Slashdot Mirror
Southeast To Start Video Monitoring Flights
NormalVisual writes "According to this article, Southeast Airlines will begin digitally recording everything that goes on during one of their flights. Moreover, they have said they will be retaining the recorded video for up to 10 years. The privacy implications here are worrying, and this sets a bad precedent, IMO." (Southeast is a charter company, not a big scheduled carrier.)
Guess Orwell was right...
regarding what you do in public? The other people on the plane may be looking at you. Does that worry you also?
word.
An airline is a private organization. You're free to choose whether or not you fly with them. If you're going to step on board their property, you've got to follow their rules--it's that simple.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Freedoms at the door. Flying isn't a God-given right, it's a damn privelege. When you board a plane, you play by their rules. The public transportation in my city has cameras on all the busses... it's meant to aid in finding those the vandalize or otherwise break the law.
Whining about this is almost as bad as the tool that got kicked off a British Airways flight for wearing a button that said "Suspected Terrorist." When you board a plane, you no longer follow the Constitution to the letter --- it's not the open public. It's either their way, or the Long Island Expressway.
Learn to play by others' rules or until then, STFU.
That is all.
The security on airlines is alittle out of control. I understand people's fears, but the truth is that these extra measures just lull people into a false sense of security.
I travel frequently and have on many cases had my bag searched. Yet after the security check points they would gladly sell me things that serve as a weapon. Glass bottles for example are much more dangerous than my mother's coupon scissors (you know the plastic rounded type, yet still conviscated).
I guess they are counting on face recognition software, but the fact of the matter is that anyone who would be worth recognizing probably has the means to change their face.
Do you slashdot readers feel safer now that they have this extra security?
Rob
Does it really matter if there's a camera on the plane? did you really have any privacy to begin with? you're only sitting in a plane with 200+ other people. And what would you be trying to hide on a plane besides something that isn't suppose to be there? I mean, the only real reason I can see some objecting to this is so the airline can't sell the tape of you having sex in the washroom.
in the bonds, ppka
You KNOW that there will be some crashes that will get recorded and soon or later they will be leaked onto the internet.
We'll see people getting spammed about and cooked as planes auger into the ground or the ocean or buildings.
You know some sick bastards will do this.
I used to work in a TV studio many years ago and there was one camera man that was seriously sick. He kept a personal library of death videos, car wrecks, murder scenes, you name it. I think he probably masturbated to this stuff considering how excited he would get when he got new footage of dead people.
Sad to say it but there really are some sicko's out there...
Think about this analogy:
What if these 'other people' on planes one day decided to carry notebooks and sketchpads,
taking in every detail and keeping it on record.
Wouldn't this bother you?
It seems like people have taken to appending that phrase, "the privacy implications here are worrying" to every article they submit. It's a fucking airplane, people - since when do you expect to have privacy?
Christ, talk about a knee-jerk reaction. About the worst this will do is enable a bored technician to watch you pick your nose ten years from now, and the best it will do is help the FBI catch a terrorist (or even an ordinary, everyday criminal).
This space intentionally left blank.
So an airline has said that they will start taping the cabind during flight, to prevent terrorism and other safety threats. Why is this bad? Is this any different from a drugstore or a bank having a surveilence camera running? No, it isn't. Do we complain about those? Not that I've heard.
I know, some of you may say that beeing taped while you're on board a plane is a breach of your right to privacy - but since when is a chartered plane your private area anyway? It's a public area, and when you're in public, you can be seen by others.
That said, I'm not too happy about them storing the video for ten years - two years should be the most, and unless something spectacular happened on the flight (like Elvis materialising and singing 'love me tender'), it should only be released to the proper authorities by the orders of a court. The one exeption to that rule would be if the carrier themself needed to use the video if it had to sue a passenger for air-rage (endangering the safety of the other passangers).
No, installing a few cameras in an airplane wont - as the article points out - prevernt terrists from attemting to take over the plane. But it might just be enought to stop that fatass next to you from getting hideously drunk and suffer from air-rage. And that can't be a bad thing, can it?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Most airplanes in the US record less than 10% of the flight data they are supposed to, and they want to waste their time with this? When your airplane crashes, the black box usually doesn't have near enough information to figure out what killed you and what they can do to prevent it. That's why it can take anywhere from months to years to come up with a recommendation. In the meantime, for lack of black box data, you get to fly with increased risk. What argument do the airlines use to get away with it? Too much weight.
In Europe, every carier records hundreds of parameters of the flight. After even a minor problem on the flight, the data tape is pulled and analyzed by maintenance. The result is they don't have stupid maintenance accidents like Alaska Airlines did. Stuck rudder? It's analyzed and fixed within weeks, not left unchecked for months.
