Slashdot Mirror
CCTV - The Fifth Utility
An anonymous reader sent in a solid story discussing the fifth utility, or, the closed caption surveliance systems in Britain. Lots of background information on encryption and privacy issues. But in the end, a very good story covering a lot of issues that might be second nature to many readers of this site, but maybe not to the average newspaper reader.
From America looking out, foreign customs seem just as, er, foreign. /I/ don't have that right?
/can/ handle their stuff, well, sorry, but there's a greater need.
Yes, guns are dangerous. That's why we demanded the right to keep them -- we had to start a little revolt a while back you might remember (happy Patriot's Day eve), and the only way to ensure that the govt doesn't put us in that situation again is to make sure that the scales stay balanced. To butcher Ayn Rand, how can I delegate to the government the ability to bear arms if
I think other countries mistake our drug/alcohol policies for puritanical religious views. If that were the case, I wouldn't defend them as I am atheist. Many USians view on drugs & alcohol are that while they may or may not be intrinsically bad in a closed environment, in the real world they can and are major problems for those people who can't handle their chemicals. Are we supposed to allow blanket permission, and then when it fucks someone up (sometimes for life) tell them sorry & point them to rehab? I'd rather we do everything in our power to prevent drugs from ruining those people's lives in the first place. If to do this I have to sacrifice the entertainment of those who
Anyway, believe it or not, if you walk down the street smoking a joint in the US, you most likely will not end up in jail that night unless you're stupid about it. But we don't tolerate cameras and mj sniffers on every corner for our protection...
Will all the videos of me just have a big smiley yellow face with "Anonymous Coward" printed underneath it as I walk in front of the cameras?
In the UK, if you have a TV card in your PC, does it count as a television?
The current situation is that there is devolution to Northern Ireland, with both Republicans (Sinn Fein) and Ulster Unionists (the other people) in their parliament.
The other part of ruling Northern Ireland, aside from stuff that these two groups look after is done by a mixture of London and cross-border bodies (ie, Ireland and Britain) - it's very very muddled - it's still technically part of Britain, but moving to a situation where it's more of a shared responsibility.
I don't think any serious situations are done without consultation with Ireland anyway - but I think it's one of those "glorious" kludges where both sides of the Northern Ireland divide can claim victory, whereas they have both in fact compromised.
The IRA have declared a cease fire, and have agreed to stop blowing people up. However, a few of them formed the "Real IRA" - who are busy trying to blow things up, and generally being like your average terrorists. They reject any compromises and purely want Northern Ireland to be a province of Ireland (or, to be blunt, probably just want to enjoy carrying their guns around and making bombs).
The current situation is the effective outcome of the peace negotiations - with both sides in power now - I'ld imagine that as they begin to trust each other more, it'll become more and more powerful, until it only really depends on Britain for defense if that. - But I fear it'll take time until they all trust each other enough to carry it on. It looks promising, although fragile.
This reads to me like a troll, but I'll bite anyway I actually have (relatively) little problem with CCTV, but "honest politicians"? What a joke! PPP (large interests pushing the government to pick the absolute worst option for financing the London Underground), Tobacco's exemption from Formula 1 Racing, The changes in the copyright law that are like the DCMA but without even the token "fair use" comments in the bill, as well as people like Geoffrey Robinson who appears to have monied many members of parliament... and so on. The government might not quite be to the legalised influence buying position that's tolerated in America, but it's hardly perfect. And the police - well, they're humans too, and they mess up - unless you missed the huge number of bad convictions and the many miscarriages of justice. The worst part is that British law (generally) used to be designed to be incorruptible. With the (seemingly heralded) removal of double jeopardy laws and the slippery slope trodden by RIP, it looks like we may be heading in a position which would scare a lot of people.
>The BBC, instead of using advertising on it's channels charges an annual fee to viewers (around £80 per household).
:)
Not purchased a TV license recently have we?
Last one I bought says £104 on it - I'ld imagine it'll go up soon - I seem to remember it being £103 last year. Or so, but then I've not been awake as late.
It's very very fiddly when you're renting accomodation - I'ld imagine that the people at our previous residence have received quite nasty letters - as I've received some for the people before us "FINAL REMINDER" etc. I had to ring them in the end as I didn't really want to piss around with this.
(However, I still like the BBC, although most of the stuff I get my TiVo to tape is admittedly on Sky 1)
>Can you even imagine why you are getting the crap bombed out of you?
Because these people have no concept of not using violence and because they are unwilling to compromise with other people?
Half the people in Northern Ireland don't want to be in a United Ireland - this is why both sides of the issue should work together and find a suitable compromise, which they are trying to do now. The Real IRA simply refuse to compromise at all.
You can argue the rights and wrongs of partition and the initial colonisation, but they have happened, and attaching Northern Ireland to Ireland would make a lot of people unhappy, Ireland poorer, and give them the same problem we have.
> Has your Parliament no hand in all this? Do you not see that you are reaping what you have sown?
Unification of Ireland might be something that should occur, but I doubt it'll occur within the forseeable future - and it isn't going to be a sudden big bang, but will instead end up happening slowly. Repeated terrorist incidents are not going to make it happen any faster, but will in fact, probably slow it down.
At the moment what is needed most is for both sides to start trusting each other and repeated bombings are at best going to slow this down.
Bloody stool.
I think he made the point that if the law is there, you might as well take advantage of it. It obviously helped him by letting him spot a corrupt politician out to do him harm.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I'd guess that y'all pay about 1-2[there's no pound sign on this friggin' keyboard] to rent a video, so providing you liked their selections, I'd guess it's a good deal from that point alone. Of course, I've always been more inclined to watch old BBC stuff on PBS than most of the American channels (pre-cable, anyway) so I'm probably biased. Coughing up $150 per year wouldn't be very much fun for 2 channels.
Believe me, though, I'm thankful that y'all subsidize the World Service for me.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Is this the same government which pays for a security service (MI6) which has the capability of censoring any information regarding how they spend the taxpayers money. Are these the same police who, on several occasions, framed innocent people for the purposes of providing sacraficial lambs after a number of IRA terrorist attacks in the 70s? Are these the same police who are virtually invisible on the streets of London until after a crime has been committed (which they see on their beloved CCTV)?
The article is right, the British have no experience of totalitarian government, and as a result people like you think that it could never happen in Britain. I am sure that totalitarian government was probably the last thing on the German's minds in the 1920s too. The main difference is that Hitler never came close to the surveillance capabilities that the British government now have.
Note: And before you dismiss me as a dumb yank who knows nothing, I spent 6 years living in the UK (4 in Scotland, 2 in London), and originate from Dublin, Ireland. I even went through 6 months of police training in Scotland before deciding that the police wasn't for me.
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The obsession with "expectation of privacy" in the US comes from the fact that the Supreme Court has construed its right to privacy too narrow: you only have a right to privacy if you believe that you are currently private. In a world full of CCTV's, the right to privacy therefore is history. This is no issue for countries with properly protected privacy rights.
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And "you can't stop technology" is not a truism: many technologies (chemical weapons, anti personal landmines, human cloning, genetically engineered food) have been rejected by many countries.
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As somebody who has lived in both UK and USA, let me tell you, I think the TV license fee works very well. The license fee pays for the BBC, whose output is very good. The other TV channels must compete and thus their standards are high too. American TV might have many more channels, but there isn't anymore to watch. For those who pay for cable, the annual cable bill is much higher than the license fee.
What high quality TV? I live in Canada and often flip through 70 channels on my Rogers cable and find nothing to watch. The best channels are consistently those from the CBC (Canadian "equivalent" of the BBC).
2 38&cid=250
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/04/15/2248
"only because your government hasn't come after you like ours goes after minorities, or Abbie Hoffman, etc.... And that is because you are all one race, and no other reason."
Wrong. England is no longer one great white nation. There are a *lot* of africans, muslims, chinese, indians, pakistanis - every single nation that was ruled by the old Commonwealth was given British Citizenship, and therefore there was a lot of immigration (and there still is). Britain is just as multi-cultural as any other country.
So, Britain is not "all one race".
In regards to the subject at hand, I can only offer one reason why Brits are "okay with this". The British have this strange "put up with it" attitude. If a train is late, they might mumble and complain to each other on the platform, but actually complain to the train company? Oh! That would be too much fuss over such a small thing.
Oh, look, there are cameras everywhere, well, I don't have to worry about that - they're not for me, right??
I don't claim to understand it - I just live here. I find it amusing however how often the anti-british americans all come crawling out of the woodwork from postings like this. In a minute, you'll be telling all the Brits how the Americans "Won" the 2nd world war! hahaha.
There are a lot of myths and urban legends regarding the right to videotape or otherwise record people in public and private situations.
Most of the cases in the US have involved invasion of privacy in some way. The only standard the courts have used is whether a reasonable person could expect privacy in a given situation. For instance, if you're dealing crack on a public street and someone tapes you doing it, there's no expectation of privacy. If you're discussing something quietly on the street with no one around, the courts have decided that you have an expectation of privacy, similar to a telephone conversation. There are grey areas around looking into people's windows or doorways, where there may be some visibility from the street.
There doesn't seem to be much difference in the law between a camera and a live observer. If you peek in windows or eavesdrop on others' conversations, it doesn't matter what means you use to do it.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Indeed - very well informed.
I bet 99% of people outside the UK wouldn't know that the Metropolitan Police only cover London, so that saying the UK Police are racist due to the actions of some London officers is seriously missing the point.
The Police up in Leeds were actually criticised by a judge for using the definition of racism as recommended by the author of the report into the Stephen Lawrence case. This was in another racist attack and shows that we don't tolerate racism any more than anyone else, by and large.
Your links prove you're desperate to push your own agenda. Try again.
> Does this sound odd to everyone else outside of > England? To me it sounds insane. Like issuing a > license to own a computer, or a phone. Please
> tell me the British government doesn't require > a license for a fucking toilet, cause that
> would suck.
The licence is to pay for the BBC. That's it.
It's a 'television tax' if you really want to criticise it.
However it gives us a unique advert-free media outlet and you have no idea how much you come to appreciate that. Seriously.
> However, in Britain we have a more socialist,
> left wing government, one that is not friendly > to business or private interests. Out
> government is trusted by the people because it > composed of ordinary people, people like Gordon > Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and
> Dennis Skinner, the Beast of Bolsover.
> Both these men are very powerful and respected
Okay - you've made me laugh too much. You are a troll and I claim my five pounds.
Dennis Skinner has as much influence on government policy as I do. You know this and you're trolling the idiots even more stupid than yourself.
Don't, for pity's sake.
Thing is, we have significant human rights legislation to cover for this.
We're just as scared of Police abuse of power here as anyone else is, ask anyone who has at some point gone to a street protest.
Thing is that when you weigh up the benefits of being able to catch the people that do MORE damage to society (ie. the type of people that only last night went rampaging around the centre of Bradford) against what MIGHT happen if a bad cop was able to use CCTV fotage to further abuse their positon of power, then I'd hope that most people would agree that CCTV is not an inherently bad thing.
"Britain is under surveillance and everyone in it has lost their freedom and privacy, I'm so glad I'm not British"
Of course I might be wrong and I apologise if that's not the case.
They can track and pinpoint who they want already. CCTV only makes it easier. That doesn't mean they wouldn't do it before when it was harder.
Please don't fall for the trolls who will tell you everyone is wide-eyed about them over here...
I've got two watching me now. When I leave I'll have one watch me at thedoor, another track me as I walk out the building, and then another two as I walk away from the building. They are there to stop professional gangs from stealing computing equipment worth more than 100K though.
Want to swap places?
I'm not substantially disagreeing that there are cultural differences. As you point out, there are substantial cultural differences between the US and the UK. I could only dream that the US could be as sensible as the UK in re: gun control.* If the existence of cultural differences was the only claim the poster had made, I wouldn't have called him a troll, since (as you've pointed out, much more eloquently than he did) there are substantial differences in attitude towards government here and in the UK.
However, having made the original claim, the poster then proceeded to pass off a number of lies and unfounded truths as facts, and base the cultural differences on these "facts." My post corrected his facts, and said that, in light of those corrections, either he didn't have a particular honest view of his own national institutions or he was trolling by deliberately indicting the US.
To put it another way: He is probably quite correct that most Brits trust their government. That point is quite valid. But his stated reasons for that trust are both demonstrably false and deliberately inflammatory. That makes him either ignorant or a troll, which is all I claimed in my post. Having now read the rest of his posts, I'll lean towards ignorant. But that's just my own judgement, and the way he framed his "facts" certainly leaves that open to interpretation.
