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Downtown Baltimore To Get Massive Surveillance Network
An anonymous reader writes "The Baltimore Sun has an article on the new 24-hour security cameras to be installed downtown and in the Inner Harbor. 'Under the Inner Harbor plan, the cameras would be able to transmit images to helicopters and, eventually, police cruisers....' How long until that ability is either abused or hijacked?"
Yeah.. let the college students run that system, I can see it now...
Student 1: Oh, dude... check this chick out! If you zoom in close enough you can see her nipples!
Student 2: Yeah, I think she's in my History class. Look at that fine ass!
All the while the Bank of Baltimore is getting robbed across the street.
This whole thing sounds like a way Baltimore can keep their grants from the US Governmetn. It's very comparable to the construction industry in every local city and state. If they don't use up ALL of the funds for that FY (and even request more) then there's a high chance that next FY it will be reduced.
Even Baltimore's city council president was concerned about this very thing saying "she was concerned that the federal grants would eventually run out and the city would be stuck with the bill.."
But the mayor says:
I'm sorry Martin O'Malley, but there are many other ways that you can prevent crime and terrorism than by setting up a 24-hour surveillance network in the city. How about increasing a police force in the city so that a presence is seen? Wouldn't residents feel a bit more comfortable having an actual person than a camera?
You could hire more police officers and increase the workforce. But, instead you are going to pay retired police officers and college kids to sit on their ass and wait for somethign to happen. Plain stupid.
Hmmm.
Yeah, I have to admit that while I'm visiting here in London right now, it makes me feel safer that there are cameras there. But guess what, last night I saw a kid chasing two black guys down a well-lit street who had stolen his bag.
So the cameras do nothing, but give the impression of protection, all the while invading our privacy.
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I believe that few people would object to the cameras being there if they were only to be used in support of Probable Cause investigation. This means that if the cameras were used if a Crime was reported to support the case to deal with it.
The problem is that it will become a case of "Vending Machine Justice" where you will be watched until an "Offense" happens and then you will be pounced on. The problem with this is that Probable Cause requires a real or imminent threat of real injury and not the usual brushing and bumping of daily life.
We all know that the eyes will be jaded towards catching the people who oppose those in power as opposed to just dealing with problems that citizens report. This is the whole problem with the security demands of today. They all arise from the disrespect of the citizens by the police etc rather than from the damage of the criminals.
On 9/11/2001 we got wonderful camera pictures of Mr. Atta and his gang as they went about their effort to destroy our country. At no point in the pictures did the cameras and the watchful eyes see anything of the horrific crimes going down. Nor could they have done so until the knives were used. All that we will get out of such thinking as is going on is the rise of a much worse terrorism by the State than was ever contemplated by the terrorists.
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If they did this in my home town. Sure, criminal activities will no longer take place under the watchful eye of the camera. They will just take place elsewhere. But these cameras interfere with my right to go wherever I goddamn please without someone knowing where I went, and where I went from there, and what I did while there, etc etc. Now it's criminal activities, next time the tapes will be used to monitor people who are suspected of other unpleasant activities, after which someone will manage to get the tapes to prove a case of adultery. Privacy IS important, because it means having the right to live life like you want it to (I know- criminals want privacy too, I don't pretend to have the ideal solution here), even though we do not always realize the countless ways in which we are giving it up. Hell, we shouldn't even be posting here, Google has our number :)
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There are cameras everywhere in the UK.
The funny thing is that if you point this out to people, they say there isn't or that they hadn't noticed, until you point them out that is. And then they don't seem to see it as an issue.
However, I think the attitude is understandable to an extent because the UK has a history of hundreds of years of fairly benevolent government and policing. The Btits I'm sure are the most spied on people in the world and the UK has one of the biggest "intelligence" operations in the world relative to the country's size, but people are unaware and/or unconcerned about it because it rarely if ever affects the man in the street.
The only time the average Brit sees evidence of the dark side of their country is when some public figure has an accident or commits suicide at a very opportunistic moment for the country.
The cameras may increase crime.
Melbourne Australia has a large number of cameras in some parts of the downtown and they are not effective. Someone who worked for the city claims that people were not reporting crimes because they thought the cameras would catch the people. It turns out that after spending millions of dollars, they haven't been effective at catching criminals. This was recently in the news here so I'm sure more info is at google news. The result of a recent investigation is that the cameras aren't worth wath they cost and do nothing to help prevent crime and nothing in catching criminals but they are going to stay a while longer.
Recently, three immigrant children were decapitated in a northern Baltimore apartment. There has been a lot of speculation that it was part of an illegal immigration scheme. The mayor himself visited the crime scene. I live nearby, and have friends who live on that block. Baltimore is a huge melting pot of a city, and, I suppose, an ideal target for terrorist cells. We are the farthest inland sea port, close to DC, etc. and the mayor completely flipped after 911 about security. But I don't really see how these big brother cameras will make a difference one way or the other. I guess is something blew up in the inner harbor, "they" might now about it a few seconds earlier than they would have without them.
This definitely feeds the "Culture of Fear" that this current administration has worked so hard to foster.
"To be fair, you don't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street in downtown Baltimore."
I'd maintain that unless you are in the presence of other people you have every reasonable expectation of privacy. Cameras are not people.
If you have a clothing problem in public, do you usually look for a semi-private nook or side area to make your adjustment? That's an expectation of privacy, even at a small level.
The entire point is that one should be able to go along and do as one wants without worry about others butting in. I personally believe in allowing people do do what they want as long as they don't infringe upon others. Obviously mugging is a form of infringement, but if they want to correct that they need to post people out there in dark blue uniforms with shiny stylized pieces of metal worn, not cameras. They need to allow the populace to defend itself without fear of legal action by a criminal who is injured in the act of committing a crime. Cameras don't prevent the mugger from attacking, and they don't necessarily do a very good job of identifying the suspect either, as all of those convenience store and bank cameras have demonstrated for decades.
Cameras have never made me feel more secure, except in one or two really weird situations, like a building fire alarm evacuation.
I don't support the idea of using cameras for direct traffic enforcement either. I would concede that using red-light-activated cameras isn't wrong, but should be used as supplimentary evidence to determine what happened in a car accident in an intersection. Otherwise, use the data collected to send a nice letter to the driver informing them that they'll be asked to enroll in a traffic school with penalty of license removal if they continue the practice. Don't use them for direct citations, don't use them for velocity.
Get cameras out of our society. Big Brother does not need to be watching us.
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Police walking the beat ready to arrest people who commit crimes is a deterrent. Police sitting in rooms eating donuts and oggling cute girls on a CCTV camera is not a deterrent.
Robberies in the town near where I work have gone _UP_ since police patrols were replaced with CCTV, since the robbers just use sophisticated 'ski mask' stealth technology to avoid being identified. Crooks care about the high risk of being caught by a cop on patrol when they commit a crime, not the minimal risk of being caught from a CCTV tape.
On the other hand, I hear that there's been a reduction in important crimes, like people pissing in the street on the way home from the pub.
i submit that the current implementation constitutes abuse.
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