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Britain is the World's Surveillance Leader
hax0r_par writes "It seems that in Britain, surveillance on the general public is happening and being recorded 24/7. They are playing the angle that this is allowing for criminal surveillance, which seems justified by the article. But it really is something to take into paranoid consideration now that we've got the technology to make this possible."
Everyone--from good hearted people to downright argumentative trolls--misses the point on spying.
I don't care about online privacy. I'm not worried about government spooks sifting through my e-mail or web surfing habits and finding out that I like brunettes with long legs, long hair, and almond shaped eyes. It really doesn't concern me. If it were some supercomputer sitting in a back room chewing through e-mail looking for "homicide, suicide, terror, assassinate, secret, password, 9/11" or some other stupid set of keywords or tracing kiddie porn that'd be fine by me. At least until the anti-pr0n people decide that moral righteousness has no bounds and start coming after willing adults with no real sex life and a speedy net connection.
Face it. We live in the real world. People in power let it go to their heads and they often use it for purposes other than those in which it was given to them for.
What I'm worried about is that the guy down the block is an FBI agent. Or CIA. Or NSA. Or some local politician who knows one. One day I'm walking down the street and a candy wrapper drops out of my pocket onto his lawn. Now this guy is such a straight laced Bible thumping tight a__ POS that he uses his political muscle to find out who I am and begin harassing me. "He dropped a candy wrapper on my lawn! He's a litterer! He's no good for society! Besides, I saw him carrying home a six-pack of beer! He must be an alcoholic as well!"
Where's the check and balance? There is none. Who could prove it? No one. Who can stop it? No one.
Echelon, Big Brother surveillance, the Anti-Terror bill. They all suck for the same reason that the Windows registry sucks: there's no way to secure them from people misusing them to hijack the system.
--
We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind
If you're in a public area, being recorded is fair game. It's no different than if a store employed security gaurds to watch over you while you shopped, or having a police officier stood on the corner watching everyone go buy. People get all uppity because it's technology, and we all know technology is bad, right?
I was attacked several years ago. Unprovoked; they were drunk, I was drunk. Anyway, the attack resulted in me being partially blinded in one eye. The police never caught the idiot who did it; not that they didn't try, but I couldn't exactly give them a good description. I wish there had been a camera at the spot where it happened. I fucking wish! So don't bleat on about personal privacy, because you've already got it. Unless you're in public.
CCTV cameras have been around in numbers in the UK for a long time. Did it stop the IRA from bombing London some years ago? of course not.
A perfect proof, if one was needed, that putting a country under surveilance may have a little effect on petty high street thieves, but most certainly has nothing to offer to curtail terrorism, and everything to do with controlling the populace.
Orwell.......grave........spinning
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
> You know there's a reason 1984 was set in Great Britain. I was written by a Brit?
"There is one thing that privacy advocates are forgetting, for there to be an impact on your privacy there needs to be either a person at the other end of the camera, or an automated consequence."
Nope, us privacy advocates understand this problem, and would like to point out that the camera's deterrent nature falls completely off once the first person has undertaken an illegal action under the camera and *not* faced any kind of punitive action. The majority of cameras are run by third party companies where they can be funded. I happen to live in a town where they spent all the money on the cameras and didn't have enough to staff them. Incidentally, the siteing of the cameras is also illegal under the CCTV extensions to the data protection act. But that's okay, they're the government.
"I trust the British government"
Well, I'll continue to be one of those naive privacy advocates until you shift your arse enough to understand that the government doesn't really care if you trust them or not, and that the time when you don't trust the government might be a few days too late to do anything. Also, it should be pointed out that it's local councils that handle cameras outside of the M25, and they've been models of civic pride. Discounting the special deals they make with developers. Or minor cases of corruption.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
There's the slight matter of who watches what the cameras produce, and where that footage gets to.
If there were more rigidly enforced rules as to what can be recorded and how it can be used, then perhaps the cameras wouldn't be so bad - instead, you can get filmed by dozens of cameras and not have a clue what's being done with the footage.