*In re: racial strife, I'm not a British minority, so I can't really say, but I've read a number of writings that suggest that the only reason race relations in the UK are perceived as better than race relations here are because the UK has a substantially smaller minority population (2.8% v. ~30% in the US, according to the CIA World Factbook). The claim is that racism is just as bad, but since so few minorities are present, overt forms of racism like police brutality are much fewer and far between. How true this is, I have no clue, but it does seem plausible.
IAAL,BIANLY
Fine. It might be lower... but from 27% to 2%? C'mon.
IAAL,BIANLY
I wasn't trying to claim that London cops == all British cops, or that all British cops are racist pigs. Certainly, there is a huge cultural gap between the American and British systems of policing- one definitely tends to encourage brutality and racism, the other (apparently) tends to encourage more positive values.
At the same time, this perception of British cops as completely and 100% fair and honest (while probably more true than in, say, LA or NYC) is clearly not completely accurate. If tapes can't be made of me, then they can never be abused. If they are made, all it takes is one bad cop to abuse the system- and I think it is a safe bet that there is more than one bad cop in Britain. The naive faith that the original posters displays is... well, naive. It may reflect a perfectly valid cultural difference between the US and the UK- it's just a cultural difference grounded in some bad assumptions, IMNSHO. It's a cultural difference that really isn't that big a deal when cops don't have anything more powerful than bobby sticks, but when you give them the potential to track every person in a city... suddenly, those "outliers" in the police force- the ones who aren't quite so friendly and upstanding- should suddenly become much more scary.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Having now read the rest of his posts, I'll lean towards ignorant.
Whoa. I totally retract that statement. If you still don't think he's a troll after reading this please post here and we can discuss. I suppose I leave open the possibility that he is just ignorant... but the level of ignorance there is staggering.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
May I ask what agenda you think I'm trying to push?
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
The 27% may be a little on the high side (it's been discussed elsewhere in the thread.) At the same time, the Church of England has a vested interest in deflating its numbers. Nothing like a sense of panic to motivate the godly to drag their children back in.
IAAL,BIANLY
Of course. But if you are going to twist them to prove whatever you want to, at least start with the right ones.
IAAL,BIANLY
Wow. What a giant flaming asshole. (forgive the language.) But I'll bite.
point 1: did I ever claim the US was better? No. It isn't. It's obvious that our nation has deep and terrible flaws. Cinci's current problems and past massive race riots in LA and Miami (just to name the worst in my lifetime) are clear evidence of that, as is our last election. That has little or no bearing on whether or not England is in good or bad shape. Sure, they aren't as bad off as we are- but they aren't in the kind of shape the original troll likes to think either.
point 2: LOL. "resident" is the right word. In case you missed it in your quick perusal of my web page, I'm a Cuban-American from Miami who happens to live in Durham while I'm getting my education. That said, I'll point out that I've voted against Jesse Helms once and wish I could do it again. I'll also note that the state of North Carolina removed references to the Confederacy from it's flag- in 1907. It isn't the greatest place in the world, no. But (again) that's irrelevant to how good or bad the British government is. (BTW- I haven't touched a gun since 7th grade.)
point 3: I have no clue what you are talking about. I have a few better things to do with my life than search for links, so yeah, some of those links are not the best. But they prove my point, I think, and additional research would support me.
point 4: What does any of that have to do with anything? I'm also a history buff and political science major, if that makes you feel any better.
point 5: Just in the past month, I've been past the Mason-Dixon twice and I'll be doing it again this weekend. Sorry; only been to Europe once. Liked it; I'll be back in January.
point 6: LOL. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder. It's easy to think the cops are fair and effective when you aren't black or some other minority. And it doesn't matter that they don't carry guns- you can ask Rodney King and Abner Louima about that, if you want American examples.
Look- America is no paradise, and yes, there are substantial differences in culture between the two countries. At the same time, the UK is not some kind of happy socialist paradise. They have racial strife and government corruption too, and to claim otherwise is just crap. Remember- every society has assholes: some are cops, some are politicians, and some just post to slashdot. To paraphrase... Go look in the mirror... the asshole, sir, is YOU.
IAAL,BIANLY
I take it back. I said elsewhere you were possibly ignorant or naive; but clearly you are just a troll. No one could be so ignorant of their own history to not know of indentured servitude or slavery on their own soil. Slavery was not abolished in England until 1833 Link. You get a 30 year lead there- which, on the grand scale of history, isn't much. And there was a great deal of fuss about it... sure, no civil war, but only because the numbers were smaller and the economy less dependent on them.
White women in Britain couldn't vote until 1918 and for 10 years after that only women who owned property or were married to men of property were allowed to vote. Universal female suffrage happened here in 1920. Either we are two years worse or eight years better- take your pick.
And, of course, you have to know whose idea property based suffrage was. It's not like British settlers arrived from enlightened England, bumped into classist Native Americans, and said "gee, how silly it was of us to give suffrage to everyone back in the old country. Here, only those with property will vote." Like many of our other good and bad ideas, the Brits had it first, and had had it for a lot longer than we did. As late as 1884, if you worked on a farm, you couldn't vote in the UK. True general suffrage was not granted until 1928. Legally speaking, the US wins by 59 years here (though obviously blacks were practically barred for another 100 years.)
As far as the reasons for revolt... sure, taxes were a huge reason. But if the British Government had actually given the Colonies seats in Parliament instead of opening fire on protesters, maybe we might have stuck around. Maybe India might have done the same if you hadn't tortured and arrested people who wanted the right to make their own salt. And let's not get into South Africa.
Look, America has a pretty dreadful history. But it is clear that you are just trolling when you are so willfully ignorant of your own history. Go back in your hole.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Or it could be used to blackmail you if you are in an affair. Or it could be used only to track and identify minorities. Or it could be used to specifically track members of opposition parties. Or to pinpoint targets for crimes. (Since I understand that private companies run the cameras, how easy would it be for a crime ring to infiltrate someone into the system? Probably pretty good, I'm guessing.)
I understand and sympathize with the point of view of CCV advocates- additional eyes in public places can be very useful and I can see how they'd increase the sense of security (my school has them all over our parking lots.) But the naive faith the original poster places in the system is unsettling.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
The fair, brotherly cops and respectable politicians are the source of enough institutional racism that the UN is getting involved. Your government has investigated the cops and found them guilty of pervasive racial bias. Heck, your own officers don't even believe that their fellow cops are fair or brotherly.
BTW, the rate of church attendance is more like 44% in the US and 27% in the UK. The University of Michigan has one of the most respected social sciences/statistics departments in the world, so please don't come back here claiming otherwise.
And as far as New Labour and the "Third Way" being responsive to the people... well, it's about as believable as hearing the same thing from Clinton. It is true that the British government isn't bought and sold as brazenly as ours is, but it is just as responsive as any other government when dollars (or pounds, as the case may be) are at issue. When those businesses want to start invading your privacy more brazenly, you can be sure that MI5 will be there to help out.
In conclusion- either you are a damn good troll or you are pretty deluded about the society you live in. Hope it is the latter... it is never too late to learn.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I thought we were four. England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland?
Y'know it's amazing what being bombed on a semi-regular basis for the last 60 years does for the national character. Maybe if someone bombed LA, NY, Dallas and Washington repeatedly, and arbitrarily, with little or no warning, we'd see some shift in the knee-jerk american position on CCTV.
You should realize that using advertising
as a way to pay for radio and television was
David Sarnoff's idea, and it was greeted with
such skepticism that he had to leave Marconi
Radio and start his own company to set it up.
In many other countries television owners have
to pay a regular fee that goes to pay for the
government stations. (Or had to..)
However, in Israel, if they detect a TV oscillator
from your apartment they don't bust down doors
over it. It's not worth it.
Would some kind Brit please explain the whys and wherefores of "Television Licensing?" Does it include televisions that aren't connected to cable? Televisions that are used only to watch videotapes, and never pull signal from the radiowaves? How about those 2" LCD televisions? Mega-sized ones? Are there different classes and payment schedules? And how long are you incarcerated if you're found without a license?
It's such an alien concept, for a Canadian who's used to getting several free, high-quality channels in almost any part of the country...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
However, you're probably not interested because you're trolling. Unfriendly to business interests, my arse! Perhaps you should explain that to Bernie Eccelstone when he donated millions to Labour and just by coincidence restrictions of tobacco sponsorship of Formula One teams were delayed.
In any case, why do you bother trolling Yanks about socialism? It's not even fun anymore, it's like shooting cows in a paddock, something you Poms should be getting pretty expert in by now . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
cctv is closed circuit television, as per
everything2
In a perfect setup, the cameras could see everything anywhere outside. However, in reality, this is not the case, and there are areas shielded from view.
So, Would it be illegal to produce a map showing locations where the cameras can't see?.
It could be argued several ways:
I'd bet that 2) would be the response in the UK, and a combination of 3) and 2) in the USA.
According to some, I don't have anything to fear from walking in view of the cameras (or sitting, or running) if I'm not doing anything illegal.
I also say that the operators of the cameras shouldn't fear methods to evade the cameras being published. If they do, and it's illegal to evade the cameras, then it's a police state already.
Use the DPA. Provide them with a description of yourself, your laptop, the time you were there and where you were. If there was a camera pointed at you, then if you cough up the minimum fee (£10) then they HAVE TO give you the tapes they have of you.
~Cederic
From what I understand (I'm Canadian, but half my family's British), they drive these vans around and can apparently detect signals from an unlicenced television.
What is it about these "paranoiacs" scares you so much you wish to see them forced into home-style prisons?
People who desire their privacy are not maniacs.
The trouble is, it's not a matter of whether I'm doing anything wrong. It's when I've done something illegal that I have something to fear. Illegal and wrong match up pretty badly. Totalitarian states typically make so many pointless, useless, and weird laws that everybody has broken at least one of them, and the Western democracies are picking up on that. You don't have to be a murderer or even a pickpocket to be targetted by these guys; you just have to be disliked by City Hall, or even just the night shift manager at the monitoring facility.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The same was true of the Greate Britian at the same time, and her colonies. In canada the equivelent of a green card is still called Landed immergrent status, because you didn't get the right to vote until you had land. IN the US any none enslaved man had the right to vore from day one, many years before the any common wealth contry.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
As for people who want to be watched, Jefferson, Franklin, and Volare. They are will to give up freedom for safty and so they will get neither, and neither will any one else!!! Plus I doubt that the cameras will actually help, they don't in toronto, ca lots of muggings happen infront of the security cammeras at night, the police are overworked, and spread thing if they not there they are not going to help.
Also their was a time when the drug laws wern't dracona in the US that time was the 1970s, it changed in one goverment, under Ronald Regan, and just think the US govement is optimised to get nothing done. Also you are relying on the police being nice to you which is not the case if your a poltical dissident, just the opposite actually.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
Another lesson of history tells us is that most change for things we take for granted came from political disidents. Giving power to trake anyone is a very bad thing and will be used against the people very soon.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
and in closeing the obligitory reference to Tomas Jefferson, Frankeln and Voltare.
Those who would give up libertry for freedom will get neither.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
Ubiquitous camars give more power to the police which is allmost allway though out history a bad think for people.
As a right how about the right to be free of police harrasment? But then lots of people have the opion that if you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide. Please make sure that your havn't done any of the following.
- used or posesed any illegal drugs
- broken trafic laws
- Payed all you taxes (including on mail orders)
- Informed the police about all knowen felloies
(Its a crime not to here in the US
- never been involed in a physical altercation
- Always put the correct Identfication on offical forms
...
If you can say yes to the whole list then you ahead of 99% of the general public in any country.Grey (Chris Lusena)
This is a wonderful piece of UK legislation, which allows you to demand any company/organization which holds information about you to give you a copy (with certain exclusions ie some government agencies). So you can walk into MacDonalds, fill out a form while you eat your burger, giving the time, date, a description of yourself, the clothes you are wearing, etc, then hand it in before you leave forcing them to send you a copy of the footage of you sitting there filling out the form.
Egad. I wrote a story about this a while back. The difference in the setup is that surveillance was a little more pervasive and the corporations could charge you for info/footage.
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Tweet, tweet.
Actually, there's many reasons to fear the US government. Over 10 major wars, the CIA's attempts to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments in Latin America, the DEA, the NSA, attempted assasination of foreign leaders (Castro), and a human rights record comparable to Islamic nations.
Life is a psychology experiment gone awry.
Neat! I've got this great new technology that scans internet traffic, but don't worry, it won't be used to spy, just to deter criminals. Like people who trade MP3s, or DeCSS, or sell items from 1940s-Germany.
And i've got this new device to put in cars - it calls the cops when you go above the speed limit. But don't worry, only criminals have any reason to be afraid.
