Slashdot Mirror
Thinking About the SnitchCam
Saint Aardvark writes "From Dan's Data comes a fascinating look at the consequences of tiny, wireless video cameras: "Right now, it's hard to prove that (for instance) riot police really beat the crap out of innocent people at a demonstration....Live streaming video from multiple cameras operated by lots of people at the same time, though, will be a different matter. Even without cryptographic jiggery-pokery, it'll be practically impossible to get away with even minor editing-room spin doctoring, if thousands of people around the world have the original footage on their hard drives." "
Between the need to keep myself safe from injustice by documenting/recording everything, and massive invasion of privacy by documenting/recording everything...
Can someone reason me out of this conundrum? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it too?
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Hey cops get accused of things all the time. It seems to me these cameras might cut both ways.
Funny, a while back here in the UK there was a program about people who used tiny cameras which sent the image of credit card pins & numbers when put into an ATM back to a mobile sitting in a nearby street and I wondered how long it would be before I saw one used where I live..
Then last week, while walking through town at college I saw a swarm of police around an ATM machine with one of them holding those little camera strip things they put on ATM machines to look nicely inconspicuous while recording stuff.. Yeah they can be easily abused and it happens a lot, costs millions, but so can everything in the wrong hands, n they're cool
In Quebec City, 2001, I shot 3 hours of DV footage. People getting surrounded and beaten up. An elderly woman having a cannister of CS-555 lobbed at her. It did nothing. Some of the footage was even plyed on tv. I guess it's not brutality if no-one's bleeding, right?
-Leigh
When I was in London a couple years ago, I knew that I was on-camera everywhere I went and I felt safer. Part of that was because I knew that policemen were watching. I think that if I knew that the people watching and analyzing my behavior were just people with an axe of one type or another to grind, or goody-two-shoes types that want to force their morals on everyone, I'd feel less safe rather than more safe.
Curiouser and curiouser, and doubleplusbad, methinks.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
What's needed is the ability to take pictures or video, have it transmitted wirelessly to a trusted third party who can attest as to content and time stamp. (I've pondered this sort of system in vehicles, so that a driver could record a "Driving While Black" type incident, and be able to provide evidence to his attorney that would be more likely to stand up in a civil suit.)
Such a system would also require cameras that provide tamper-resistant digital signatures for each frame. This wouldn't make doctoring impossible, but should quiet some of the objections to this sort of evidence.
... it's shoking at the 1st time... it's somewhat disturbing at the 10th time... and it who gives a fuck at the 1000th time.
Just think of those footages you saw last time about children dying of hunger. Can you remember what did you do? Opened a new can of Coke?
Just a Random.idea
With apologizes to Dr. Stallman, I'd like to point out that information systems to which everyone has access to the information it manages/monitors/etc. are less prone to abuse by bureaucracies or governments. Take "red light cameras," for example. These are foisted on municpalities under the auspices of "public safety" (e.g. fewer red light runners, ergo fewer intersection accidents). However, since the operation of these systems is typically obfuscated, these systems invariably become nothing more than revenue generators. Yellow lights are shortened, in order to increase the "catch." Never mind that this "forces" people to "run the yellow" and thereby increase the likelihood that there will be a ROW-induced collision.
If everyone had some way to monitor exactly what these cameras saw, exactly how the lights were timed, etc. it would be dissected in public enough to prevent these sorts of scams. The same goes for "safety" cameras in public. If you saw exactly how much of an invasion of privacy a given camera amounted to, you would bet there would be fewer of them, and those that are allowed would better meet the specified purpose (instead of "once it's there, nobody will notice we're not looking just at what we said we were").
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Conspiratorial overtones aside... I mean, really, I gotta see this mythical Ashcroft League of Priapatetic Darkness (or whatever it may be called by the moveon.org crowd these days) bust into a server room in West Armpit, China and run off with the results of some guy's DV recordings before the public sees it...
Hint: It is literally impossible to stop information once it gets online and out to the public proper.