Cameras might be helpful in catching criminals, but too many times you see fuzzy, single-frame-per-second, black-and-white video footage of an armed robbery with the police asking if anyone in the public recognises the masked perpetrators...
Then there's the mast-mounted CCTV cameras in town centres and the like, which merely have the effect of shifting crime out of the field of view of the cameras' lenses...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Facts as seen by who? Suspicious according to what criteria? Into which context will our activities be placed?
At the moment I feel that I trust the British government enough that this is an acceptable situation, look at the impact the congestion charges (and enforcement cameras) have had on London traffic for example.
Honestly, you trust the government at the moment (I'm also from the UK)? I certainly do not, and by the dramatic plunge in confidence ratings for Labour I'm not alone (not advocating an alternative party, merely pointing out the failings of the one in power).
And yes, let's look at the London congestion scheme. Brought in ostensibly to cure central traffic problems, when revenue undershot expectations they decided to extend the scheme to the suburbs against the wishes of 76% of the inhabitants, and today it's announced they're also raising the price. Trffic problems? Revenue raising.
Also, where do you think the people who used to drive have gone? What's happened to them, what's happened to their quality of life? Or do you feel it is co-incidence that there have been so many Tube failures lately after a surge in passenger numbers and drastic overcrowding on certain lines?
Cheers,
Ian
I think other countries have to understand the British obsession with binge drinking and random physical drunken violence to appreciate why we don't really care about the amount of CCTV.
When it is just you and a bunch of drunken yobs on the street, you may still get the crap beaten out of you or mugged, but at least with CCTV you stand a good chance of getting them caught and convicted.
We now know it does reduce crime, and increases detection and conviction rates, all at the cost of some imagined "privacy" while in a PUBLIC place.
CCTV has caught child killers, rapists, drunk drivers and so forth, in return there is footage of me scratching my arse while waiting to cross the road , which will be kept for a month or so before being taped over.
Hardly a terrible price to pay all things considered.
When the government passes a law mandating all cameras have to be digital, all digital footage has to be kept forever, and connected to a government face recognition system, then I'll be concerned.
As it stands most footage is erased after a month, and is stored on hundreds of individual unconnected systems. Hardly Big Brother.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
I just moved out of London because I was fed up with the noise and traffic. The amount of traffic was insane - most days I could have walked on stationary cars in a traffic jam the entire mile to the tube station without touching the ground.
The number of times I would walk past some poor pedestrian surrounded by paramedics after being hit by a car was insane. Something had to be done about it.
Almost every car you see is just carrying one person. That's just not sustainable. Charging a toll that's really not that great compared to parking charges is a good way for the city to raise money to pay for upgrading public transport, and to make the car drivers actually pay for the vast damage they are doing.
The reason why it was located in Britain was because the author is britisch. The book itself could play in any country of the world. I consider George Orwell to be a genious. He bascially extracted the base of ever suppressive government out of the sign of the times (Back then he had Stalin and Hitler as good examples) and made a timeless metapher out of those things he could gather. Both books animal farm and 1984 would fit perfectly in every country which shows the signs of totality or the stages of beginning. Don't get me wrong my american friends, but back then animal farm and 1984 was more or less a mockery of communism, but I consider it essential political literature, because there are signs in your society is as well, which are the dawn of totality and oppression which were clearly shown in the book (and in the history) Totality always has the same face being it communism, being it and oppressive democracy (those things exist, look at Fujimoris Peru) being it a dictatorship or a plutocracy ( a government form where the people with the money dictate things)
Bear in mind that under contemporary definitions your 'Founding Fathers' would have been considered dangerous terrorists.
The founding fathers were pretty much driven by paranoia of a geographically and socially distant government becoming plutocratic and disconnected from the governed. That is why one of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is that of the states to raise and train a civil militia (and the right of the civilians to keep and bear arms for participation in that militia) to oppose and even overthrow the federal government. Given their experiences such paranoia could be considered some what justified.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
You might trust the government now, and welcome more cameras, and in a few years from now major cities could be completely covered by cameras. Which I gather you wouldn't think is a bad thing?