And we're going to institute a new program in bars, to make sure nobody under 21 is drinking. If they are, the authorities are notified immediately. But don't worry, non-criminals like ourselves have nothing to fear.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
You Sir, are an...
The point in the article regarding the Television Licensing Authority is that they have the right to check your home for a television.
The reason for this?
The BBC, instead of using advertising on it's channels charges an annual fee to viewers (around £80 per household). The methods they employ to enforce it, from my experience are as follows:
The Send a letter stating that they don't have a record of a license to each address. In the letter they include the application form for the license and a reply-paid form which allows you to state that you do not own a television at that address.
Those who state that they don't have a television might have a "television detector van" pass down their street more often than not or they might get a doorstep visit from a TLA agent... (I had one of these, when I didn't have a television... you can just turn them away.) I've never known of a case where they broke into a home to check. I did, however, hear of someone winning a case by stating that although he had a television he refused to watch the BBC channels - could just be an urban legend.
I do think that you extrapolate too far.
The point of the article is that, in Britain, we don't seem to care too much. I suppose that if a right-wing dictator were to get into power in the UK then we'd have a real problem, because the surveilance infrastructure would already be there for it's abuse, but then we have the oldest democracy in the world yet still have a monarch with the technical authority to overturn government.
Your assertion that Britain is one race is seriously flawed, come to the UK sometime. We are three countries each with distinct cultures, we have many naturalised British who originate from many areas of the former British Empire. We do have racial problems. We have had a few riots in the past ten years, because of racial tensions.
We've come out of a weekend where there was another suspected RIRA bomb in North London and you ask me how this CCTV puts me at ease?
The RIRA wouldn't be able to bomb the City of London, because of CCTV... I'm sure they would have rather bombed Mount Pleasant (The Main PO) instead of the small sorting office that they eventually targeted.
I do feel safer, because of this.
Heh...
Some of our most senior police chiefs in Britain have campaigned for the legalisation of Marijuana...
Their justification?
They want to spend time on real crimes.
I only visited Manchester (and Cumberton / Sellafield, beautiful country, by the way) once, but I didn't see much evidence of cultural diversity in the streets of elsewhere, i.e., I saw 95% white people.
You obviously never went to Rochdale (near Manchester), Brixton (in London), Southall (near London), St Pauls (in Bristol).
Hell in Southall the street signs are written in Urdu, for crying out loud.
Actually Direct Debit
and the amount is so small that I don't really notice it...
So there is an army of typists translating and typing in captions so all those deaf monitoring agents back at the station can read what everyone is saying?
You mean Closed-Circuit, I believe..
Having lived in major cities in the UK for most of my life, I find the figure of 2.8% extremely hard to believe. I guess as a percentage of the population as a whole its plausible, but my experience (admitedly the last few years I lived in the UK were in London, which is much more mixed) has been closer to 30% than to 2.8%.
That said, I have no idea what the acutal percentage is, it could be 2.8% but that would more accurately reflect rural life than urban. Judging from the time I spend in Pennsylvania and New York in the US, I'd say that's pretty true here too. (ie, it depends a lot on where you are)
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
The idea that the people should support public broadcasting, something without a strong commercial slant is a good one. A tax on TV purchases and imports seems a reasonable way collect that. (IMHO, I favor using regular taxes, because like education, I think it benefits the whole country, but...)
What isn't at all reasonable is the TLA vans patrolling the streets, the automatic search warrants...
The *only* time I see automatic right-to-enter being reasonable is in "hot pursuit". If a police officer sees someone they are pursuing enter a building, they should be able to follow. But there are no other reasons in my mind that they should be able to enter without the owner's permission, or a judicially granted warrant. And I mean something a judge really investigates and approves, not something they rubber-stamp.
Any type of taxation can be automatic. The BBC could get an automatic $100/citizen, or %.02 of income tax, or anything else. As long as the BBC doesn't employ the actual TV-Tax collectors, it's still in the position of dealing with the government for its money.
If you can turn a TV Licensing Officer away, why do people ever pay the fines? While I don't believe some of the stories in this thread, the officers must have some power to enter and search the homes of unwilling people.
Last year I took some photos of the posters mentioned in the article, some of which had some very witty comments written on them...there are people in the UK who are not happy with what is happening...
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However, in Britain we have a more socialist, left wing government, one that is not friendly to business or private interests.
Yikes. Don't you ever watch any Mark Thomas? Big business looks pretty cozy with the British government to me.
They are used by the police, who are famous around the world for fairness and correct, brotherly behaviour.
Now I think you must be trolling. Police do what their bosses tell them, whether its nice or not so nice.
UK counter culture comedian MArk Thomas did a show on CCTV, and he discovered that the Data Protection Act means that you (the public) can demand by law any CCTV footage that contains you. And if the company or council or whoever has the CCTV camera doesn't, you can report them and they get in trouble. It doesn't mean very much, but it does mean that the company has to go through the hassle of checking all their CCTV footage to make sure that you're not on it, or they get a large fine.
On the show he took a bunch of morris dancers to the town that has the most CCTV cameras per capita, and made them dance in front of the cameras for a few hours. Then he sent the council his 10pounds (thats the charge for this "service") and a letter and some photos of the morris dancers and asked for the copies of any footage. The council replied that they couldn't identify anyone in the videos, so he filed a complaint, and I think they got fined (but I don't remember).
He also had a competition running for whoever could make the best movie/short film only using footage from these CCTV cameras.
Many USians view on drugs & alcohol are that while they may or may not be intrinsically bad in a closed environment, in the real world they can and are major problems for those people who can't handle their chemicals. Are we supposed to allow blanket permission, and then when it fucks someone up (sometimes for life) tell them sorry & point them to rehab?
No, apparently it is better to tell them how evil they are, send them off to the tender care of the US's largest growth industry (the prison system) and let that fuck them up for life. Typical right wing bullshit. Take someone with a medical problem (addiction) and criminalize them. All the while building a new generation of prohibition billionaires.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Yeah, instead of commericals, PBS uses underwriting. At the start of every program, there's a message clearly identifying the underwriters of the program, often with a logo of some type. I've seen fairly drawn-out sequences on public television too--the Travelers' Insurance sequence that was (maybe still is) before the News Hour with Jim Leher.
If you think the underwriters have no effect on the editorial content of public television, think again. While I don't think it's usually as overt as the underwriter calling the station asking for a program to be pulled (although it has happened), a show without underwriters is unlikely to be made.
=======
Life is exciting, isn't it?
The DMCA--for corporations, the best copyright law money can buy.
Government surveillance makes Americans uncomfortable. I understand this is a cultural difference between Britain and America, and people can vary a great deal in the degree of personal discomfort surveillance causes. For that reason I don't expect that we could come to any agreement on this point.
The second concern, which really undergirds American's concerns, is political. It's the question of whether government can and should be entrusted with using this power impartially.
This is probably not within memory of most slashdotters, but here in the US, we have had examples of egregious abuses of government investigatory powers for political ends as recently the Nixon era. Of course, the Watergate break-in brought down Nixon, but in some ways the break in and the subsequent coverup were not the greatest of the Nixon adminsitration's crimes. In the same 1970 election, the Nixon Whitehouse ordered Internal Revenue Service investations to dig up dirt on George Wallace and his family.
The investigation found crimes by Wallace and his brother, but the administration announced it was not going to pursue the matter. Less than a day later, in a separate and ostensibly unrelated announcement, Wallace retracted plans to start a third political party to challenge Nixon for the presidency.
Wallace was a populist demagogue who had the potential to split the right wing vote and throw the election to the left. much more dangerous politically to Nixon than George McGovern (the Democratic candidate) was by himself. McGovern would have very likely been buried by Nixon without the aid of dirty tricks. Of course, Wallace might equally well have siphoned McGovern support from the then solidly Democratic South. Nixon made sure, very sure, that any possible political scenario leading to his defeat was squelched by blackmail, bribery, and if necessary burglary.
Your touchingly naive lionizing of Labor politicans leads me to suspect you might be a Tory in red clothing. But supposing you are who you purport to be, doesn't your parliamentary system with its numerous parties lend itself to even more to the temptation to misuse surveillance for political ends? It seems to me that under your system, sometimes only a soupçon of skullduggery may be enough to prevent your enemies from forming an effective coalition.
I don't mean to start a debate about the virtues or pitfalls of parliamentary democracy -- it certainly has both. I just want to point out that temptations exist in every system, and that in a parliamentary system you might not have to blackmail many people to throw control of the government one way or the other.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
what CC means on your TV isn't what it means in surveillance.
Can someone please explain to me why the hell I should care?
Sure. Read on.
First of all, if the goverment ever went bad (ie became undemocratic) then I don't think it would take them more than a week to set up whatever surveillance they wanted, no matter what their starting point.
Yep. This is why it is absolutely essential that the citizenry watch the government like hawks, to ensure the government doesn't go bad.
But that doesn't always work, either. Read on.
Maybe I'm being naive and ignoring history
You are.
but I find it hard to even consider this possibility because I just can't see how, in this time, in this part of the world, our goverment could be displaced or changed to something undemocratic
Check out recent history--very recent, actually. A lot of people forget this, or choose to ignore it, but the Weimar Republic of Germany had a well-educated public and a vigorous democratic tradition. However, in the 1930s this educated, literate public elected, by an overwhelming margin, Adolf Hitler to the position of Chancellor on a platform of racial hatred.
People knew he was going to turn Germany into a dictatorship. They didn't care. They liked what he was promising, and they liked having the Jews to blame for their current problems.
If you think that it can't happen in England, think again--it can happen anywhere. Even the United States, which in World War Two casually violated many of the most important precepts of our own Constitution in order to appease a citizenry which was panicking and demanding action. General DeWitt decided that sending all Japanese-Americans to detention centers would reassure the public, so he issued the order. Despite the fact that General DeWitt's order was blatantly, flagrantly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of the United States declared this to be legal in Korematsu v US.
Do you think the United States, the self-described bastion of liberty and freedom, actually gave a damn that we were violating our most sacrosanct principles?
We didn't.
In fact, we didn't give it a second thought.
If Weimar Germany can throw everything away and walk headlong into oblivion after an insane dictator bent on destroying his nation as he attempts world domination...
... If the United States can piss on its own highest law, merely to appease a panicking populace...
... then it can happen in England, too.
In a democracy, is it not true that the people are always right?
Was it right for seven million Jews, gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals and the like to be sent to the furnaces? After all, the people decided they wanted a leader who would decisively stand against the Jewish menace, who would eradicate the Jewish faith from Europe.
Short answer: of course it's not true.
The people are not always right. If they were right, Hitler wouldn't have been elected, nor would have Neville Chamberlain, nor would Korematsu v US have been decided the way it was.
As was pointed out in the movie Men in Black, a person is intelligent, compassionate, open-minded and often brilliant. But put ten of these persons together and what you get is people--a panicky, irrational, closed-minded animal.
Democracy is not built on the principle that "the people are always right". Democracy is build on the principle that "what the people want, they ought to get--and they ought get it good and hard!"
So there's some absolute notion of what is right and the people sometimes get it wrong?
At this point, you're just trolling. Stupidly, too, might I add.
The majority does not decide right and wrong. They decide what to do, and the right or wrong is decided by history.
Grow up.
Most devices that tune in some kind of radio signal throw off at least a local-oscillator signal (typically 455 kHz for AM radio, 10.7 MHz for FM...don't know what TV uses) that could be picked up from a short distance. TVs also have sawtooth oscillators that produce the horizontal and vertical scanning. These run at 60 Hz for vertical and 15.75 kHz for horizontal (these numbers are for NTSC as implemented in North America; they will vary elsewhere). If a van rolled up, pointed an antenna in your TV's general direction, and picked up the appropriate combination of frequencies, it would be a reasonable assumption on their part that you have a TV running.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
If this is a real issue -- the public has a right to fight it. Couldn't a laser pointer/something more powerful really damage a camera? There has to be a way to damage them -- and if the public has an outcry and fights them, they will go away. I think the _real_ issue is the public WANTS them!
Uh oh, someone else who's been watching too many American films. The British did indeed crack Enigma. The US however were a little slow to take up how useful this was and repeatedly ignored Enigma decodes loosing a lot of shipping to German U boats as a result. I sugest you do a review of your WWII history :-p
I prefer the tax to the adverts :-)
All I can remember is that the ship supporting the operation was the HMS Bulldog :-) I seem to remember that it happened before the US got round to joining in with the war, but I cant be sure.
Actualy I think you'll find they had the basics worked out by the time they got hold of one of the enigma machines... before that only a small number of messages could be decoded, and they took a long time.
