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The Path of Least Surveillance
prostoalex writes: "Business Week draws attention to the growth of monitoring and surveillance systems in modern society. Only in Manhattan, as article claims, there are at least 10,000 cameras. Londoners, at the same time, are caught on tape 300 times per day. Is it a necessary measure of pre-caution, or, as Marge Simpson put it, "as long as everybody is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done"?"
as long as they stay out of my house i dont care what they see me do in public......
not that im saying i do things worth video taping at home but.....
yea the outside should be monitored but stay the hell off of my property
This is how you know you're a geek the power goes out and you are unemployed and unemployable. Yes I know I can't spell
This is quite a hot topic in Vancouver, and a smaller city in the BC interior, Kelowna.
.Dave
There's an interesting read on a Canadian Government website (clipped from a local Vancouver newspaper).
On a related topic, at a fireworks event in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a police helicopter overhead at a couple hundred feet, buzzing back and forth around the crowds as everyone was leaving to go home. Despite the obvious police surveillance, there were still some violent attacks in the crowds, as reported by the news the following day.
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
For the "I have nothing to hide yadda-yadda..." people, I just can't see why anyone would like (or, at least, wouldn't mind) to be monitored so much, even if it's a public place. It sure doesn't make me feel safe. I find government and businesses tracking me far more scary than a potential mugger on the street. To each his own, I guess.
Call me paranoid, but I often travel through town on smaller roads that I know don't have those damned "traffic" cams pointed at the intersections. I know there are probably plenty of less conspicuous cameras out there that catch me (and it will only get worse), but I exercise as much dilligance as I can without going totally crazy.
Method of processing duck feet
I don't see the difference between a cop on every streetcorner and a camera on every streetcorner (except that the camera can't shoot anyone...not yet anyway).
As long as the cameras aren't positioned in a way that they can spy on people in their homes or other private places, it's no big deal. When they put a camera on the lightpole outside my bedroom window, I'll complain. But until then I'd say they do more good than harm.
It's a complex issue, but my overall thoughts on the matter - note this isn't neccesarily what's actually legal today, but what I feel is "right".
Anyone (a private citizen, a corporation, or a government agency) should be allowed to surveil public places. If I want to wear a bodycam walking all over the public parts of town, it's my business. Same goes for security cams watching streets/sidewalks near a business, and the same goes for government run cams. After all, you have no expectation of privacy in public anyways.
Publication/Sale/Transferrance of camera footage shot by these cameras should be forbidden without the permission of everyone in every frame. If you can't track them all down, and get their consent, you can't publish it raw. You can get away with it by blurring out any unknowns or non-consenters with a good blurring algorithm (I highly suspect some current forms of blurring seen on police tv programs can be undone by averaging the errors over time, but it's just a suspicion). I think this should include celebrities, contrary to current legal opinion.
Of course, in the case of the government, we really can't them from doing what they want with the images. Luckily on a broad scale they probably couldn't track us all, simply too much data. However, they could easily actively track for a "top 100 list" of people that they want to find and/or track. What I'd like to see is that any active wide-area face/person tracking (e.g. watching for a list of specific terrorists' faces on all cams in Manhattan for period of time) should require some sort of warrant or court order that relies on some evidence or at least reasonable suspicion - and no, "Ashcroft says so" doesn't meet that requirement for me.
11*43+456^2
How does this fall into this topic? This is talking about ACTUALLY walking around in manhattan, not some online representation of it... There's already a site where you can map a route that avoids cameras... what more do you want??
Yeah, when you think of surveillance, what do you think of? 1984. We're all being watched, right? Except us in the States are still protected by our Bill of Rights (unless you are a libretarian, then they *are* out to get you).
But I was pondering this kind of stuff just a few days ago when I learned that all 48 stores that are owned by my employers company will have their cameras linked together by the internet. So supposedly the owner could punch in a number, and see whatever is happening in that store at a time.
What concerned me was how centralized this system seemed. It was one thing when each store kept their own security tapes which were rotated every few days, which was largely controlled by our local manager. It was another when people I don't even know can spy in on me anytime they want.
So I really don't know what to think of this. It almost seems like something they have every right to do. But who is preventing them from outsourcing the monitoring job to another company? Next thing you know, all workers in the State are being monitiored by the same people.
Just as long as they don't install a speaker system as well.
I can imagine suddenly hearing what sounds like the Voice of God bellowing "You are sitting on the counter." I look around. "Get off the counter and get back to work."
I know this is way off topic, but I looked on Google and found no answers to my question.
How much money is spent on M$ office wacy year? I am curious because I hypothesise that if 10% of that amount could be invested and would yield greater long term returns. If that 10% was instead put into developing an opensource office suite (soon to be gobe) all people who use M$ Office would have a equally robust free alternative. Having this they would save future money from M$ spending.
This seems like a pretty reasoable hypothesis, however if I can think it up, why can the large businesses not? If they have, why have they not proceeded with suck a plan? Am I missing something?
