks, looking for a more permanent place to live. Petronis' dorm room seems like a luxury accommodation in contrast. Naturally, he feels guilty about that -- but his life is hardly easy at the moment. He's juggling classes, mandatory study hall for baseball, keeping up with his family's rebuilding issues and managing the donations and volunteers.

"In other words, he's using business management major skills in a pretty useful way," said Catholic University baseball Coach Ross Natoli. "He's a free spirit, yet a caring kid. He has that New York can-do attitude. He's a terrific teammate."

In fact, the entire Petronis family knows something about being team players, Natoli said. Not only do they attend many games -- both home and away -- but Petronis' father, without being asked, started buying lunch for the players during long doubleheaders last year. Doubleheaders at smaller colleges tend to be long, inglorious affairs, often lasting 5 hours or more.  

"When you play a sport in college you try to emphasize importance of what it really means to care about teammates and have their back," Ross said. "Matt is one of those guys. What he's done has not surprised me."

Petronis' fund did so well because he set it up quickly, taking advantage of all the publicity that Breezy Point received in the immediate aftermath of the storm. It's now the main gift-giving tool for outsiders who want to help Breezy Point. The money will be given to the Breezy Point Disaster Relief Fund, to be administered by a seven-member board of directors.

"He did all this on his own, it's as simple as that," said Steven Greenburg, who will chair the disaster relief fund. "What he's done is magnificent, and a perfect example of what we do here in Breezy Point. It's just nice to see young people step up like this."

The money will be doled out to people who apply for it using anonymous forms, Greenburg said.

John Makely / NBC News

Matt Petronis gets a hug from Anne-Marie Willis at the Catholic Club, which has been turned into a distrubution center for donated supplies. Petronis celebrated his Catholic confirmation in the building.

"We have to do it that way, because everyone knows everyone on Breezy Point," he said.

For Petronis, the fight is personal.

"The place where I grew up during my childhood is almost gone, but that is not the case for the children that are growing up now," he wrote on the wepay.com page. "They deserve to enjoy the same little piece of paradise I enjoyed when I was younger, so this is not just only for Breezy. It’s for the younger generation as well that I want to have the same childhood, but better."

The last few weeks of the fall semester -- the crush between Thanksgiving and Christmas, tend to be the busiest time in a student's calendar. But despite the papers and exams staring him down, Petronis went home Thanksgiving week to help with the cleanup. It was the first time he'd seen the destruction of his family’s Beach Road house in person.

Read more of NBC News' coverage of Breezy Point

"You just stare at in disbelief. I have so many emotions going through my mind," he said. "But there are so many positive things going on, and I really just want to help out, so I’m going to stay positive."

Petronis, who appeared in three games last year as a Catholic University freshman, had a disappointing end to his fall baseball season, pitching in a 2-1 loss to the Naval Academy. But one gets a sense there are a lot of wins in his future.

Already, Thanksgiving week has brought good things to his family. On Wednesday, Petronis was helping move furniture into a new apartment the family had just scored in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, not too far from Breezy Point. There, they'll be able to find a little more normalcy while they plan to rebuild their home and their lives. But the new apartment isn't nearly big enough for a family gathering so, for the first time, they'll be eating turkey dinner outside New York City – at an uncle's home on Long Island.

"It's going to be weird, switching it up is odd. But we will be around family, and that's what Thanksgiving is about," he said. And he vows Sandy will be just a bump in the road, that holidays will come to Breezy Point again.

To give to the Breezy Point Disaster Relief Fund, visit Petronis' WePay website at:

https://www.wepay.com/x4c0ok9/donations/hurricane-sandy-raising-money-for-breezy-point

Or http://breezypointdisasterrelief.org/

Or send a check to:

Breezy Point Disaster Relief Fund/C/O The Law Office of Lee and Kane
2175 Flatbush Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11234

Other places you can donate for Sandy relief, or offer help:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/30/14805994-sandys-aftermath-how-you-can-help?lite

* Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook.
* Follow Bob Sullivan on Twitter. 

More from Red Tape Chronicles:

Ettore Ferrari / EPA file

A security camera stands on a lamp post in front of London's iconic Clock Tower, which houses Big Ben, on July 23.

When the Olympic flame is doused on Sunday, we know the cheers will quiet, the athletes will move on and fans will go home. But will Big Brother stay behind?