The only reason they are recording their passengers is to protect them from liability when they handcuff an unruly passenger. It has little to do with increasing your safety.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
The chance of any particular flight having "terrorists" is virtually nil. That can't be the reason that the airline is considering doing it. I see this as a way to check job performance of the airline employees. "See, we have of it right here. You weren't nice enough to customer Joe X." Just like all other forms of workplace monitoring, I suppose, and a CYA against employee-based suits for wrongful termination, discrimination, etc.
Ok, so what's to stop you from slipping a little piece of airplane-trim-colored tape over the lens staring you back in the face? Or a little vaseline to blur things a tad? Or, if you're feeling really nasty, some nail polish, clear or otherwise(it'll permanently bond to the plastic lens.)
Please help metamoderate.
If they indeed are planning to install cameras, I would like to see them choose the first alternative...beam all videos live to monitoring stations, to constantly monitor the passengers, warn the crew of dangerous activity and take preventive action.
FDRs are basically doomsday equipment, useful only after an incident has occurred, it would make more sense to work towards preventing incidents, rather than plan towards subsequent investigations and lawsuits.
Ofcourse, the costs involved in setting up live broadcasting of video, and the infrastructure to monitor the large number of simultaneous flights/cameras would prove prohibitive.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Do you see a difference between the following two situations:
(1) you are in a public place, and other people can see you
(2) you are in a public place, and video archives of everything you do are stored and accessible, now, for 10 years, but almost certainly, for life
Do you not see a difference?
One is called reputation. The other is something that enables Orwellian nightmares.
There is a certain invevitability that is working here, but all that recommends is that the state not be in charge.
I forget what 8 was for.
Whining about this is almost as bad as the tool that got kicked off a British Airways flight for wearing a button that said "Suspected Terrorist."
John Gilmore has done more for personal freedoms and liberties on the net than anyone you know. He founded or helped found the EFF, the "alt" newsgroups, the Cypherpunks, and Cygnus Support, the first company that showed that you could make money supporting open source software. Cygnus was later bought by Red Hat for umpteen millions of dollars, but Gilmore was already rich, having been one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems.
He has steadily plowed his money back into causes designed to promote freedom online and in the physical world. He has funded the FreeS/Wan project designed to provide automatic link-based encryption. He's also funded efforts to add security to the DNS. He provided the money for the machine that proved once and for all that DES was insecure. He is presently suing the government over travel restrictions.
As for the button incident, his point is that we are all being treated as suspected terrorists under the current regulations. As long as people put up with that without a protest, nothing is going to change. We should all be grateful that someone with Gilmore's credentials and financial strength is doing something about the increasingly harsh restrictions that all of us face as the government cracks down.
This is obviously a bogus concept for any number of reasons:
/. who support this sort of thing for "security" reasons will wake up and smell the ruminant evacuation, but I'm not holding my breath.
1) Since they don't videotape the johns, anybody can can do anything in there - including nookie between the pilots/stewardesses/passengers (make up your own combination!), terrorists preparing weapons, criminals smoking dope, etc. So there's no advantage.
2) As someone pointed out, keeping it for ten years is braindead. It's extremely unlikely that any liability or security concerns - or even marketing concerns - could justify that time span.
3) As for processing the video, keep in mind that this stuff is probably going to be digitized and stored where pattern recognization software might be able to process it - if not now, then ten years from now. This means a vast store of videos for Homeland Security to look at and analyze - at taxpayer expense - to no good ends. Or for the airlines - and whoever else they sell the data to - to use for marketing purposes.
4) They ADMIT that the purpose is to enable law enforcement to keep track of criminals! THIS MEANS YOU! This means the tapes WILL BE PROVIDED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT ROUTINELY! Read the fraggim' article!
5) As someone in the article points out, what's the point of keeping tapes of flights where nothing happens? It is obvious that there are ulterior motives here.
6) As for why THEY are doing it, the article says Homeland Security WILL eventually mandate it, so they are starting now. This means the ball comes from Homeland Security's court, but the airline sees a marketing advantage from analyzing all those videos for marketing purposes. This also means that once Homeland Security has mandated it, the notion "if you don't like it, don't fly with this specific airline" is not a viable option for business travelers who MUST fly on business.
While it is obviously true that you have no privacy in public places and should not particularly expect any, there is a difference betweem being inspected by your fellow asshole citizen and being inspected by some marketing asshole or some security asshole you don't know and who may have an agenda and the authority to put your ass in jail based on misinterpretation of some grainy vidcap.
One hopes all the stupid, right-wing, patriotic American dolts on
Morons...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!