And? I still dont see the problem. The only people who have anything to fear from these systems is the criminals, and I fail to see how that can be a bad thing.
Most potential attackers wouldn't carry out the crime in view of the cameras, and if they do it is quite likely that they will find themselves arrested within a week thus preventing them from attacking anyone else.
I made a point of saying that our society is not crime ridden. CCTV cameras play quite a big part in reducing crime rate in areas that do have a crime problem, and make areas that dont have a crime problem even safer for the non-criminals.
In these days of the internet it is very difficult for any government to hide it's actions from it's people by banning publication of those actions.
As we have easy access to news published outside the UK it would be an easy task to see what news (if any) is being hidden from us, and I cant think of any cases for a very long time that would cause me to distrust the government enough to make me suspect that they would be using CCTV to spy on me or for corporate purposes.
I wouldnt give a damn if MI5 kept a file on me thinking I was a threat to national security. It's only a problem for me when they show up and arrest me for being a threat (which in the case of the examples you gave, they didnt).
I'd prefer them to keep files on too many people, than to not keep files on the people that are truely a threat.
Ah, but we dont have to suffer adverts on the BBC TV chans, or radio stations. After seeing how American cable TV is I'm damn glad we pay not to suffer things like that.
I have heard several arguements like this before, and from reading the comments I see that a lot of people belive that CCTV is evil (or something like that).
:-p
CCTV is not some massive invasion of privicy. I cant walk down to my local pub without being 'seen' by the CCTV systems, but lets face it, do I care if Dave at GCHQ knows I've gone down the pub? Personaly I rather like the fact that the two guys that then jump me for my cash also get caught on camera. Dont take this as meaning Britain has a massive crime rate, because it doesnt, I've never been mugged and I suspect this is partly down to CCTV as mugging someone in front of a camera is hardly a great idea.
If the cameras were pointed into your house, or fitted in your bathroom I could see the problem, but they're not. They're in public places covering parks, major shopping areas, etc, not often do you see them in residential areas unless the area has a crime problem.
Much of the security network that's in place is due to the problem the UK has with the IRA. When a terrorist group spends most of it's free time blowing up chunks of your major cities you tend to get a little parrinoid about it. Anywhere that is likely to be bombed is covered with CCTV equiptment. Anyone who's been to London may have noticed the lack of any litter bins on the London Underground, they've all been removed as they were too easy a place to put bombs.
I'd far rather the police know I go to the Elm Tree for 3 pints of bitter every Thursday, have an email address for my dog and make mobile phone calls to people less than 2 metres away from me, than to find myself vapourised when a terrorist group decides my road would look nicer as a crater and no one notices them [plan to] leave a large quantity of Semtex lying arround.
If I'm not making much sense I appologise, it's 0200 and I've had a hard day
>
> What? No cameras at home?
You're right. We need to bust a few innocents like this. Only then will our subjects will beg for cameras in the home - to prove their innocence - like the masocthis begs for the whip.
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The fair, brotherly cops and respectable politicians are the source of enough institutional racism that the UN is getting involved. Your government has investigated the cops and found them guilty of pervasive racial bias. Heck, your own officers don't even believe that their fellow cops are fair or brotherly.
So you give a couple of links the the Steven Laurence case - one case in the last 6 years where the police made a poor job of an investigation - and in this country there was then massive public outcry, and an investigation was held, and changes are being made.While at the same time there are riots in the US, because your cops are going around shooting black kids themselves. I really don't understand what you hope to prove by bringing this up.
What were you trying to prove? That our police force isn't perfect? - well at least it is making a serious effort to improve.
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BTW, the rate of church attendance is more like 44% in the US and 27% in the UK. The University of Michigan has one of the most respected social sciences/statistics departments in the world, so please don't come back here claiming otherwise.
I do not know why the cultural differances exist, so I'm not defending the original claim that this is due to religious differences.-
And as far as New Labour and the "Third Way" being responsive to the people... well, it's about as believable as hearing the same thing from Clinton. It is true that the British government isn't bought and sold as brazenly as ours is, but it is just as responsive as any other government when dollars (or pounds, as the case may be) are at issue. When those businesses want to start invading your privacy more brazenly, you can be sure that MI5 will be there to help out.
So... Our govenment ain't perfect. Neither is yours. But this isn't the point.The point of the original post is just that this all comes down to cultural differences.
What does this mean?
Like I said in another post:
- I am english, and I believe in gun control. If I had been brought up in the states I would probably believe in the right to bear arms. But I wasn't so I don't.
It's just a cultural difference. Most people on slashdot seem to believe in the right to bear arms. If you are one of them - ask yourself this: The majority of the UK population believe in gun-control - are you really arrogant enough to believe that you must be objectively right and that all these people must just be wrong?This is not about black and white, one country being right and one country being wrong. You chose to live in a country where you have the right to own a gun and walk down the street without being watched by CCTV cameras, and most US citizens seem agree with you. I choose to live in a country where there is a lower rate of gun-violence, and where I feel that the streets are safer in cities at night, and most UK subjects would seem to prefer this.
The original poster was not trolling - just pointing out this cultural difference.
G.
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Ahh the police aren't watching you, so its ok then? It a contraced private company so that's better? I think that it's worse esp, since now you have a company that isn't even marginally beholden to the public like the goverment is.
Whoa - this paranoia is going to kill you, I'd hate to have your blood preasure. Now lets slowly put down the crack pipe and talk about this rationally.CCTV was fitted in an area I used to live in. Not a high crime area - cameras were really fitted for the peace of mind of the elderly (who made up a large slice of the population), but street violence was halved over the first year. The cameras were paid for and fitted by the local council. A friend of a friend was hired as an operator - a bored 17year old kid, working for minimum wage (well, this is before a minimum wage was enforced, but you get the idea). He would go along and sit there, bored out of his little mind, twiddling the joysticks or reading a magazine, just sitting it out. He said that there were only staff rostered to man the cameras half of the time, due to costs.
Okay, so the guys as CESG monitor our comunications. So what? The guys at NSA are monitoring yours - it's all the same thing. Be serious - beyond echelon, there is no great government conspiracy - and the man-hours it would take to spy on the general population with these cameras would be a poor way for the spooks to spend their time.
- The right not to have the police following you around all the time, waiting for you so commite some crime so they can arrest you.
First of all, the police are not watching you - for the simple reason that it would cost too much. Councils contract private security companies to staff CCTV systems, since the police are already over streached - and the CCTV operators will only bother calling the police if they see a crime in progress.Secondly, some people do want to be watched. For example, I heard of a pilot scheme in one city in the UK, where there is a phone number that a single woman walking home alone at night can ring. She can leave her description, a time, and roughly what route she will be following. Now, rather than walking home alone in the dark afraid of being attacked, every time she turns a corner she will be greeted by the sight of a CCTV camera turning to focus in on her. Having a big brother to watch over you is not always a bad thing.
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used or posesed any illegal drugs
To quote the subject at the top of this thread, "CCTV is a reflection of cultural differences." Please bear in mind, that in this country, if you are caught smuggling 5 grams of pot into the country it is assumed to be for personal use and you will be given a £70 on the spot fine. Compare that to the US view on drugs smuggling. Cultural differences.- Don't you ever watch any Mark Thomas?
Note for non-Brits:Mark Thomas is a politically motivated comedian-slash-borderline-terrorist (that's meant as a compliment) and probably one of the biggest pains in the government's ass.
One thing that he had great fun playing with in his recent series, (not what prev. poster was talking about, but relevant to CCTV), was the Data Protection Act.
This is a wonderful piece of UK legislation, which allows you to demand any company/organization which holds information about you to give you a copy (with certain exclusions ie some government agencies). So you can walk into MacDonalds, fill out a form while you eat your burger, giving the time, date, a description of yourself, the clothes you are wearing, etc, then hand it in before you leave forcing them to send you a copy of the footage of you sitting there filling out the form.
This is all wonderfully silly.
You are a perfect British subject. You have swallowed the official propoganda line and accepted it without question.
Just about everybody else in the world questions this kind of intrusion, but not you, and obviously not very many other British subjects.
Note, I use the word subject and not citizen because a citizen has rights. You gave yours up long ago.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Although TV detector vans are the most obvious way of catching people, the real work is done by computers. They have a bloody big database containing every street address in the UK, and they subtract from this the data from licenses sold. The remainder are households that don't have a license. Since TV ownership is almost universal, almost all of these households will be license evaders.
CCTV stands for "Closed-Circuit TV", not "closed caption." It means the signal is generally carried by wire to a monitor or video switcher (although sometimes sent via short-range broadcast), where it is viewed by a Watcher (rent-a-cop etc.)
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
It's simple, they don't get the chance to do this.
Hello, I own a small technology firm creating custom software solutions. I am hereby announcing that I will not open a UK office (though I am currently in two countries) and have decided, based exclusively on your horribly degrading privacy policies, to not do business with the UK currently or in future.
The people actually *in* the UK can't boycott the UK.
DB
PS, I mean it about not doing business there.
Ummm... I create custom software for companies, you know, workflow apps, maybe a web application. No privacy infringement necessary for me to make my mortgage payment. In fact, one of the reasons I no longer work for the last company I was employed at was that one of the VPs was a bit too eager to have me break into other employees mailboxes. The stupid idiots hadn't even cleared the low hurdle that US law provides so I wouldn't do it except for one case where they suspected theft from a branch that was losing money hand over fist.
As for France, why do you think that I would like my government idiocy in even bigger doses?
DB
Since privacy has been eroded under both Tory and Labour governments, it's a bit pointless to choose between them on privacy grounds. Or are you one of the few, the clueless, the Liberal Democrats?
DB
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Your argument would hold water if the cameras were being placed in peoples homes, or something outrageous like that. But they aren't.
Being videotaped in public gives people information which is private. By putting it in the database they can correlate where I go Saturday nights, when I leave, what I take with me, where I stop to buy champagne for a private party.
There is no reason to have cameras on streets or driveways. There is nothing to steal on the street. Hey, criminal put that burnt out cigarette back on the ground it's not yours.
In fact, with a camera on MY driveway, the information on it should BE mine.
With cameras on streets, the information should belong to that neighborhood.
There is aboslutely no reason for centralization of all the information.
--What will you do when your next generation sees --them as normal as furniture. And the next have --no innate fear of them and completely ignore --them?
-That is the situation now. CCTV cameras have been -used here for years, to great effect.
You didn't understand my question. What will you do when your next generation doesn't give a damn about the cameras and starts commiting crimes in broad daylight. Chaos is a matter of power. If people don't care anymore your police will helpless to stop them.
The system even has a computer face recognition system that can highlight known criminals and also pinpoint suspicious behaviours completely autonimously. This saves manpower and cuts crime.
As long as criminals give a damn.
Saving manpower is a savings in conscience. Conscience cannot exist without awareness. There's a difference between having a cop watch you and having a cop watching a camera. You can talk to the cop. The camera will not relay your message nor its potential to cause people to reconsider their actions.
CCTV cameras are welcomed by the populace.
And? Oh I'm sorry is there something else you had to say about this? Oh you didn't I see...
I arrest my case.
It has been quietly and successfully used here for many years now.
Why quietly? What are you afraid of? Criticism?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
No, I swear I have never been caught trolling on CCTV.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The argument would be irrelevant not redundant you troll. But just for the fun of it I'll respond.
Two truths in symmetry:
There can be no ownership without freedom (DeCCS/DVD is a perfect exaple.)
Likewise there can be no freedom without ownership. Jack Valenti himself stated that privacy is a matter of property.
It's why people own land. Did they make the land? No
The liberty to be alone is what is missing. If you cannot be alone you have no safety nor freedom to speak of.
Tell me what is the difference between a prison and the outside world if you're always watched?
What is the difference between a prisoner with a tracking bracelet and cameras everywhere?
Why bother maintaining pride, integrity, and character if your life is to be constantly judged at all times according to the stinking broth of the collective court of pubic opinion?
If steal something in front of cameras available everywhere am I truly caught or am I just going to be given a different place to continue stealing?
Remember society is recycled every 30 years (the average population doubling rate).
You claim Americans see the cameras as being foreign and unusual. I claim you see them as being external as well though in a positive light.
What will you do when your next generation sees them as normal as furniture. And the next have no innate fear of them and completely ignore them?
Sir Churchill would be disgusted I'm quite sure of it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Closed captioned?
Closed circuit!
Someone been watching too many tv programs closed captioned for the thinking impaired?
Make sure that we can watch our leaders and police as easily as they can watch us.
And this is, I think, the key point. Even with my rabid distrust of any government, I would be willing to at least consider allowing such surveillance if my government had to be under my constant surveillance as well.