Every Olympics host city goes through it: the Olympic hangover. When the athletes step off the medal podiums, the city must clean up, pay the bills and figure out how to monetize a series of shiny new venues. The most important decision, however, might seem much more subtle: What happens to all those new security cameras and other surveillance technologies that were installed for the Games? Privacy experts fret that, as with Athens, Beijing and Vancouver, the Olympics means a steep ratcheting up of security that never really gets ratcheted down.

"It would be a tragedy if the most visible legacy of the Games in London was a huge increase in the amount of surveillance people are subjected to in their everyday lives," said Nick Pickles, director of London-based Big Brother Watch.

Host cities tolerate massive shows of security that would otherwise be unimaginable. In London, which already has more CCTV security cameras than any other city in the world, 2,000 new cameras were installed in the Olympic Village, while nearly 2,000 more were installed around the city, according to Big Brother Watch. License plate recognition systems have been installed throughout London. There are even surface-to-air missiles atop apartment buildings and more military troops on the ground than Britain has in Afghanistan. An $877 million effort, it's been called the largest peacetime deployment of security forces in history, but the question remains: Will there be mission creep? How much of that infrastructure and the public’s newfound tolerance for being watched will remain after the Games are finished?

Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an analysis of all recent Games and says the results are disheartening.  It should come as no surprise that the Beijing Summer Games were used as an excuse to install thousands of cameras that are still in operation, said the report’s author, Rebecca Bowe. But other cities have suffered similar fates, too.

"The Games bring a legacy that lives well beyond the prestige," Bowe said. "We've witnessed time and again, the security infrastructure lives on well beyond the Games."

Concrete concerns
The concerns aren't merely theoretical. Athens officials installed about 1,000 cameras for the 2004 Summer Games. In 2007, Greece amended its national data protection law to exempt the cameras; Greek privacy commissioner Dimitris Gourgourakis resigned over the incident. The cameras have since been used during protests following economic unrest there.

More Olympics coverage in London 2012: Hosting the Games

The Olympics has a long-running legacy as a massive security event, which long pre-dates post-9/11 terrorism concerns. It dates at least as far back as the Munich Summer Games of 1972, when a security breach contributed to the kidnapping of Israeli athletes from the Olympic Village; 11 were eventually murdered.  But even before that event, the Olympics were never free of international politics and the real possibility that some group might use them to violently make a point.

No one disputes the need for heightened security during the Games, but is the installation of security infrastructure, and the culture that comes with it, a one-way street? Can a security state be dismantled? Or are the Games a Trojan horse that allows those with a heavy-handed security agenda to gain the upper hand?

Olympic security plan transforms London into fortress

"The equipment has been bought and paid for. The real risk is they simply leave it in place and turn it over to local authorities, and by the back door, we have a huge increase in surveillance," Pickles said. "Government officials have made assurances that some of it is temporary, but they haven't said what."

Follow @RedTapeChron

E-mail a tip to Bob Sullivan

Already, whiz-bang security technology in London has proven tempting to local authorities. Pickles pointed to minutes from a recent borough council meeting in Newham, just east of London, where officials openly expressed desire to buy Olympics surveillance technology after the Games end.

Alfredo Lopez, founder of the international privacy advocacy organization MayFirst/PeopleLink, said it's very difficult to reverse the Olympics security buildup.

"There is no way these guys are going to take down those cameras, especially with all the social unrest there," said Lopez, who is based in New York.

Lopez, a professed lover of Olympic sports, said the security issue threatens to squander any of the goodwill gained by the otherwise-peaceful international gathering.

Red Tape Chronicles on NBCNews.com

"I happen to believe, and I know this is corny, (that) the Olympics is one of the greatest things the human race does, so why do these bastards pervert it with their repressive attitudes?" he said. "How can you run a principal event of goodwill and friendship, then at same time, on top of buildings you have missiles? It's totally incongruous. It's very, very disturbing and contradictory to the Olympic spirit. It ruins the whole thing."

Slideshow: Olympic Emotional Moments

/

Click for more from the 2012 summer games in London.

Launch slideshow

'It softens people up'
One fundamental problem of the Games is that they are used as an "obvious show of military capability," Lopez said, with host nations using the occasion the beat their chests about their powerful ability to respond to threats. But Pickles is worried about a much more subtle issue: Residents get used to the trade-off between privacy and heightened security practices, and their tolerance level is slowly raised, leading to fewer objections to police tactics.