The problem arises when you don't trust the government. A system of cameras covering people's lives gives enormous power to the ones controlling it. Eventually a corrupt group will control the system as it provides too much power to leave alone. Take a camera down for an hour, commit a murder. Blank past recordings for incidents you don't want to be known. Record different events over old tapes, essentially rewriting history.
When you do reach a situation when you no longer trust the people in control it will be next to impossible to stand against them. It would certainly be impossible, if things came to it, to organise any kind of resistance against the government. No such thing as secret meetings. Potentially large crowds could be dispersed before they ever got troublesome.
With no privacy you lose power.
I think the first thing people have to remember is that the CCTV cameras in the UK are not some huge centralised network where Blair can press a button and see me sitting at my laptop in the park. It is decentralised, set up and run by shops, bars, clubs, councils, etc... Enemy Of The State is a cool film, it is also rather silly.
The Brittish government, while I wouldn't go so far as to say I trust them, are relatively benign when it comes to nation affairs. There are laws protectly us from the missuse of these cameras and if we can't relay on governments abiding by the (national) law then we are all screwed anyway.
I worked for some time in a small shop in a "difficult" area. Sometimes I would be working on my own late at night and my only friend was the CCTV. When trouble was bruing I would say "Smile for the cameras, I'm phoning the police now." Okay this doesn't tackle the route causes of crime but anything that prevents it being perpetrated on me right now is a very good thing.
"that the time when you don't trust the government might be a few days too late to do anything."
I imagine that I will get flamed for this, but I think the statement above is very true, esp. concerning England. Personal ownership of fire arms is a much easier and, in my opinion, much more effective way of preventing crime. Violent crime in Britian as risen greatly since the fire arm ban. Bobbies are now being issued guns. If you want crime to go away, get guns in the hands of the citizens.
Just to show I am not talking out of my ass.
Apparently Violent Gun Crime has gone up 20% in the last year
" Later in the week the home secretary is to host a summit on tackling gun crime, which figures due out on Thursday are expected to show has risen sharply......It is expected the figures will show a 20% increase in firearm offences in England and Wales."
Another article from the BBC about it
Another Article
Heu Fox News gets in on the action too, you decide!
In all fairness, I have tried to include several sources and not just gun nut sites in the US. Flame away
Hang on, I live in the UK.
I don't want to know that a camera can watch me getting mugged.
I DONT WANT TO BE MUGGED IN THE FIRST PLACE!
This is the same as the policemen sitting down letting technology do the work for them (speed cameras etc).
Its unfortunate you lived in a rough neighbourhood, and I have been in similar situations.
I would rather spend 10 times as much money (yes even raise taxes if needbe) on real life, actual police officers that I can see and speak to.
Getting real officers out and about doesnt just reduce crime, it gives people confidence and peace of mind. A camera just idly watches it happen.
Technology should never replace the human touch, cctv does have a place, but not sprinkled around like confetti.
I fear to do it however would mean a major shakeup of everything though, but thats my £0.02 worth.
liqbase
How is it invasion of privacy when you are filmed in a public place?
:-)
If there were cameras installed in my house, I would have privacy issues, but not in the town centre.
No-one has issues with cameras in banks, shops or ATMs. No-one asks tourists to delete photos that include them in the background.
Why is it such an issue in public places if the camera is run by the police?
Does anybody believe there are hoards of analysts checking these tapes for individuals in real time?
Do you believe everybody is interested in you?
Do you believe the guv'mint is keeping tabs on you, where you walk, what you buy, who you talk to, just because they can?
Does anybody actually identify with Mel Gibson's character in Conspiracy Theory? Are we being tracked by the metal strips in our currency?
I believe this is just a mistrust of the unknown thing. In the distant past, our campfire light didn't illuminate the woods, so there were trolls, gnomes, elves and pixies in there. Same thing these days, but it's Aliens and secret guv'mint departments, because we don't know what they are up to.
Paranoia is no way to live your life, relax, you are not the centre of the universe, nobody cares about you, you are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are a member of a mass, you do not stand out.
Unless, of course, you are all criminals and have your faces in the image recognition software that will call down an airstrike from black helecopters as soon as you are identified!