Unfortunately, that's not how it will ever work. Like every other conversation about government and the governed, it is a basic matter of balance of power. The side that has the greater ability to gather information has more power than the other side and will never willingly give up that advantage. And as far as I know, it has never been the case that citizens in any country have won out in this balance of power, so we are always talking about government surveillance of citizens, not the other way around.
It would be a happy day if we were discussing the constant erosion of some government's operational privacy.
Yes!!!
But since the Korporations now own our gubbamint here in the good ol' Korporate States of Amerika, served by their Republikan butt-servants, the Kompassionate Konservative Koalition (Keystone Kops Klavern), here in KorpAmerika, we'll never see it. Of course, data that refers to us and can damage our privacy and rights (including our right to life!) doesn't belong to us, the sheeple of the KSA!!! That's only fair. Corporations are MUCH more trustworthy than gubbamint...besides, they can sell the data to the gubbamint and make a tidy profit, never worrying or being responsible for the accuracy of the data!!!!
*sigh* at least we can be happy God and Jesus (and LRH!) are on our side!!! and that one day, everyone in the world will live under our glorious rule!!!
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
...OUR resident curmudgeon.
More info at: http://www.dogeatdogfilms.com/middlepage.html
Sounds like something Mike would do for one of HIS TV shows...
I still want the DPA here in the KSA...at least it would be a start!
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
No government is all-wise and simon pure.
Nobody ever said they were (insert rant about New Labour here). However, here in England we have what is commonly called a democracy. This means that, once a week, elected people from all over the country come to shout at the current government about what they're doing wrong.
Let me just elaborate on this: The government are ordinary citizens. They are kept in check by Members of Parliament, who are also ordinary citizens. Your severe checks are there. They have been for several hundred years in this country.
I see citizens of supposedly democratic nations sitting idly by and letting their governments usurp powers they should not have
The government represents the people. The government has power to do all that they want, but that is kept in check by the people, through their elected representatives. I trust the goverment, because I know I can make it known to them that what they're doing isn't correct.
This may sound a little alien to those in America, where, as far as I can tell, the president is decided by the alignment of the planet Jupiter with the full moon on the 23rd day of the month (no, seriously, the Electoral College system is hardly what you might call fair. One person's vote in one state counts twice as much as one person's vote in another state).
The point I'm trying to make is: In England, democracy works. We trust our government. If the people collectively don't like the government, we can change it for a new one at a fair, free, and, above all democratic election. We don't fear invasion of our privacy, because we know that, if our privacy is invaded too far, the government will rectify it, or they will lose their power.
the liberty to *not*get*caught*
:-)
The thing is, gov't doesn't go bad all of a sudden. It does so gradually. Citizens slowly, over time, give up their rights and their privacy is eroded. A hundred years down the road the gov't is bad even though it never "suddenly went bad".
You have to guard your rights jealously and watch the gov't like a hawk. It's not paranoia, just lessons from history. Liberty leads to prosperity, but prosperity leads to complacency, and complacency leads back to bondage.
I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.
Constitutionally Correct
Government: If it's powerful to give you everything you need, it's powerful enough to take everything you got.
The question shouldn't be, "How much good will this law do if used properly?" It ought to be, "How much bad will this law do if abused?"
I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.
Constitutionally Correct
Yeah, I know there was a smiley there, but then again some dweeb moderated it as "Insightful".
If you're a wanted criminal and they catch you as a result of seeing your mug on CCTV, good. If you're committing a crime and you get videotaped doing it, and locked up as a result, good. Fact is, when you break a law you're giving up your liberty under the system that enforces those laws.
Before you say anything about silly laws - they can't use the CCTV system to bust you for having a stash of MP3's or warez'd games unless they point the camera in your room, which they don't. Obviously the crimes that this deters (And gets people caught for) are clear-cut crimes such as assault, vandalism, theft, etc.
And if, by chance, this system DOES get you busted for a bad law, one (for example) pushed through by moneyhungry corps, then it's a whole other discussion about why those laws shouldn't exist in the 1st place.
---
It's like having a subscription to the Playboy channel and bitching about the subscription charges being like tax... nobody is forcing you to pay for porn, it's your choice.
Kinda, except that you can't choose to watch only commercial TV and not pay the license fee. I still don't understand the logic behind that.
Only someone with something to hide would act like that...Step up the surveillance everyone,I think we're onto something!!!
Oh shit, he didn't do anything. Who cares that they were watching?
Whoops, I'm responding to a 10yr old who's never read a newspaper, seen a documentary, or read a history book with the words POWER and CORRUPT in them, let alone experianced them first hand...gawd
Not quite right on the age, but I don't know how you can distrust the goverment completely. If power corrupts then surely their should be no power. So you're an anarchist?
In this country that is plenty for a conviction.
Of course, IANAL but I simply do not believe that is true in this country, which is I suppose the root of the disagreement. That's all circumstantial evidence which would help the cops to narrow down the suspects, which is the whole point. If that is enough to secure a convinction in your country (I'm assuming the US) then I think the problem is in your criminal justice system and demanding more privacy is the wrong way of attacking it.
PS Thanks for the not-trolling assumption, I was a bit worried about being labelled that :-)
Yes, Germany did elect Hitler, democracy in action. In a democracy, is it not true that the people are always right? As that interesting k5 article was saying the other day, reality is defined by what people believe. It's not the best example (because Hitler went and started invading everybody in sight) but is the resulting war against Hitler not a further expression of democracy?
There is an interesting point raised by your ellectoral college, suposedly protecting against "the tyranny of the people". Maybe I'm missing something, but how can you have a tyrannous majority?
The people actually *in* the UK can't boycott the UK.
Sure we can, we have elections too you know. It's not that the government is getting away with something here, as discussed elsewhere, it seems that we're just not opposed to it.
You have to PAY,then FAIL a test in order to recieve idiot-box propoganda...
Sigh.... It's called a joke dude, there isn't really a test.
The people are not always right. If they were right, Hitler wouldn't have been elected, nor would have Neville Chamberlain, nor would Korematsu v US have been decided the way it was.
So there's some absolute notion of what is right and the people sometimes get it wrong? Who gets to decide what is right and what isn't? The answer is that the majority decide, hence democracy.
At this point, you're just trolling. Stupidly, too, might I add.
Actually, I'm not, so I won't take that as an insult.
The majority does not decide right and wrong. They decide what to do, and the right or wrong is decided by history.
"History", as you use the word, is just the accepted view of the majority at some point in time after the event.
Okay, I admit it, I'm a dumb Brit who finds security cameras mildly re-assuring. I don't care if I'm being watched or that the goverment can read my e-mail. Can someone please explain to me why the hell I should care?
The primary arguments for privacy seem to be that if the goverment went bad all of a sudden we'd be fucked and that I could be accused of some crime I didn't commit. First of all, if the goverment ever went bad (ie became undemocratic) then I don't think it would take them more than a week to set up whatever surveillance they wanted, no matter what their starting point. Maybe I'm being naive and ignoring history, but I find it hard to even consider this possibility because I just can't see how, in this time, in this part of the world, our goverment could be displaced or changed to something undemocratic. Secondly, I trust in the legal system. If I am ever wrongly accused then I trust in the courts to decide that I'm not guilty. There are, of course, miscarriages of justice, but it seems to me that the fact of the surveillance would not make any difference to the number of times this occured (except that it could instantly disprove many accusations). I think that the issue of privacy also brings up the question "should we break the law if we disagree with it" which is I think an interesting question, and one which I admit, has been bothering me for a while now.
Of course, it seems that in this forum, I'm in a distinct minority in holding these views, and I just don't understand why. Why is it that politicians let these things happen if they're so bad? So please, dispute my points, because I've looked and I still don't feel I've read a persuasive argument about this.
The UK consists of 4 jurisdictions:
England
Scotland
Wales
Northern Ireland
The Anglican Church (Church Of England) is the established church (ie 'state religion') in England
The Church Of Scotland (Presbyterian) is the established church in Scotland
In both Ireland (as it then was before the secession of the Irish Free State - now the Irish Republic) and Wales there are no established churches. The local episcopalian churches (sisters of the Church of England) were disestablished (late 1800s in Ireland, early 1900s in Wales) due to the fact that the majority of the local populations were not members of the established churches.
http://scottish.politicaldiscussion.org
Sorry, there is an established church in the Irish Republic - the Catholic Church - but for 20 odd years before Ireland seceeded there was no established church - bad editing...
http://scottish.politicaldiscussion.org
Just think, now parents in Britain with sons in MI5 and MI6 can tell their little kids that "Big Brother is watching you!"
Wow! Just amazing...
What to highlight:
It is Old Testament values and paranoia (America) versus modern rationalism (Britain).
And this drivel deserves 5/insightfull rating?
Thanks for the clarification. No jest.
I'm realy enjoying this now. You're almost funny.
There have never been slaves on British soil.
That right! It's much cheaper to abuse the poor bastards right in their own bloody lands. And cleaner, too.
Now I was convinced that it was the socialists doing the dirty deed. The original poster seems to have an amazing ability to attract support from many quarters. Very educational.
I decided to get rid of the TV instead of paying.
Life without TV is so much more fulfilling.
Try it for a couple of months -
I didn't think I could stick it
-----
But with us, they just made a random visit, saw the TV and asked us for our license which we didn't have.
The fine would be a £1000 but we're poor students so we just get away with a warning first time.
-----
What a dumbass. We view our government with fear because of our founding fathers' experience with kings and tyrants in Europe. They knew that power corrupts and they set out to form a government that held abusive power in check. Thus we have a separation of powers in the US, each designed to hold the other accountable.
It's not our own American history we fear. We fear and keep in check human nature's tendency to abuse power once it is gained.
> The communications of UK citizens can now be
> trawled by GCHQ to investigate any "large number
> of persons in pursuit of a common purpose"
I wonder if they got bored yet of reading the email thats been going round over here (in the UK) telling people to put their religeon down as Jedi on the census.
(i know the link is about NZ, but its the same thing - except we cant be fined for incorrectly answering the question about religeon as it says so on the form)
I was just talking about the TV license thing with friend today. As if it didnt seem stupid enough to have a license for a TV.. people who are blind get about 10% off their license and people with black an white TVs get about 70% off. I dont remember the exact values, but thats _almost_ right afaik.
I really don't think this is too big of a deal in many ways; the difference here seems to be that there is one large, centralized network of cameras. This in contrast to each department store, library, convenience store, etc having their own seperate camera system.
Were it a buisiness handling such a centralized system of surveylence, I would be terrified; the information would be sold to anybody ready to offer a few monetary units.
With a government controlling such a system, it is slightly less fearful, as the government usually doesn't exist to skin their citizens and take all their money; but rather to serve the people that it governs.
Americans are typically very distrustful of their government; I have not yet heard of an English or German version of the 'X-Files' (of course, I do have my head at a terminal, and not TV). Americans tend to not want anybody to know anything about them - unless they give their express permission.
Americans can be so paranoid as to believe that there is a secret hegemony that is really running things, and a similar camera system has been built into each TV for over 50 years. And the U.S. Government, which has been incapable of keeping nuclear secrets from China, hiding various political scandals, and of keeping units and measures straight (US/Imperial vs Metrics), is capable of hiding a conspiracy involving beings from another world.
The fact that most of these stories involve being heavily intoxicated before abduction, and forced human procreative activities during their absence seem to be more an excuse for sleeping with somebody when they were drunk.
From an American point of view, such a camera system is *Proof* that the government is 'out to get you'. Even if the benefits clearly outweigh the costs, there will always be mistrust and protests agsinst government survelience of any kind.
Personally, I've lived in a city where there are cameras everywhere - about every 50 m on each side of the street. I never found it bothersome in any way. Sure, a bored police officer can say 'hey, that man bought a Pepsi instead of his usual Coke!' - So what? If a corporation were to get hold of that data - say PepsiCo, then I would surely receive email/postal mail about Pepsi, and some ad executive would acclaim that the ad campaign must be working.
But it's called 'Generation Y' for a reason - the generation has seen so many advertisements before they leave elementary school- let alone are gainfully employed, that ads are always treated as a corporate boast.
With a government-operated system, the raw amount of data is so huge that it could take days before a criminal could be spotted and tracked to a particular location.
Facial recognition is currently poor at best: Why do you think high-security situations use fingerprint-scans or retinal scans -- even in an area that facial scan would prove sufficient? It's because facial recognition isn't that great.
