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." "

Comments

Torn

[Enigma_Man]

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

Re:Torn

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone reason me out of this conundrum? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it too?

Sure, the problem is with eating your cake and having it, too.

More seriously, my personal, non-legally-binding view is there has to be a clear, legal separation between areas with an expectation of privacy and areas considered "public." If a cop or a stranger can legally observe you from somewhere, then it doesn't matter if you replace a human with a camera.

Within a person's home, you have the legal right to tape what you want but strangers do not and the police need a warrant. If you tape a cop beating you up and you show it, that is fine, if cops secretly tape you without a warrant they should be punished.

Finally, a uniformed cop on duty in a public area (i.e. not in a restroom or in his own home) should have no expectation of privacy, since the uniform itself is a public display of his authority. By wearing it he consents to observation by the general public, so if he drags a motorist out of a car and starts pounding on him there should be no assumption that he won't see his sorry a** on the local news.

It often hard to prove the Cops are innocent

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey cops get accused of things all the time. It seems to me these cameras might cut both ways.

it will do shit-all

[Pandora's Vox]

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

... how amazing and awful ...

[ninjagin]

The article combines aspects of two of my favorite books: The Artificial Kid (Bruce Sterling) and 1984 (George Orwell). I've recently re-read both of them. The amazing thing is that the snitch-cam concept may supercede so-called "reality TV". The awful thing is that people will inevitably use it to not only validate the conformity of others, but as a vehicle for a snitch-based cash income.

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.

"Open" systems are easier to legitimize

[csoto]

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").