That was a joke, by the way.
-- I like the cut of your thinking, young man. - me.
Personal ownership of fire arms is a much easier and, in my opinion, much more effective way of preventing crime. Violent crime in Britian as risen greatly since the fire arm ban. Bobbies are now being issued guns. If you want crime to go away, get guns in the hands of the citizens.
Since nobody in UK (apart from weird tabloid-speak and people attempting to be ironic) use the word 'bobbies', I'm assuming you're not from the UK. This would explain your frankly bizzare linking of the firearm ban (which was ridiculous, IMHO) and the rise in violent crime. Absolutley nobody carried (legitimately) a handgun as a crime deterrent and anybody waving a legally-held handgun at a mugger would find themselves locked up pretty quickly.
I'm not saying that gun crime isn't up, I'm not saying that the ban was stupid, but to connect the two is a non-sequitur of pretty big proportions.
CCTV cameras should not be thought of as an alternative to real policemen, but as an alternative to real witnesses. Unfortunately politicians don't always understand this, and use the installation of CCTV cameras as justification for reducing the amount spent on policing...
Had you soundly thrashed the wanker, he might have refrained from starting trouble in the future.
Yeah right. Do you really believe this? If you do, you might well be the least cynical and most naive person alive.
On a reduced level, as a former Junior high school teacher I'm firmly convinced much of the drugs and violence in High School is because we stop bullying in Junior High too much. The way it now works is that the kids with fast mouths victimize and ridicule the ones with fast fists and they are helpless to respond. Even as a teacher who knew which kids to watch, actually catching them picking on someone verbally in earshot is very difficult. On the other hand, seeing the physical retaliation is easy. What a good chunk of these behavior problems need is a good ass kicking. For you non-US, Junior High is ages 10 to 13 generally.
Never confuse volume with power.
If you want crime to go away, get guns in the hands of the citizens.
This has got to be a troll. America is one of the few nations with a high degree of personal firearms, and has crime "gone away" there? I think not.
I am sure that the EU types will love their gun bans until they manage to extinguish in the name of safety all freedom. If you take the USA's crime rate apart by race you find ours even for guns is lower than England for the persons of northern European ancestry. If this is a product of some racial factor or some sociological factor I don't propose to say. The incidence of murder and other violent crimes appears to have a pretty stable rate for various ancestrial groups no matter where in the world they are.
One statistic which simply does not lie is the one which tells how reliable this "Trusting the Government" idea is. In the period from 1900 to 2000 the world saw something close to 205 million persons murdered. During this same period we saw the total number of persons murdered by their fellow citizens in crimes below 5 million. We saw the number of persons murdered by their respective states reach nearly 200 million. Trusting your personal security to a nation state is INSANE.
We have in the USA a creature who is a most peaceful animal. This animal never is known to attack others and is generally left alone by all. It is a porcupine. Assauting a porcupine is a good way to wind up with a face full of quills. (long spikes) So long as the State understands they will get a face full of quills (Bullets) if they bother me. They leave me alone.
In the USA the right to keep and bear arms is not associated with crime control. It is State Control. The reason the State wants gun control is it is getting predatory.
It must be clear to all that removing the quills from porcupines does not enhance the safety of porcupines. It only favors the predators. This is also true regards the State. (State = Nation for those who cannot read the dictionary)
In order for the State to feel safer in hurting its citizens it finds it necessary to make them fearful of the citizens quills. This makes the citizens give up and makes the world safe for the worst of all criminals, the police state.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I live in Britain. The gun ban was not a big deal. No-one had guns anyway. The law has clearly not backfired. I would say it had very little effect at all, guns are not a big part of British culture, and this has not changed...
Besides, the grand-grand-parent suggested that the american idea of people carrying arms to reduce crime was working, hence it's completely fair to compare crime rates between the countries.
Also, one of the articles he pointed to claimed as a great success that the murder rate in the US was now *only* 6 times (!!!) as high as britains, rather than 10 times as high like it used to be.