Even handwriting recognition is only 95% accurate - and that is with a somewhat limited set of variability. But the human face? Waaay too much to process; it might work somewhat well if the search was limited to each state's 'most wanted' list, but would be an utter failure to track individual citizens.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Oh please. Have you ever read the US Constitution? For those in slashdot audience who have not: It is interesting to note that the wording of the Constitution and Bill of Rights always focuses on limitations placed on GOVERNMENT but not PEOPLE. The whole reason for this is that the framers of the US Constitution realized that power corrupts-- even the best people are at risk. You can't expect me to believe that you trust all your elected officials to do what is right 100% of the time. It is human nature to do what is in one's best interest. That's why it's necessary for the population at large to give leaders a little zap with the cattleprod once in a while. Lest they forget whose interests they protect.
The framers recognized this need and the US Constitution goes to great lengths to protect the right to keep the government in check. I would agree with you that this may indeed be a cultural difference. But if every citizen of the UK has your blind faith that government can be left to its own devices, the whole country gets a "+5 Troll" rating as far as I'm concerned.
The reason we pay a TV license is so that we don't have to suffer shitty adverts and crap quailty programs like you do on other Channels.
I myself am very happy with it. 110quid for 12 months is not much for the two best channels there are (BBC1 and BBC2)
Is this like for people who don't know how to click on a web link?
Well it ain't our fault you were too arrogant to use enigma codes that we gave you, hell we even gave you ones that would of helped prevent Pearl Harbour. But no you didn't need them. Opps
It's the RIP bill introduced by Jack "Police State" Straw. This bill is what we in the UK should be scared of, not the CCTV cameras that invade out public lives.
If you don't know what the RIP bill is then read the article, it is the biggest invasion of our privacy there has ever been.
Okay, they don't have any equipment in the vans: they're just there to be visible, and to scare people. How would you localise a signal from a back bedroom in a block of flats, anyway?
When you buy or rent any kind of TV signal demodulating equipment - TV, video, TV Card - you have to give your name and address to the retailer. They then pass on that info to the TLA, who trawl through it periodically, comparing it with their own records of who's bought a license. To reiterate, the vans don't do anything!
About the U.S. drinking age - didn't Blair recent make some moves to make it harder for teens to drink? Right before his son was caught drinking?
I agree with quite a bit of this letter - these cams are not a big deal. And American needs gun control (more like Japan, not England). But the U.S. government is the world model for freedom and democracy. This was sheer idiocy.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Ok so you sign up for a license when you buy a tv or anything capable of receiving tv signals (tv card). What about if you buy a tv second hand, or find one sitting out for the garbage? What if you were to buy parts and build a tv from scratch?
Sorry but stuff like that has always bothered me.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Its nice to know that two guys will be watching you bleed to death while the attack(ers) are getting away.
, 17 41225%255E1702,00.html
If your society is so crime ridden that the only solution is constant surveilence then you have deeper issues to work out. Heres a link stolen from another post showing just how well these cameras seem to be working
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Congratulations on learning to speak. Perhaps one day you will learn a few other words as well.
From what I can figure out (see the quote below),
from http://www.hmso.gov.uk
Statutory Instrument 1991 No. 436
The Wireless Telegraphy (Television Licence Fees) Regulations 1991
2. The following class or description of television receiving apparatus is hereby specified for the purposes of the definition of "television receiver" in the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949[5], namely such apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving television programme services, as defined by section 2(4) of the Broadcasting Act 1990, whether or not the apparatus is installed or used for other purposes.
What, me worry?
What can we nerds do to reduce our exposure to this problem?
To take my own case:
So come one guys. Get a grip and address the real technical issues!
Oh, and regarding the USA and UK? All I can say is that if I could learn the language I'd move to Finland and go dogsledding every weekend :-)
CCTV = Closed CIRCUIT TV, not Closed CAPTIONED TV....
CCTV = Closed Circuit Television.
Please do not get confused. Closed Captioned is for the hearing impaired. Closed Circuit is for specific people on the circuit.
witty sig goes here
I don't consider any channel that spends 10 to 15 minutes out of every hour showing people saying "Send us money" to be 'commercial free'.
--
Dyolf Knip
Really, the last thing I want or need is to be protected from myself, least of all by a government to whom I am just a number and a source of income. I mean, how is it I'm allowed to drink my liver into oblivion, smoke cigarettes until my lungs have more asphalt in them than the road outside, or throw myself out of an airplane and hope the parachute works right, but getting a buzz from a joint is just too dangerous to me? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, made even more stupid by the fact that it's the reality I have to live in.
--
Dyolf Knip
Last time I checked, CCTV stood for Closed Circuit TeleVision..... Unless these people have hearing issues....
actually, U571 aside, the Brits were primarily responsible for cracking the enigma code. So, it's not self-promotion, it's just a statement of fact.
Yes they did have help, but most of the work was done by the Brits.
Incidentally, I think that snatching of the enigma machine that was loosely portrayed in U571, was actually done by a Canadian. (Thought I think he was under British command at the time). Anyone know for sure?
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
I am a real limey. Proud dual citizen.
Although apparently I need to get a bigger antena. I also live in the Okanagan, but I've only been able to get CHBC (which is modified CBC for people who don't know). Could be something to do with being up against the mountains in Glenrosa. Thanks for the info though, I'll try a bigger antena the next time I get ticked with shaw and cancel my cable service.
Thanks.
btw- I don't agree with the British system, but someone asked. But there are better explanations up now, so read one of those.
...
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
15 gazillion cameras in the city of London, and when my work laptop got stolen at London Charing Cross train station last week, I immediately went to the help desk thing, waited for the guy to get through to the cops, only to be told that if one turned up, they'd give me a call. WHAT THE HELL?
I have zero privacy while waiting for a train, but nobody gives a crap enough to check the goddamn tapes?
What's the use of giving up rights for temporary security when you don't get any goddamned temporary security?!?!?!?!
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
-Nev
I know... you've got the wolf by the ears, so to speak, and I sympathize. Apparently the decades of highly educated politicians and academics (whom you trust so well) have missed what a six-year-old child understands...
...it's wrong to steal.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Yes, I suspect that my perspective comes from being in a country that recognized some of the excesses of power, as wielded by the British over its colonists, as an evil.
I do not extrapolate from the TV license issue, I rather interpolate from Echelon. The article in question is broader in scope than that, and I am asking you if Echelon sits as well with you as CCTV and other invasions of privacy.
Is it true or not that simply not having a TV is tantamount to allowing the police to search your premises, a search warrant being a mere formality, as was suggested in the article, and does That sit well with you?
I understand that CCTV makes You feel better, but do you have any empathy for those for whom it is a source of harrassment, or do you believe that it is not used to spy on 'suspected' criminals before they commit a crime?
Orwell painted a picture of the Englishman as someone for whom party loyalty superseded love, even. Do you think there was perhaps a basis in fact for this? I understand that fifty years ago there was a war going on, but now that there is no war, I find less of a need for the abrogation of social contracts between the government and its people. But you remain loyal.
I only visited Manchester (and Cumberton / Sellafield, beautiful country, by the way) once, but I didn't see much evidence of cultural diversity in the streets of elsewhere, i.e., I saw 95% white people.
I contend that you would feel much safer if your Parliament conceded to some of the Irish demands for Home Rule; there was a glimmer of hope there for a time, but that seems to have died. I suspect that many in law enforcement use the 'Irish Problem' as a rationale for bigger and better weapons, spy gadgets, and techniques. I understand it's a big problem, but suggest that there are other approaches; ones that respect universal human dignity and rights.
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Oh, no, please don't get me wrong. I am not arbitrarily anti-British, and I suspect that we would tend to agree more than disagree about this.
I actually respect the English for many of their accomplishments, and, who knows but that the trust the citizens put into their govt isn't something to be applauded for the most part. But no one should defend internal spying as a general principle; it is too dangerous.
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I agree, US citizens are not free anymore, since about the 60's revolutions, possibly before then. You will notice that I don't defend Carnivore, and I agree that the cops in this country are way too powerful, but I think you miss my point. My question had to do with why the Brits put up with all that, and actually seem to rationalize it as a service to their government.
As far as your last sentence, feel free to be offended. I will admit I got a little hot under the collar while typing the post, but it was in reaction to the parent post which was a little condescending. I maintain that I am not wittingly a racist, and I also struggle to be non-hypocritical. But ad hominem attacks are weak arguments in any case.
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I must ask you, since you are obviously an apologist for the TLA system, and by linear extrapolation, an apologist for Echelon, CCTV, the loss of the ability to protect the citizen from governmental intrusion into their privacy.
Why do you think these policies are good? Do you really believe - as I assume such a highly-homogenetic society must of needs become xenophobic to a degree - that people who are not exactly like you are (British) Should be watched carefully?
Because, as you know, your elected officials use this system to spy on their people for no reason at all other than they are not proper British citizens, i.e., if they are Irish they are members of the IRA, so they get spied on, if they are of Middle Eastern descent they may be terrorists so they will get spied upon, if they have long hair or go-go boots they are likely drug dealers and so they get the Big Eye.
Orwell was a Brit. I would prefer that you folks just lionize the hell out of him for what he was: a man who ushered in the glorious world of today with all its wonderful spy gadgets that keep Mum and Dad safe at night, rather than a prophet of Doom, which you all should have taken him for. You Brits act like you all prefer it that way. You talk about how you can trust your government, unlike us Yanks, but I contend that that is only because your government hasn't come after you like ours goes after minorities, or Abbie Hoffman, etc.... And that is because you are all one race, and no other reason.
Don't you see that you are to become un-free? Already you are not free to do what you like, because it will leave you exposed and vulnerable to the long arm of the Bobbie. Oh yeah, but you don't carry guns so you are better than us Yanks.
Please try to see what the general implications of all this internal spying are, and then, do write back, old chum, and tell me why it is that all this sits easily on your mind.
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These camera's aren't focused inside peoples apartments and such, rather they are watching streets and sidewalks. Last time i checked these were public areas. People don't get angry when they see someone walking on "their" sidewalk. If you're not doing anything wrong then why are you so afraid of them? What rights are they taking away if it's a public area?
While it may be true that 70% of Americans go to church a week how many go just because their parents did? Many go to churches that are suited for them so that they can get their "religion" as fast as they can and then feel like they're Christans. These people aren't really religious, they just go because they think that they can go to church once a week and live a completly different life. People who i go to school with talk about how they went to church and then they got wasted later that night and had sex with someone they didn't know. Also i dispute the fact that 70% of Americans go to church once a week. Today our church was almost filled with around 500, it is usually 350. This happens at most churches in America during Christmas and Easter. Also a large percentage don't even go to Church on those days. No one on my mothers side of the family has went to church in the past 15 years. Many people that i know don't go to church or just go twice a year. What about the other religions? Probably 70% of Americans don't go to church on a weekly basis and a large number of the ones that do go don't take it seriously. Many liberal churches don't even belive most of the bible but they were probably included as being a "church." I would like you to reply with where you found this information as it seems a bit sketchy to me. I belive the British numbers as i have heard first hand accounts of the large percentage that don't go. I would rather have the true Christians rather than have ones that just want to fake it so that they feel okay.
Actually, in the UK, you have to be 18 to drink. And the Nazi memorabilia ban is France. But, of course, you knew that really, because we all know how well the average US citizen knows the world at large...
No, it's just as scary, you just don't realize it.
Just remember, these cameras are not used to spy, and never will be.
And you know this because.......
Two Polish mathematicians managed to optimise the process to make it workable (namely the 2-dimensional searching techniques). The principles were born in an English brain, but the English weren't too proud to accept improvements.
FP.
--
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
But the weirdest thing of all is that we really don't care. To take an example that may sound trivial but isn't, the Television Licensing Authority is currently running an advertising campaign boasting of its ability to invade our privacy. Hoardings show a local street sign with the caption that declares, four people in this street don't have a TV licence and the TLA knows who they are.
Duncan Bennett, a systems administrator with the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, knows exactly what this means. He hasn't had a TV in 10 years and yet, annually, he gets threatening letters from the TLA. He has now discovered that, with no evidence against him whatsoever, they can get a warrant - always automatically granted - to break into and search his house. He is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, a terrible inversion of ancient common-law tradition. He has struggled to find anybody willing to take up his campaign on the issue. Bennett is not suspected of drug-trafficking, terrorism or subversion. He is suspected of having a TV without a licence. Only in Britain would such an abuse of power - or even such advertisements - be tolerated.
We seem to have such fear of crime, and such a mute acceptance of the seizure of power by the authorities, that we are actually comforted by the thought that we are being watched all the time. This, in the current climate of paranoia and high technology, is dangerous. Our right to live a law-abiding life without interference is now utterly compromised. The Englishman's home is no longer his castle, it is his virtual interrogation cell.
