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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..."
"Unsophisticated" people being paid twice their wages at Burger King will protect me by spotting terrorists from the privacy of their own homes!
Sweet, now I can bid $5 dollars / hour to watch hot co-eds in the shower instead of paying conventional webcam fees. Thank you PriceLine!
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Although many security details need to be handled carefully, it's a weird enough idea that it might actually work...
Yes, sounds like a great idea! It could be very useful where I live. We've got new neighbours, and I think they might be muslims. They're definately foreign, anyway. I don't have the time to sit at the window all day looking for suspicious activity, so if we put a web cam up it would make it a lot easier. God Bless America!
I can see it now
+5: Suspicious
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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.
*This page intentionally left pointless*
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).
I don't know where everyone is getting these crazy fears that it's 1984 playing out in real life. These cameras are protecting the private or secure public areas. We're talking about power plants and dams here. No one that wants their privacy needs to be in these places. I mean, its not like they're going to put one up in the middle of town square. That would defeat the purpose entirely. The picture would change every five seconds, so someone would have to LOOK at it every five seconds, much less find someone on there who might be a terroist.
I agree with the poster that it is so crazy that it might work. The only thing that i doubt is that they're going to pay $10/hour for people to watch this. That's a very good salary, and i wouldn't mind doing it for that much.
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
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.
I can see all the arguments for and against this system, and while it is obviously well-intentioned, I find it a bit disturbing. It's all well and good sticking security cameras around the place and putting trained security individuals in charge of watching them, but this sounds like a helpdesk thing - they get a small amount of "training" and then they're released out into the real world, with a wizard to help them.
"Is there a person on the camera?" Yes
"Are the person's eyes looking shifty?" Yes
"Is this person wearing all black?" Yes
"Is the person carrying something?" Yes
"Alert the authorities that a Muslim individual is walking around in the local supermarket carrying military-grade C4 explosives! Query the man through the loudspeaker. Don't believe him if he says he's doing his shopping! Don't accept any other explanations he gives! You are ALWAYS right, and even if you aren't, this wizard IS!"
Orwellian nightmare?
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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.
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?
1984, George Orwell. (on-line version)
What are the odds on them starting to recruit children from the schools first...?
RTFA... This system as described only sends video when it detects motion. Then once motion is detected it sends the video to three of these "unsophisticated" viewers. If they see somehting interesting, it is then sent to ten more. If there is agreement that something is worth checking out in the video, then the professionals take over.
As described, this is only useful for moniitoring places where people rarely venture, and really shoulnd't be anyway, such as power substations and bridges in remote areas, etc.
Looks like a pretty good system to me, at first glance.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
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.
Yes, the article specifically mentioned pointing those cameras at places where nobody is supposed to be.
For now.
For years, the government has gotten around the Constitution by outsourcing its atrocities. They can't really abridge the rights of people by interrogating them here, so they let their allies do it. They're prevented from infringing the privacy of the people (but in many cases still do it), but they're fine with letting companies collect the data and then rifling through their records.
They've made a science of preserving the illusion of freedom while making it scarcer and scarcer in real life. That's because the government's primary goal is to protect itself. The consumers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hitizens come a distant second.
If by some miracle the webcam idea works (and I really don't think it will, except as a psychological deterrent to attacks on soft targets), someone will suggest it gets "spread" to other places. The citizens of the nation will manage to keep themselves under tight scrutiny at the behest of the government. Can you say "worst case scenario," boys and girls?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
It's already been done in Britain, iirc. I remember seeing a short piece on a news program a while back about some poor couple who were living on a city block with a camera mounted on the pole outside. Because of where it was mounted, it had the freedom to turn to look through their windows. The piece was about how they were trying to get whomever had installed the camera to put limiters on it so the people operating the cam would stop peeping on them all the time.
let's put a webcam at every corner in public places, then put a sign under the webcam stating its ip address (maybe ipv6 would help).
Now everybody with an internet connection can watch any webcam at any time.
Since it would be impossible to know who is watching the camera that's above your head, everybody will become a good and productive dron^H^H^H^Hcitizen.
oh, and the paranoia that would arise shortly after will be defined as anti-American: if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have to worry about anything.
say welcome to the new Privacy era!
ps: this is supposed to be a joke. If you don't get it, don't care about it.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
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."
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.
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