This would be a pretty good "Ask Slashdot"
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
With the monitoring of movements, phone calls, purchases, you can determine what your beliefs are (to a great extent) and then if they feel your beliefs should be adjusted, you can be put into an internment camp, or declared a comunist.
Fight Spammers!
For those of you that don't feel like reading the entire episode in search for their obscure reference.
Marge: You know, the courts might not work any more, but as long as
everybody is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done.
figuring the i-see program has been up for a long time, its interesting how only recently the subject gets attension
There is a nice map (pdf though) with quite a few of the cameras
here.
I seem to remember a project to find the path through the city with the least cameras... Wasn't that NYC? I'm pretty sure it was at slashdot, but I can't find it.
This is a reprint of this post I made, with an update.
A few months back I was having a lan party in my garage. Pretty hot, so the door was closed to about a foot. Halfway through playing the neighbors 16 yro ritilin hyped Add kid (aunt later told me this) kid crawled under the 1 foot gap in the garage.
:P) So I never miss a chance to infuence people into computers. Kid said he played CS so I invited him to play on a station not being used.
I consider myself a computer philanthopist (yeah right, i'm unemployed
Well about 10 rounds later kid turns to me and asks, "Know where to get any dope?" I ask him his age, find out he's 16 and intruct him never to speak of that again in my house in order to maintain neighborhood harmony. After a few more minutes he takes off till about 8.
Now anyone that has ever been to a private lan party knows that after many straight hours of interactive gaming a break of non-interactivity is required. So we were sitting around watching funny pr0n when I looked over and the kid was back! He didn't announce himself or anything, he was just sitting there all quiet (creepy like)
Well, earlier that day I had fried the bios on a friends computer. So I payed him no mind and went back to searching the web for a fix when his mother and aunt came over. They both seemed pretty drunk and started flirting with my friends. I mean heavy flirting, like one of my buddies has japanese kanji characters tattood on his arm, and she was tracing the outline while running her fingers through his hair. These bitches were straight FREAKY DEEKS! No BS here, these middle age broads were down for some young cock!
Well, i'm still staring at my screen trying to not pay attention to whats going on when the kids mom started rubbing up on me. I got pissed (any true get gets pissed when someone breaks their concentration) so I thought I would make a smart ass remark to her..
"HEY TELL YOUR KID TO QUIT HITTIN MY FRIENDS UP FOR DOPE!!"
Everyone started laughing, she went up to her son, said his name in a whiny tone of voice NooooLAAAN and sorta hugged him. He sheepishly grinned and I thought that was that. I had told the kid no askin, and I had let the parent know what happened. I thought I had done my duty as a neighbor and went back to fixing that bios.
She went home, about 5 minutes later the kids stepdad comes out. NOLAN TOQER! COME HERE I WANNA TALK TO YOU! I told the guys to wait there, wasn't a big deal and i'd be back in a minute.
Well, I followed the guy out front, he got 6 inches in my face and started holding a fist, threatening to call the cops on me for delinquency to a minor, and was just being drunk and nasty (I could hella smell it on his breath)
"Hey if you want to come over here to get a point across thats cool, but getting 6 inches in my face isn't, now if you would just take a step back and a breath, maybe we can talk about this rationally" I took a step back while sayin that just in case, he started lurching forward so I started yelling "GET THE FUCK OFF MY PROPERTY!! GET THE FUCK OFF MY PROPERTY!!"
Well, by that time the clan had stood up, and his wife was over there pulling him back across the street apogizing the whole time.
Before people start dissin me, let me explain some known things about this cat.
1. He only bought his house 3 months ago
2. He's pissed every neighbor off by leaving his dog out front all day while he's at work so it wont shit in his backyard (guess where it goes?)
3. He's gotten into fights with 4 neighbors
4. nobody, and I mean nobody in the neighborhood likes this cat.
5. Oh and just today the mailman had to mace his dog, and told me he wont deliver mail to the neighborhood if his dog keeps getting left out.
6. If this guy is worried about his stepson being around dope, he shouldn't go asking his neighbors himself where he can get it.
Well, i'm really not that much of a fighter. I'm 29, pack a day smoker since I was like 10, and I really REALLY am a pencil neck geek. So yeah, basically i'm scared because this house I bought and planned on living in for the next 30 years has some drunken fat surly construction worker living across the street wanting to kick my ass. What to do???
Well, MY GEEK POWERS COMBINED! I set up a video capture card and camera combo. I mounted the camera in an electrical box, and put tinted plexiglass over the front. It now points at my frontyard waiting to catch his dog shitting on my yard, or my neighbors yard. The camera goes into a MS WMS on a win2k server (If someone can point me to something open source i'll use it)
The trusted neighbors all know about the camera and connect to it over our cat5 fence network to watch it. Currently I can store 24 hours of low quality video on the crud equipment I have.
*UPDATE*
Since we've installed the system, we've shown the cops video of this guy letting his dog loose to relieve himself in our yards. As a result his dog is either contained or on leash. Let's hear it for geek inginuity!