How did we get here? The story begins in a bedroom in Cheltenham in 1969. James Ellis, an employee of the Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's global listening post, had been working on the problem of coding, more accurately known as encryption. Thanks to our cracking of the German Enigma code during the second world war, the British were regarded as world masters of this art. Since then, GCHQ had been working closely with the American National Security Agency (NSA) to ensure that the good guys - us - would always be able to crack or write codes more successfully than the bad guys - primarily the Soviets.
In his bedroom, Ellis had an idea for a system of encryption that would be utterly unbreakable. But his system was so completely at odds with prevailing wisdom that it was at once rejected by almost everybody in the code business. Ellis died in 1997, professionally anonymous to the last, and just a month before his brilliance was generally recognised when GCHQ finally published his papers on their website.
Until then, everybody thought the first man to have this idea was an American named Whitfield Diffie. In 1975, Diffie had independently experienced the same eureka moment as Ellis, but his insight was made public. At that moment, both GCHQ and NSA, not to mention every other security and intelligence service on the planet, suffered a crisis from which they have yet to recover, and the issue of individual privacy leapt to the top of the political agenda, where, almost everywhere except in Britain, it remains.
The Ellis/Diffie invention was what is now called public key cryptography (PKC). It is the most powerful coding system that has ever been devised. It's what you use if you bank or buy on the internet. You don't know you're using it: your computer does it for you. It offers everybody the power to communicate in unbreakable codes. As a result, it's easily the worst thing that has ever happened to the spooks and the police. Beside this, Kim Philby was a minor hiccough.
This is how it works. Normally, if one spook wants to send a coded message to another, he does so in a code that can be unlocked by a key - a string of numbers - known to both of them. The problem is, they have somehow to give each other the key. Diplomats going through customs handcuffed to briefcases are one way of passing on keys. But you can mug a diplomat and, as the British showed when they seized a German Enigma machine, you can intercept keys transmitted by any other means. Either way, the spooks lose their secrecy.
In PKC, one party makes his key completely public; anybody can have it.
This public code allows anybody to encode their message and send it. But the public key can only encrypt the message, it cannot decrypt it. Only the secret key possessed by the recipient can unscramble the message. As long as he keeps his key secret - an easy task, because he need never share it with anyone else - then his code is unbreakable.
The one flaw in this might be the use of supercomputers simply to run through all possible key combinations - a so-called "brute force" attack. Keys are just sequences of numbers, after all. But now that more powerful personal computers and software accept much longer keys, it would take billions of years for a brute-force attack to succeed. Rumour has it - there are only ever rumours in this area - that the NSA has spent $5 billion trying to crack the strongest contemporary codes and failed.
Since both the NSA and GCHQ are founded on the principle that they should be able to read any communication anywhere in the world, this is their worst nightmare. Since 1975 they have been battling to find ways of ensuring they can still eavesdrop on anything. And, because Diffie's trick was already out there among the nerds and hackers of the world, this battle had to take place in public. Essentially, both the British and American security services wanted copies of all keys to be lodged with government agencies - so-called "key escrow" - or, as in the system we now have in Britain, they wanted to be able to demand the surrender of keys.
But the libertarian nerds, known in this field as "cypherpunks", fought back in the name of freedom from the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother government. In the United States they have had some success, thanks to the native distrust of government; in Britain they have had almost none.
After the collapse of communism in 1989, this issue became even more urgent. The primary targets of the security services were no longer the Soviets. Now they were organised criminals, drug traffickers and terrorists. This meant they wanted to watch their own citizens rather than just foreign spooks. The possibility of the high-tech, constant-surveillance Big Brother state was threatening to become a reality.
PKC had become much more than a brilliant mathematical trick: it was now the centre of a bitter philosophical and political debate about the privacy of the individual. This has now spilt over into just about every area of public policy. Before PKC, the spooks could watch and never explain anything. After PKC, they had to come out and argue their case.
The big questions are obvious. How much should the government be able to find out about me and the things I do? Should it be able to read all my private messages, my bank accounts, my health records? Do I have any right to privacy at all, or does the public interest in the possibility that I might be a terrorist, paedophile, criminal or spy overrule all other considerations?
Cryptography was only the beginning of this debate. Technology - whether in the form of computers, mobile phones, credit cards, store cards or closed-circuit television cameras with sophisticated face recognition systems - means that people can now, if they like, know almost everything about anybody.
We all leave an electronic trail wherever we go, whatever we do. This trail is impossible for the individual to eradicate or control.
Much of this trail may seem innocent - what you buy at Tesco using your loyalty card is hardly likely to be a sensitive matter. But the point about computer memory and processing power is that it is expanding at a rate few of us can begin to understand. As a result, thanks to those loyalty cards, it is perfectly possible to trawl through everything you have ever bought at Tesco, and that can produce a startlingly detailed picture of your life.
"I'm not embarrassed about my shopping," says Ian Brown, a researcher into mobile multimedia security at University College, London, "but the insidious nature of this is that it's not the day-by-day information, it's knowing about all your grocery for the last five years. It's amazing how much you can tell about someone from the pattern of their buying." Furthermore, information breeds information. Once I know one thing about you, I can generally find out another. Using a technique known as 'social engineering' - essentially a simple con trick - armed with a few details like your date of birth and post code, I can easily convince some lowly clerk on the phone that I am you and seduce him into parting with more sensitive material.
When you add into that mix internet usage and e-mails - neither of which are remotely secure unless you go out of your way to make sure they are - it becomes easy to build up staggeringly detailed pictures of the lives and habits of almost anybody. Indeed, there is an automated global system code-named Echelon, operated by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is believed to intercept up to 3 billion communications a day, trawling through them for sensitive words that might indicate a security threat - it may well pick up this article in transit. Some claim that 90% of internet traffic is scanned by Echelon. The exact figures are unknown, because the system is top secret. Indeed, Britain, alone among these countries, does not even admit it exists. Simon Davies, head of the pressure group Privacy International and a self-confessed cypherpunk, describes Echelon as "black-helicopter, Mulder-and-Scully stuff". As in The X Files, the truth is out there, but so is somebody who doesn't want you to know.
Even by just collating all the addresses of your e-mail correspondents, the security services can construct "friendship trees", patterns of association that, whether you are guilty or not, may connect you to terrorists or criminals.
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are the final turn of the screw. There are now 1.5m of these operating in Britain, and some, as in the London borough of Newham, use facial recognition software that automatically identifies target individuals. Some of these cameras are visible, but many, in pubs and clubs, are not. In time, it is thought these cameras will be linked in a nationwide web. They will become, as Dr Stephen Graham of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne has suggested, the "fifth utility", after telephones, water, gas and electricity. "These networks," he writes, "have long since merged and extended to become technologically standardised, multipurpose, nationally regulated utilities, with virtually universal coverage. I would argue that CCTV looks set to follow a similar pattern of development over the next 20 years, to become a kind of fifth utility."
"We have far more of these cameras that any other country," Graham tells me, "though Germany and the US are now catching up. Why? Well, I suppose we have fewer constitutional and political fears about invasions of privacy.
We have a huge fear of crime and we have no totalitarian past like almost all the other countries in Europe."
Graham believes the key to the future, networked power of CCTV is automation. "The key to the limitations of their use was the human operator, who just got bored. Soon, software will be able to do all that, and then the power will be in the hands of the software writers to decide what is abnormal behaviour. It will all be hidden - there will be no accountability."
And, in their book The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, the academics Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong write: "The architecture of the maximum surveillance society is now in place." Their point is that the hardware of CCTV is so firmly in position that enabling it to watch everybody all the time is now merely a software problem.
Meanwhile, other surveillance technologies are springing up all the time. Police in the US, and some private agencies here, now have machines - called IMSI catchers - in their cars that fool your mobile phone into thinking they are base stations on your network. They can even tell your phone not to use any form of encryption. So they can listen to every mobile call you make. In addition, all big companies in the City of London routinely have to attach devices to their windows to prevent sensitive meetings being overheard through remote sensors that pick up voices from vibrations of the glass. Or there are Van Eck devices, which can read everything on your computer screen from a street away from your house. It is rumoured that one of these machines has been refined to the point where it can pick out one computer screen at the top of Canary Wharf from street level. Or tiny airborne devices the size of butterflies are being developed that can watch every move you make. And so on and so on. "It is plausible," writes Bruce Schneier, an American security consultant, in his book Secrets & Lies, "that we could soon be living in a world without expectation of privacy, anywhere or at any time."
Soon, some have suggested, we shall have to record our entire lives on audio and video just to establish an alibi, in case we are implicated in a crime. Indeed, not to make such a recording may one day be treated as a cause for suspicion.
Do we care? In Britain, apparently not. We accept CCTV cameras out of fear of crime, and as a result we have more than any other nation in the world. Meanwhile, a study by the Economic and Social Research Council's Virtual Society programme has found that employees do not regard surveillance systems in the workplace as invasions of privacy. And finally, in the form of last year's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP), we now have, according to many observers, the most invasive legal apparatus anywhere in the world. China, it has been pointed out, has nothing as draconian as this on its statute book. It has been described by the constitutionalist Anthony Barnett as "the most pernicious invasion of privacy ever imposed by a democratic state". Among other things, the act ensures that all internet and mobile-phone communications will potentially be interceptible by the police and security services. Furthermore, even if you are not suspected of any crime, you can be imprisoned for two years if you fail to disclose a computer password. The communications of UK citizens can now be trawled by GCHQ to investigate any "large number of persons in pursuit of a common purpose".
THE SURVEILLANCE TRAP | YOUR WHOLE LIFE LAID BARE
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get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
Denial: Sweet but deadly.
I don't know specifics about the U.K. situation, but there are huge concentration camps set aside in the U.S., just waiting for the people to fill them when the day comes.
Put your programming aside for an afternoon, open up your mind, (tough, I know,) and do some Google research. Start with, "Denver Airport". That's an excellent 'on-ramp' because all the many creepy assertions are entirely verifiable and the questions raised by them have answers of vast import.
While you may live in the U.K., it is entirely foolish to believe that you are not affected, or that the negative perception of population control is merely a 'cultural thing' specific to any one region. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the world is on the cusp of an enormous, planned tragedy.
Dig until it hurts. Don't be a 'Blue Pill' piece of live-stock. Knowledge Protects.
-Fantastic Lad -He's just crazy, right guys? Guys?
David Brin was right; the cameras are coming. Make sure that we can watch our leaders and police as easily as they can watch us.
Many highways you travel on have cameras that go back to the Department of Transportation, where TV stations, etc., get their live feeds for their news shows. In fact, states like New Jersey are starting to put these camera online. I believe Atlanta and a few other cities have extensive survailence networks; one tiny piece of New York City has so many public and private cameras it isn't funny.
Now IANAL, but I belive the laws in the United States at the moment do *not* cover video survailance. Prosecutions of people spying on other people are normally because someone performed *audio* survailence (i.e., left the microphone running on the camera). There was a case where landlord put a camcorder in a couple's bedroom behind a two-way mirror. The landlord would have actually been within his rights to put a camera there except for the fact he left the microphone attached.
Heh...I don't know 70 people who go to church...
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Intersting picture of the journalist.1 d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk?=PHPE9568F36-D428-1
Ok ok, I do know what it really is.
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It must be because America is so religious. 70% of Americans go to Church once a week, compared to 2.5% of Britains. This almost wholly explains the different attitudes in each country towards self defense, rehabillitation and crime deterrance. It is Old Testament values and paranoia (America) versus modern rationalism (Britain).
All that so called rationalism (and all those cameras and gun control) has produced the second most crime-ridden nations in the world. So much for your Socialist/Fascist utopia.
In hindsight we probably shouldn't have rescued the UK from Hitler in the first place, since it turned out to be a waste of time. You're voluntarily turning your country into a modern day Nazi Germany.
From the article:
We have a huge fear of crime and we have no totalitarian past like almost all the other countries in Europe."
Well that seems about to change. The UK seems hell bent on proving Orwell right, although he was off by a few years.
Did a search on google, and found these three:
Comments on Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory ...
Letter to the House Of Lords on the Regulation of ...
Ways to Defeat the Snooping Provisions in the Regulation of ...
The last one covers (among other things) steganography and is quite interesting.
Yes me too. The article looked serious, until
you note the date at the top.
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Stupid question - how do they catch you?
This is all very freaky to me, I do not have a TV, and I would hate to be suspected of being a criminal just because I don't care for TV....
I visited a old friend in Southern California this winter. He lived in a "gated community" where security cameras watched all the areas inside the complex.