"The danger is it softens people up to the next step," he said.

The next step is Brazil in 2016, where circumstances on the ground dictate what will almost inevitably be an even stronger implementation of security force and technology. (Privacy advocates are too pessimistic about the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, to use those games as a battleground.) An active battle between paramilitary police forces and organized crime means residents are used to compromised civil liberties, and even before the 2016 Games, Rio de Janeiro will host the World Cup in 2014. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks suggest that U.S. government officials have encouraged use of additional surveillance tools by the Brazilian government, as well as a partnership with U.S. security agencies.

As a result, market research firm 6Wresearch predicts the market for security cameras will nearly quadruple, to $362 million, by 2016.

By then, Pickles warns, people have another element to worry about: increased sophistication of technologies like facial recognition. Londoners, for example, would almost certainly not tolerate a permanent military presence in the city. But as police gadgets get smaller and smarter, they also become less visible.

Slideshow: When the Olympics is your neighbor

/

A diverse community in East London will welcome the world to Britain for the 2012 Olympic Games. Meet residents and hear how they feel about having a huge, world stage in their backyard.

Launch slideshow

"It's getting more discreet, even as the processing power is getting more powerful," he said. "It's becoming much more clandestine, ... which means people won't object to it as much."

Looking to Vancouver
Brazil and London might be able to learn something from Vancouver's experience after the 2010 Winter Games. Western Canada has an active civil participation culture, and even before the Games began, Canada's privacy commissioner warned about mission creep in Olympics security plans.

"The right to privacy must be upheld, even during mega-events like the Olympic Games, where the threat to security is higher than usual," Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard said in a speech delivered before the Games calling for dismantling of surveillance technology after the Games. "Will the residents of Vancouver and the lower mainland wind up living surrounded by an array of surveillance systems that they neither want nor need?"

Partly as a result, most of the 900 video cameras installed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were removed after the Games. About 75 were left behind for use by the Vancouver police, said Adam Molnar, who is studying the Olympics security effect as part of his Ph.D. work at the University of Victoria.

Slideshow: Venues for 2012 London Olympic Games

Oda / Getty Images

From Wimbledon to Wembley Stadium to The Dome, a look at the venues for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Launch slideshow

"British Columbia civil liberties associations put pressure on the Vancouver Police Department, which was in negotiations to keep the cameras up," he said. Even some of the remaining cameras were turned off, only to be used in crisis situations, he said.

On the other hand, analysis of Vancouver's post-Olympics security hangover is muddied by the fact that in the spring of 2011, there were major riots after the Vancouver Canucks lost hockey’s Stanley Cup final. City officials have successfully turned to Twitter and other social media tools that deputized people to help identify criminals during the riots. Given the embarrassment over the riots, many residents were eager to help.

"That turns out to be an alternate route to (security) cameras everywhere," Molnar said.

The most lasting legacy of the Vancouver Games, Molnar said, was not police gadgetry, but rather reorganization of the police force into small, nimble anti-riot teams that share some characteristics with paramilitary teams.

"The extent that militarist ideal supplants community-based policing, that should concern people," he said. "And any time you have a deepening of integration between civilian and military police, like you have now in London, that's disturbing."

Molnar felt confident that Vancouver's security experience offered some hope to privacy advocates in London and Rio, however.

"You can look to Vancouver as a positive example of an active civil liberty and political community that tried to engage the government around privacy and surveillance issues, and that did earn some small victories," he said. "In many ways it's forced policing agencies to respond to public debate. ... There's certainly a need for informed civilian oversight."

'Mega-events'
But Bowe, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she's worried that the Olympics will continue to be abused as one of a list of "mega-events" that give officials permission to tighten the security screws until tremendous power is concentrated in small government forces.

"The march toward a militarized, urban future will continue apace unless people push back," she said. 

And Lopez sees little room for hope at the moment.

"My general worry as a human being is about the setting up of apparatus of police states in all of these places," he said.

Even those who have faith in the good intentions of their current government are being short-sighted, he warned.

"The (U.S.) and some of these places are not a police state now. But the problem is if the apparatus is set up, it could be easily be Nazified and turned on people. ... If there's a history to the world, it's that certain small, elite groups of people usurp and pervert the great works of the majority of humanity, like the Olympic Games, for nefarious and selfish purposes."

* Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook.
* Follow Bob Sullivan on Twitter.