The German government tried the censorship route in 1996 over a shitty little online rag called Radikal, and they couldn't stop Germans from seeing it (or even slow 'em down by much), even back when the 'net was damned tiny compared to what it is today.
The Chinese, which do have a totalitarian government right now, can't even stop their own population from proxying and satelliting their way out beyond official governmental firewalls and seeing whatever they want. This is in spite of a government which does have (and exercises on an alarming basis) the power of life or death, freedom or imprisonment, over their citizenry.
Hell, there's a damned hard fight in keeping the frickin' child porners to a minimum, and there's no nation on Earth that endorses that stuff. What makes you think that the US gov't is any more efficient in stopping information that half the planet's leadership couldn't give a dried dog's turd about.
The PATRIOT Act is limited to US territory and any foreign country which agrees by treaty to help enforce it. The list of signatory nations ain't all that damned long.
So, please, lay off the wolf-crying. Gad.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Remember to VOTE!
For who? John Kerry voted for the Patriot act, as did every other senator save one. George Bush didn't veto it. This is just another issue where there's no difference between the candidates. The same plan for Iraq. No mention of the War on Drugs. Same gun control policy (Guns for hunters, not for militias). The differences in their health care plans will just shuffle a little money around amongst the richer folks.
John Kerry focuses on outsourcing when that is a miniscule percentage of jobs lost. John Kerry focuses on getting drugs from Canada, without asking why drugs here cost so much. It's all misdirection. George Bush is left as an exercize for the reader.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually a better, far more realistic scenario...
Say you (or your sister) were a pregnant college girl walking in to get an abortion, and the local "right-to-life"thugs decided to video tape you and use that to identify and/or harass you.
Oh, you agree with the right-to-life thugs? Well what if the abortion clinic uses the same cameras to video tape and identify you and sends some pro-choice thugs over to firebomb your favorite church. Or gives the video to the police to "investigate" you.
Any technology is likely to be misused by people wanting to discredit, harass, or abuse their enemies.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Much the same is already happening. In the olden days, if you recklessly blew through a red light, a cop would stop you, assess your intent and/or emotional state and make sure you didn't do it again. Nowadays, you can blow through ten lights in a row and get 10 citations in the mail two weeks later. This hardly discourages incorrect behavior.
That's horseshit. The vast majority of those that don't vote do so because they are too damned lazy to either a.) get their asses to the polls or b.) educate themselves enough on the issues to be able to make an informed decision. Only a small fraction of those who abstain from voting do so based on some ill-conceived moral perogative to not "lend legitimacy to an illegitimate system."
-Matt
Duke '05
Dude. Seriously. "I couldn't get to the poll?" I bet in school your dog ate your homework.
Register as a permanent absentee voter - you vote on your time, you mail the vote in (or drop it off at the county) and you avoid last-minute crap like people reregistering you in a different precinct.
If voting ain't a personal priority, that's your deal. But if you don't vote, then it's not, "because I had to work late," it's because you're a lazy bastard. Own it.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Not voting means elections are decided by people who are not you. If everyone insightful enough to perceive flaws in the electoral system doesn't vote, you get a government elected by the dumbest, most apathetic, least observant, and most single-minded.
If you don't like the system--and sure, there's plenty not to like--then agitate to change it. There are many sensible ways to do this. Abdicating your right to be heard isn't one of them.
I should buy some cement.
I seriously wish the seattle police woulda done even more. I cheered them when I read the paper the next day. Even though the article tried to make it out as something bad.
Well they did go apeshit on a bunch of mostly peaceful protesters instead of arresting the violent ones like they did the previous time. I was in Seattle when it was happening. I wonder how many of the violent protestors were planted by the cops - it seems to be increasingly common.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
> I wonder how many of the violent protestors were planted by the cops - it seems to be increasingly common.
It's not more common at all, there's just been a bit of a gap since they last had to do it. The police (and other agencies) used to regularly plant provocateurs in the demonstrations against the Great Military Adventure in Vietnam 35 years ago.
What a long, strange trip it's been.