My friend had to return to work the day I arrived, so I spent the afternoon relaxing at his place. Having come from Minnesota (4 ft of snow when I left) I went outside and wandered aimlessly around the complex, enjoying the ability to wear shorts in January. I took pictures of interesting things, like Christmas tree lights on tropical trees and ponds filled with liquid water. In retrospect, this does seem awfully suspicious/crazy.
After about half an hour in this paradise, a security guy told me I had to come with him. I didn't live there, my friend was out of his office, and I had no way to prove I wasn't some crazy Minnesotan intent on photographing the area before I killed everybody. I'd done nothing wrong, just acted a little weird. But I spent the rest of the afternoon in the security office until my host could verify I was indeed a legitmate guest. It was not a pleasant experience.
One would hope that real police would do a better job and find something better to do than harass law-abiding people. But I wouldn't want to bet on it.
My question to you is, why is it that a thousand eyes arent enough?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
And? I still dont see the problem. The only people who have anything to fear from these systems is the criminals, and I fail to see how that can be a bad thing.
Criminals, ah, ok. Then it's all well and good. You therefore won't mind, of course, when added legislation describes the things YOU do as criminal, and the monitoring cameras gather evidence on you doing it before the fact, will you? By your own words, this will be perfectly all right, since god knows only true criminals are EVER accused of being criminals, and their privacy violated.
Give me a break. No government is all-wise and simon pure. They should not be wielding this kind of power, at least not without severe checks on their ability to use it, and monitoring of THEM (the monitors) available for public scrutiny.
But the way this will enter private lives will be very simple: Subtle threatening and social pressure. "What, you don't have a telescreen in your house?! You must be one of those terrorist hackers!" (shun shun shun shun shun). And eventually, NOT having a telescreen in your home will be declared illegal, once the situation is ready for that. More and more, I see citizens of supposedly democratic nations sitting idly by and letting their governments usurp powers they should not have, and these "law enforcement" agencies get away with it through subtle threats, claiming that the only people who need to fear this are the bad guys. Well, let me tell you, in an authoritarian government one of the main goals is to make it impossible for ordinary citizens to avoid breaking the law, so the police forces will always have an excuse for anything they do.
Privacy is doubleplusungoodthinkful, Winston.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I live in the UK, in Scotland. I am well aware that my country has a huge rate of camera penetration throughout city centres and streets. However, it is only foreigners, americans and the like, who find this unusual.
It is a cultural issue, not an issue of privacy at all. Americans view their government with fear, and quite rightly, given its history and abuses. However, in Britain we have a more socialist, left wing government, one that is not friendly to business or private interests. Out government is trusted by the people because it composed of ordinary people, people like Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Dennis Skinner, the Beast of Bolsover. Both these men are very powerful and respected, and both come from working class backgrounds. All our politicians are men, and women, of the people. This is different from American politicians, who need hundreds of millions of dollars to run for office, and so are in the backpockets of all sorts of interest groups. Our politicians need no money to run for office.
All this means that our government is much less scary. We can trust it to set up CCTV systems and not use them to spy, but only to deter criminals.
Like I said, this issue is cultural only. We in Britain think it is crazy that americans cannot drink until they are 21 years old, and are free to buy guns and carry them around with them - an act, surely, of inherent danger. I would far rather face cameras in the street than guns, but each to his own.
It must be because America is so religious. 70% of Americans go to Church once a week, compared to 2.5% of Britains. This almost wholly explains the different attitudes in each country towards self defense, rehabillitation and crime deterrance. It is Old Testament values and paranoia (America) versus modern rationalism (Britain).
Just remember, these cameras are not used to spy, and never will be. They are used by the police, who are famous around the world for fairness and correct, brotherly behaviour.
CCTV is an excellent criminal deterrance.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
There have never been slaves on British soil.
America was only free if you were a white man of property.
Imagine if there had been no revolution in america. Slavery would have been outlawed 60 years earlier, without a fuss. Race relations would have been much improved in your country. It would not be infected by religious maniacs as it is. Prohibition and the like would never have happened. People wouldn't be getting electrocuted to death in a country with a law against 'cruel and unusual punishments'.
America would be much improved. Sort of like a better, bigger Canada.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
CCTV cameras do not affect this liberty. CCTV cameras are only put in public places. You don't have the right to be alone in your local highstreet, supermarket or motorway, where the vast majority of these cameras are placed.
Your argument would hold water if the cameras were being placed in peoples homes, or something outrageous like that. But they aren't.
Why bother maintaining pride, integrity, and character if your life is to be constantly judged at all times according to the stinking broth of the collective court of pubic opinion?
That it what the 'Closed Circuit' part of CCTV means. The camera data is readily accessible to everyone through the data protection act, but the fact remains that they are used publically only.
What will you do when your next generation sees them as normal as furniture. And the next have no innate fear of them and completely ignore them?
That is the situation now. CCTV cameras have been used here for years, to great effect. My local city, Glasgow, has seen a huge crime rate decrease in the city centre thanks to the use of CCTV. The system even has a computer face recognition system that can highlight known criminals and also pinpoint suspicious behaviours completely autonimously. This saves manpower and cuts crime.
CCTV cameras are welcomed by the populace. If I am walking through a bad area at night, I feel much better about it if there is a decent CCTV system in place.
In the end, these systems are just another legitimate policing tool. If you don't think the police force is trustworty enough to handle them responsibly, think of all the powers they already have, and be scared. CCTV is not some big brotherish, revolutionary concept. It has been quietly and successfully used here for many years now.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Periodically I reply, complaining of the reception quality in Germany and Russia where I live most of the time and they shut up.
The point is that unless you are operating a TV to pick up a transmission, you are guilty of nothing, so a warrant is valueless unless you are watching TV. Many licence prosecutions were thrown out because the TV was only used for playing games, or because it was a display device for one of the older microcomputers.
The argument for the continuation of the licence is that simply by its presence, it helps keep commercial TV in the UK 'honest', i.e., good content and not to overdo the advertisements. Therefore, even if you only watch commercial TV, you benefit.
See my journal, I write things there
and other flexible display technologies, how long before Britons make masks out of it, that present a pixellated or other warped image to the cameras? Of course, latex masks are already available, but flexible displays are more on-topic for /.
In either case, imagine 1000s of people walking around with the face of the Queen Mum
Americans used to be able to drink before they turned 21 (18 for beer, 21 for liquor). You have to be 21 here because most people drive everywhere they go, unlike most of Europe, where we people walk to the pubs and crawl back.
Yes there is, I've got one here. I can't be caught out like that!
That is a dog license with the word dog crossed out and the word cat written in crayon.
Man didn't have the right form
Yes, the other poster is right, there is absolutely nothing that the BBC has contributed to world culture and the fact that so many US citizens give money to PBS to watch reruns of Dr Who and Are You Being Served is because they are ignorant lefties who ought to be shipped off the Russia where they belong (and where they would be unable to watch the BBC).
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The other purpose of the license fee is to set minimum standards of competence for television viewers. It is quite a while since I passed the test but I still remember some of the questions.
Q. Who played Emma Peel in the Avengers before Diana Rigg?
Q. True or False, Reginald Bosequett's hair [False]
Q. Why is Star Trek the most commonly shown US TV series A: The BBC purchased the UK rights outright for $80 per episode during the initial runs
To pass you had to score no more than 5 out of 10, thus demonstrating that you were not a total couch potatoe.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
CCTV = Closed Circuit Television...
... not closed caption.
Do you like German cars?
George Orwell was right.
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
Victimless street crime? Auto theft certainly has a victim...
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Sure reading through someone's email "may" give someone insights into their habits, but so can cookies, so that statement I guess was thrown into the story to make it jucier I guess.
If someone is extremely concerned or paranoid about these things, then one method to avoid them is to halt using digital communications. Sure we all use things digital to facilitate our lives but its not a neccessity and no one is going to die from not using the Internet or digital related equipment.
For those who are concerned with ECHELON or others, then encryption is the only route to go unless you plan on reverting to morse code or something.
Thats sort of a dumb comment to make. Being a member of a mailing list with some bad apples would not constitute you being a bad apple. Thats like saying because a criminal lives on your block you too may have criminal tendencies. Thats again something I see that was probably added to spice up the article.
Well instead of whining about it, all the people who are concerned have whats called voting power, and if nothing is done other than bitch, then what could you expect.
I've read studies which stated that these cameras haven't even lowered the crime rate anyways, so who's fooling whom over in the UK.
And I will restate this from a prior post, installing more cameras might deter crime, but it won't stop it, its only a matter of time if it hasn't happened yet, that criminals will just get sneakier. All it would take is one smart criminal creating a nice EMP weapon and zap all those little monitors' insides.
G.I.T.S.
360 degrees of Karma
What part did I make up about the article saying when everything I copied was related to the article with my own comments? The subject of PGP is something I wanted to say since I'm entitled to my opinion I think thats what this forum was for.
Well instead of whining about it, all the people who are concerned have whats called voting power, and if nothing is done other than bitch, then what could you expect.
Maybe your misconstruing what I've said which is your own problem, as the only thing thats off key in my post would be the PGP section which again is my own damn opinion.
What I mean by this is by this author saying this would be a broad comment as Im sure that the government their would not arrest or consider someone a criminal because a criminal lives on their street. If this person has had his own problem so be it, but to make a broad statment like this is utter bullshit.
Keep waiting for an apology
360 degrees of Karma
When the US apologizes then maybe I'll consider it.
360 degrees of Karma
For those of you that follow London news, think of the whole Damilola Taylor thing. The only way the Met got anything to go on in that case was from all the CCTV cameras in the area: that was their evidence and lead to start looking for people. Or the BBC studio bomb: they caught the Red Cab on tape, and that allowed them to put out pictures of it.
And I miss garbage cans on the Tube. I always have some wrapper with me, and feel guilty (remember the Canadian bit) about throwing it on the ground. Somone should come up with a good bomb-resistant garbage can for the Tube.
Cue The Sun...
Just remember: the US is not immune to the government syping on its people.
Cue The Sun...
PBS is like the BBS. Exept they do fundraising. And they show bbs shows. no comercials either.
Within the last week or so, they've started the same type of surveillance in the city of Wilmington. They want to make the city seem safe again.
A doubleplus good day to all!!
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
While you're right, us Americans engage in more than our fair share of privacy abuses (especially in the latitude we give to corps), this is also part of why we're so sensitive about it all. Trying to raise consciousness.
But I think you're missing the point. I don't know about the UK, but here, crime in general and violent crime in particular are at the lowest rates they've been at in something like 50 years. We don't need or want CCTV for that reason. YMMV, and the UK can do what it pleases. I know that the massive surveillance there certainly means I'll exercise my freedom to never go there, and I'll fight tooth and nail against it happening here, where I don't have the choice of leaving (despite the "love it or leave it crowd" -- where would I leave _to_?)
Massive surveillance nearly guarantees tyranny. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually it will happen. I fight against this stuff not for me, but for my daughter. And once the "fifth utility" is entrenched, and if it brings tyranny, then the game is over and the only recourse to regain freedom would be revolution.
I think it's better to raise a (nonrevolutionary) stink now, while there's at least some chance of winning.
Not only that, but the Times is a conservative (as in the political party) paper, and would print anything against the current government, If the Tories were in power, I'd expect the article would be praising CCTV.
Add to that the elections due at some random point this year, now is the time for the papers representing the oposition to start spreading FUD (and for papers supporting the surrent party to start spreading FUD about the other parties).
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
If this has you so freakin' paranoid, MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE! It's really that simple...
TODO: Something witty here...
I noticed the article is dated April 1st... This isn't a joke is it?
There's a flaw in your argument, namely that unskilled computer users are a public danger. Can you say DDoS?
It's downright disgusting, actually. Just do a portscan for 137/udp on a cable modem or DSL netblock sometime. About 2/3 or so of them probably have a share named "C" with no password on it -- and that's just Windoze. It doesn't even touch on all the Linux boxes vulnerable to RPC or BIND exploits...
You are, of course, correct that government licensing wouldn't help the situation much. Most politicians can't tell MHz from DMCA, much less pass sane legislation regarding computers.
Blech. The whole situation stinks.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Wait, they get spied on too.
How else would the cops know that Jebadiah was selling crack cocaine at school again?
That TV licensing stuff is strange. I've actually never heard of it. What do they consider a TV? Would they consider a PC with a TV/FM video capture card and a VCR plugged into it to be a "TV?"
See? The things that I miss by not owning one of them new-fangled TV things.
I think that the street is a public place, and 'loss of privacy' is an argument that only serves crimimals and paranoids.
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
That article is from April first so it might be an april fools joke, all the comments from Brits that I've read seem to support that theory. I mean come on, the opening line is like something the muckrakers of the early nineteen hundreds would write.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire