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Internet + Wireless Cameras = Homeland Security
NumberField writes "According to an article by
Steven Levy posted on MSNBC, Jay Walker of PriceLine fame is talking about a
system he calls
US HomeGuard. His plan is to hire large numbers
of unsophisticated users to monitor Internet-connected security cameras looking for
suspicious activity. Although many security details (i.e.,
DOS attacks,
cryptography,
privacy)
need to be handled carefully, it's a weird enough idea that it might actually work..."
sig globally, act locally
this is sooo 1984..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Forgive my ambivalence about having 'unsophisticated users' watching a webcam, trying to outsmart and detect people who have been training in the desert for the past 5 years on how to AVOID being detected.
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I just heard that they are laying off a bunch of TSA screeners in our state. Americans are very reactionary. My father talks about how "9/11 changed everything". Time rolls on, eventually we will get complacent/get back to normal (depending on your point of view).
What? That's crazed - you're actually saying that te right to privacy is limited by your property. By your reasoning, a homeless man doesn't have any right to privacy - after all, he's always outside his own home - he doesn't have one, but he's just as human as we are, that's what it's about. Privacy is a right, and it means that noone may force you to reveal stuff you want to keep hidden, if its none of their bussiness. The point of a right like this is that it *is* your right, no matter what. The only question here is if placing cameras is an actual violation of that right.
And exactly how could a million camera's have prevented the september 11 terrorist attacks?
My karma ran over your dogma
This was mooted at least 6 years ago. In the incarnation I heard, people swapped details with people in another time zone, so that while one person was asleep/at work, someone else in another country could occasionally check a webcam image in the corner of their screen. The two people need not know each others name or exact location, if they were worried that the person watching would take advantage of knowing when the watched person was home.
This will work for about five minutes, after which lists of every camera location will have been posted online.
Naturally, it's not the monitoring of restricted areas that I fear so much as the next step. Government expanding to fill all adjacent spaces, I can't help but believe that the next iteration of that technology would be to begin monitoring public areas for suspicious behavior. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
My concerns aren't privacy, I'm more worried about letting the average person run basically run this system. This smacks of 1930s/40s Germany, where you were asked to basically spy on your neighbor. It smacks of the Red Scare here in the US, where, again, you were basically asked to spy on your own neighbor. The list goes on and on.
I'm all for securing potential targets but I don't think that letting the average person run the system is a great idea. Think back a few months to an incident in Florida where three medical students on their way to their new residencies were chased down and then detained on the side of the highway for nearly 24 hours. This was all because one ignorant woman saw three Middle Easter-looking men having a private discussion in a restaraunt. I'm afraid that this system of cameras will only increase instances like this.
Nothing happens most of the time. Watching it will be boring ... maybe if the system was assisted by motion detection software and/or AI that would help. But then how would you deal with suspcious activity in public areas .. The AI cant be that perfect.
I think this will be too boring and most people will fall asleep watching the crap, and/or issue false alarms too often.
Whenever I read about "looking for suspicious activity" I cringe at what my neighbors might be suspicious of. We (at least in the USA) are trained from birth to conform and not stand out. We are taught in school to ridicule and/or fear people who are different--people who look different or behave different. Some of the folks I live near are afraid of people who wear black. Others don't like seeing people walking home after midnight. The problem with letting joe sixpack look for "suspicious" people is that anyone who does anything besides sleeping, going to work and shopping, will inevitably be considered suspicious by someone.
The USA has become a nation of freightened sheep, and the general public is happy to lock people away who don't totally conform to the norm (please compare our imprisonment rates for non-violent offenders against the rest of the world).
Would you want your neighbors to watch you and decide whether you're doing something "suspicious"? How about letting your business competitor decide? How about that homeowner's association nazi who thinks your yard gnome is too big?
So when I'm on the street, you have the right to know everything about me? I can walk up to you and demand to know how much money you earn, what diseases run in your familly etc.? I know you wouldn't tell me if I did that. Interesting thing is some believe that I can't do that, but that the state does have that right - a policeman should be able to walk up to you and ask what he wants to know, even when you're not suspected of anything.
Privacy isn't something limited by your location, it's a universal right - when violated, you've violated someones personal freedom, and thats about the most important thing we have.
These cameras are protecting the private or secure public areas.
Cameras dont protect anything. The collect "evidence". And unless the response time is around 60 seconds, no matter how many people are watching remotely, not a single act of sabotage will be prevented by the presence of a CCTV camera, no matter who is behind it.
The "security" industry in this case is a vile parasite, feeding off of the fear of crime and sabotage. It would be far better to spend time fixing the root causes than putting cameras on everything.
But you know this.
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> I'd rather not have Joe Blog watching me step out of my house...
Unless you live in a nuclear power plant, or some other place where there are not supposed to be any people walking around... Read the fucking article, the cameras would be in places where there should be no peolpe, not in front of your damned house. Come on, the Gov has more important things to do than watching your every move.
I agree, the camaras in stores dont seem to stop the shop lifters, they could care less. Do they actually think a terroist is going to care about a camara that someone "might" be paying attention at any given time.
As technology progresses, this expectation is eroded. What does it mean to go to the store and buy a magazine? It used to be, it was public, but unless someone you knew saw you, no-one would now. It is possible now to track what magazines I buy (through credit cards, Bonus cards, etc. and the UPC code on the magazine), and form a database. The test of "expectation of privacy" is the same, but technology has lowered that expectation.
You're right, in that the test of "expectation of privacy" is the current way to determine if you have a right to privacy, and this stuff happens in public view. The question is whether we need to change either the test, or our expectations, or whether we accept an ever-vanishing amount of privacy. If millimeter wave imaging became cheap (which can look through walls), would that mean I wouldn't have the expectation to have sex in my own home without being seen?
Technology has definitely changed the picture. Privacy is no longer an issue of being seen, but also of being tracked. Just because we have lost so much privacy does not mean we can't reclaim it.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
That post was about as insightful as a Mike Tyson press conference.
I'm more worried about letting the average person run basically run this system. This smacks of 1930s/40s Germany, where you were asked to basically spy on your neighbor. It smacks of the Red Scare here in the US, where, again, you were basically asked to spy on your own neighbor. The list goes on and on.
These people would not be spying on their neighbors, they would be nothing more than work at home security guards. They are protecting specific public and commercial infrastructure.
Unskilled airport workers go through everyone's underware, do you hear privacy activists outraged at this? Not the ones that fly.
Think back a few months to an incident in Florida where three medical students on their way to their new residencies were chased down and then detained on the side of the highway for nearly 24 hours. This was all because one ignorant woman saw three Middle Easter-looking men having a private discussion in a restaraunt. I'm afraid that this system of cameras will only increase instances like this.
Your appraisal if this incident exposes your ignorance on the matter. The men were purposely speaking to be overheard (their conversation was not private at that point) as part of an insanely idiotic prank with the intent to purposefully cause alarm in nearby patrons. The lady stated that she weighed her correct course of action after hearing the statements and did the obviously correct thing by alerting law enforcement.
Should an individual have alerted authorities after hearing plans for sabotage during world war II?
Go ahead and delude yourself into your own conclusion to this question. The correct conclusion stands dependent on its own merits.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it make more sense to use motion detectors where there's not supposed to be any movement? It sounds like a more efficient system would be motion detector/camera pairs, and a small number of security guards who can then take a closer look when an alarm goes off to make sure they're not sending a SWAT team against a stray cat.
There are a few things wrong with the system as he describes it.
First of all, trained or untrained, it would be very easy to "pass" on a security camera as a bunch of curious college kids with backpacks (full of C4). Even a well-made bear costume would be indistinguishable from the real thing on a webcam.
Second, such a system might not have a fast enough response time. A five second window is a long time to run through a security camera. Assuming the first camera captures you, it might take 30 seconds for 3 people on the internet to recieve the image, and another 30 for the next 10 people, and 60 seconds for a person in the emergency responce headquarters to review, find, interrogate, and notify the authorities on campus. Let's assume the security responce people take 2 minutes to find these terrorists... They now have had 4 minutes to poison the water, plant a bomb, or take an opera full of people hostage.
Third, like all motion detectors there must be an amount of accepted variance. If terrorists walked really slowly or very slowly obstructed the camera they could walk right in front of it. Being wireless, the cameras' locations would be easy to detect. If the system compared this 5 second picture to one 10 minutes ago they could detect such changes, but such a system would consume large amounts of resources to store those backphotos. This problem is sticky but not unsolvable.
Overall this is an interesting idea. In essence, it automates most unnecessary parts of security screening (staring at unchanging images) and taps groups of affordable internet personnel to do the easy but non-automatable task of deciding if a moving object is a person or a blowing trash bag. Once those two criteria have been passed, the real security specialists can respond, thus lowering the number of security personnel needed and the overall cost per camera monitered. And reducing cost for the same service is always a good thing.
The ______ Agenda
Besides, why should the average american be concerned for homeland security?
I'm sure domestic any number of different things, cars, tobacco, alcohol, etc. kills more people each year on american soil than terrorism does.
Yet, I see no huge overarching "war on speeding" for example.
I'm not american, but let me tell you. From the outside this fixation on security looks a lot like hysteria.
Furthermore it seems like a lot of people in the position to do so is converting this paranoia into money and power for themselves.
I think the general US population would be much better of without these monsterously huge efforts to "increase security" att all costs.
But what do I know, I'm just a dirty foreigner.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
It has nothing to do with watching you in your house, or in your neighbourhood. It has nothing to do with people watching random cameras.
Slippery slope.
This morning I heard a local shock-jock lament that we should treat gang-members as terrorists after all, they hurt far more people than terrorists do... I understand and to some degree agree with this logic.
Seems to me that we could put webcams through-out the city and use untrained people to filter the cams and pass suspicious activity along to the police. Of course every once in a while a pizza delivery dude would be mistaken for a drug dealer and once in a while a lady waiting for a bus would be mistaken for a prostitute.
But what the heck, what are a few civil liberties compared to safety? Everything - ask the few Jews that survived Nazi Germany.
Now, nearly five years after this event with almost no major incidents, the city council approved sticking cameras all over this area. There will be no cameras near residential areas for locals, just cameras for students. The police chief has designated the areas as a problem section and now he will have the legal right to monitor the place with a bunch of cameras.
Using the same mentality other cities could monitor their problem areas and keep a close eye on what the minority population is up to. Personally, I would like to rent a house next to the police chief and stick up 10 AXIS cams covering every inch of his house.
My point is that there's more to privacy than just being seen in public places. The author of the post I replied on stated that in public areas you have no right whatsoever to privacy. That is not the case. You always, everywhere, have your right to privacy, but sometimes, you willing give some of your privacy up - when I go outside I let people see and tape me. Because it's willing, it is not a violation. The moment you do or say something outside, you make it public bussiness, that means you willingly give up your privacy for the moment, but not that you don't have your rights any longer on other subjects. This is not just about the camera's.
Why would any terrorist worry about getting boxcutters past airport security now when they could dump an assload of ricin into a big city's reservoir and watch hundreds of thousands of people croak?
Why did they bother to do it in the first place?
Maybe because the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon was first and formost an attack on the symbols of the military and financial might of the US and that the civilian victims were just a side effect?
If they only were looking for a huge bodycount they would have choosen another target, or another method.
Contrary to popular opinion, terrorism (per definition) isn't just about killing people, it's about furthering your agenda through intimidation.
This means that they are mostly primarily interested in maximizing the propaganda value of their actions, not the destructions they cause.
Take Usama Bin Laden for example.
As I understand it one of his most important objectives was to get the US military out of Saudi Arabia.
And, guess what, you're pulling out of there right now.
From his point of view: Mission Accomplished.
And all this essentialy because of the fear instilled by one operation.
As an added bonus you crushed a secular regime in the middle east.
Be prepared for Al Quaida operatives (or others) trying to instigate a islamic revolution in Iraq sometime in the next few years...
I think most of the proposed methods for reducing terrorism misses the point.
Almost all methods try to take the terrorists on directly. But terrorism is only the symptom, not the decease.
It's root cause is: A lot of people are so desperate that supporting these guys seems like a good idea.
A terrorist organization can't live without popular support somwhere. Take away this support for their cause and what you have left is a few extremists with a serious funding problem (ok, OBL might be an exception) and nowhere to hide.
In the case of islamic terrorism solving the Palestinian question would probably go a long way towards reducing the threat.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
The PROPOSED use of the system seems reasonable enough.
But if it works, what do you think the next applications of the technology are likely to be?
And, of course, the implications of the "piecework" model are a little chilling.
The article says that the "pay for this part-time work would be $8 to $10 an hour" but there's no reason why it would have to stay at that level, why it would have to remain part-time, or why the work would necessarily be given to Americans. I can easily see a world in which companies use this kind of technology to perform constant surveillance on their employees--and the surveillance piecework would be done overseas where the labor rates are lowest.
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Sounds good to me. Then maybe the judge will believe me that I really didn't go through that red light, and that the cop was lying. Then maybe I can charge my state senators with speeding, which we all know they do just as much as I do. I may have something to hide, but I don't have anything more to hide than anyone else.
But no, I'd much rather have racist cops on every corner than cameras. I'd much rather have webcams that only corrupt politicians can view.
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
No, it is quite insightful.
;) ). I'd be willing to bet more terrorism would be stopped 10 minutes after the creation of a Palestinian state, than with all the cameras, bombings and special ops combined. People won't attack your country if they feel you are acting fairly.
How many times have we seen the videos of Mohommed Atta and his buddy walking through Logan airport and entering the gate on CNN over the last 1.5 years?
Millions.
Most major airports already have plenty of video surviellance to stop baggage theft. That didn't stop the 9/11 guys, nor would it stop anyone bent on a suicide mission.
All that was needed was a good, solid cockpit door and 9/11 would just be another day on the calander. Or maybe an Air Marshall and 1 or 2 Glazer safety slugs. Or better intelligence gathering by the people whose job it is to know about and prevent these things (NSA, CIA, FBI).
Better yet how about stopping the root cause of terrorism in the first place? As other posters have pointed out, terrorists don't usually recruit from populations that are happy and treated fairly . Perhaps US foriegn policy should concentrate less on supporting repressive regimes so they can get cheap oil and more on helping the people live free (without all the bombing
Any and all of the above would help, But not more cameras.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Do you get a reward for turning in your neighbour? How much for a family member? What about your spouse?
Garbage in, Garbage out. You're telling me "unsophisticated" "security guards" will have the power to turn anyone they don't like into the US authorities.
Need I remind you that these people will not be "arrested", but will be treated like the folks at camp x-ray - threats to national security.
This is a fucking witch hunt and the US gov't is trying to
I think what it really showed was what you said.. every system has cracks and determined people will always find a way through those cracks.
All this extra security is there for one reason and one reason only... because it makes people FEEL better. Some guys bring boxcutters onto planes and hijack them and cause a mess... so we start enforcing every arbitrary rule in the book , whether it would have made any difference or not.
People see armed gaurds and silly carry on bag restrictions and think "good the powers that be are doing something". Thats ALL it really accomplishes. People are NO safer now than ever before. However, the truth is they were never in much danger as I still believe you are about as likely to die from terrorist acts as you are to die from say, a lightning strike.
Maybe is a sysadmin thing but I think about security, and after the last time I flew out of logan I thought about those box cutters. I dunno, I am pretty damned sure I could get something comparable on the plane if I really wanted to.
I mean a box cutter? be serious! hell make it out of plastic and then you just need to hide the blades. Do you know how easy it is to hide a razor blade amongst things? fuck bring a laptop and shove the blade into the floppy drive or in the case behind the screen.
Hell fuck it... just train them in proper hand to hand combat. Put a few people on the plane (like they did) with the right training and the boxcutter is just a formality. Give them pens if you really think they need a weapon.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"