The Lab leader is putting a surveillance camera inside the lab to protect some precious devices bought recently. The viewpoint of the camera covers most of the lab and shows clearly the lab members 24h per day and 7 days a week. The camera is only accessed by the lab leader.
is it ethical to put such a camera inside the lab?
This largely depends on disclosure --- in cases where you record employees at work there are ethical and legal obligations relating to notification and disclosure. The legal rules depend on your jurisdiction, but in most jurisdictions this situation is regulated by some kind of legislation on surveillance. (E.g., in NSW in Australia this would be regulated by the Workplace Surveillance Act 2005.) To check on the legality of this practice you should consult relevant surveillance legislation in your jurisdiction. Regardless, your lab leader should certainly contact the university legal counsel before installing a surveillance camera.
As to the broader ethical question of surveillance (as opposed to its legality), there is a reasonable literature on this question in the business ethics journals (see e.g., Ottensmeyer and Heroux 1991, Fairweather 1999, Halpern, Reville and Grunewald 2008, and Hadjimatheou 2014). I will not attempt to paraphrase this issue here since it is a large issue which is best understood by reference to the literature.
Yes, it is certainly ethical, so long as everyone knows it is there. It doesn't even necessarily show lack of trust in the regular lab denizens. An alternative, of course, would be to pay someone, a guard, to be always present.
I suppose it is possible that the leader's motives go beyond protecting the equipment, of course, but even that isn't problematic if a record of lab activities might be needed to assure against possible bad behavior, such as, for example harassment. In some situations the lab work may be so sensitive that a record needs to be kept.
As noted in comments on this page, the legality may be in question. But that varies from place to place.
To make it even clearer, if the camera is put in place without the knowledge of the participants it would be unethical. If the camera were put into a public area then it would also be unethical in the absence of come compelling reason that would mitigate it.
If the camera were put in place to monitor the people and their performance, rather than protect equipment, the situation becomes more difficult to asses. But it would probably be unwise to do it, whether ethical or not, because of the strong negative reaction that it would cause and which is evidenced in the comments here.
The ethical judgment I made is, therefore, very limited to a particular set of conditions as expressed in the question asked.
If the lab ever uses human subjects, it's important to keep this camera in mind as a potential breach of confidentiality. Most IRBs would (a) want to know that subjects are being recorded, (b) want the camera mentioned in the consent form, and (c) want a plan for the storage and disposal of recordings that include subjects.