Even if the arguments of the NRA are applicable in the US (which i doubt) they do not work in a society where guns are as rare as they are in britain. In 7 years here, I have not seen a single gun, not even an imitation one, except for armed policmen at specific point (e.g. airports, the US embassy, visits of foreign dignitaries etc.).
Similarly in 20 years living in Germany I've seen one gun other than in the hands of police. While I spent 1 year in the US I saw countless guns...
If you're not used to that it makes you feel very uncomfortable, I guess if you're used to it it could make you feel safe...
> We saw the number of persons murdered by their respective states reach
> nearly 200 million. Trusting your personal security to a nation state is INSANE.
And you really think that in the states where this happened, guns were not ready available to the populace? Most of these 200Mn deaths are due to attempted coups and revolutions and counter-revolutions and fights with "rebels" etc. etc.
IF the US government starts doing things you don't like, what are you going to do? You really think that handgun in your house is going to stop them?
You really think that if Germans had had more guns, Hitler wouldn't have come to power? You think Hussain would have been removed earlier if there were even more weapons in Iraq? You think Afghanistand was lacking handguns more than anything else? How about Sudan?
The UK has a fifth the population of the USA yet has 50 times less gun crime
This statistic is a little crude because it doesn't take into account very very different levels of gun ownership from place to place. For instance, guns are entirely banned in Washington DC, and DC is often the most likely place to be murdered by a gun in the US.
On the other hand, there are places here in rural Ohio which are so well armed that they could take over a latin american country, and they have not had a murder in that county since Ohio's inception (and they are not necessarily unpopulated...they often have a pretty good sized population.)
And of course there are places that are mixed. Much like comparing the gun culture of Switzerland and Israel to the anti gun culture of Japan (former two have low homicide rates, lots of guns, latter has relatively high murder rates, low guns) its the culture that makes the difference, not the guns.
Interestingly, the places in the US with high crime rates are the places with the most gun control (NYC, LA, etc.). Gun control laws were passed because of high crime rates. Crime rates were not thereby reduced. The answer, of course, was more gun control. And here's why:
"When an ideologue finds himself in a hole, he calls for a bigger shovel." -- Bill Clinton.
Bill is a smart cookie (he also happens to be an advocate of gun control, but there's no law of logic or nature that says a guy who's right about one thing can't be dead wrong about another).
So in places like NYC, gun control has been successful in getting guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, but it has failed utterly to get them out of the hands of criminals, much less reduce the crime rate.
Meanwhile, in parts of the US where law-abiding citizens are allowed to own guns, and in significant numbers do own guns, the crime rate is so low as to make London look like a war zone. That's called a "correlation". We haven't established causality.
All we've done is demonstrate that you're talking out your ass.
All of the examples you give show dictators disarming a (presumably armed) populace after establishing totalitarian power. In other words, the wide availability of guns did not stop them from taking power at all.
The idea that in 1938 (when Hitler passed the law you refer to) the Jews could have mounted an armed struggle against the nazi party, or even against the Gestapo is absolutely ludicrous. The Jews in Germany were not militant nor widely armed in the first place.
You think that you have nothing to hide because
you are ignorant of the large number of laws that
you violate on a daily basis. When you become
politically unpopular, or inconvenient to some
powerful person's brother-in-law, you will be
removed to prison.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Germany elected Hitler - it wasn't totalitarian to begin with. But otherwise, right. They take away the guns while the gov't is trusted. (Sounds like a good idea - fewer weapons means less violence, right?) Then when the gov't changes (or maybe it was the plan all along) the populace is defenseless.
Learn from history. Never, never, never give up your guns. Things may be OK now, but situations can change quickly, and it's too late to undo the mistake of disarming.
Even if the threat of tyrannical gov't is removed, criminal elements alone are reason enough to protect yourself. You wouldn't put a sign in your yard that said, "This home has no effective resistance to a powerful criminal, but police can be summoned in 5-15 minutes" would you? Maybe you live that way, but you're relatively safe because it's unadvertised, and criminals have to risk the odds. But in a country where law-abiding folks are disarmed, the whole country has that sign in their front yard. It's foolish.
Constitutionally Correct