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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." "
Even without cryptographic jiggery-pokery, ..... Say, wha?????
Seriously though, this does raise an important point, however, the real issue is not "is there evidence available", rather it is: "can we get access to the evidence?". There are lots of instances where the facts exist, it is just obtaining access and recent efforts as part of and independent of the revised Patriot Act will make it even harder for the general public to 1) have access to evidentiary information 2) remain anonymous when contributing evidentiary information and 3) avoid prosecution for retaining evidentiary information that might be "determined" sensitive.
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Sounds to me like Big Brother meets P2P.
Any possible "legitimate" use for these things will be dwarfed by the massive amounts of grainy upskirt pornography that will be produced.
Would that make this technology less valuable?
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It certainly could prove useful, but as the Rodney King tape proved, the context often does not get put into play with videos. It's not entirely certain that even 50 people will get the context of a situation recorded. I think the real bonus will be the hesitation of police to react with force in protest situations where everyone has a video outlet. A downside would be their hesitation to react with force when necessary.
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?
:)
Work out a real time recording/encryption system so only you or the people with your key can watch the recording. Let me know when you are done with it, I want to buy one.
Yeah, I have been playing with a vBlog (video blog) here: m3blog.com, and my original idea was to quickly post unedited video quickly.
However, I quickly found out that is was more fun to do a little editing, as people weren't watching my raw posts, they quickly grew bored! And it wasn't very hard to do little quick edits, especially time-shifting, to make events seem like they took place before or after other a certain point.
As a previous poster said, it wont do much, even if you can get to A- produce footage from multiple cameras of 'incidents' ('innocents' getting beaten) B- Distribute said media at a scale large enough to have any kind of impact.
Public opinion is what matters. Try to get your 'point of view' on National TV. Medias are controlled, or at least aren't close to be 100% objective; they show you what they WANT to show you. In this case, Evil Anarchists rioting against the World Economy Globalization.
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All the cameras in the world won't make a difference. All that matters is what people are told they're seeing. That was proven in the famous Rodney King trial.
Or, better yet, look at what happened in Waco. No evidence of illegal activity by the Dividians. No evidence of drug manufacturing. No evidence of child molestation. Ignored evidence of the initial shots being fired by the ATF. Yet our government was able to falsely justify the torture and death of innocent civilians. Few people seemed to notice.
Look at all the video evidence you like. Big Brother will tell you what to see.
I might have been there (Quebec City), and have a similar tape. I especially love how riot police beat up mainstream journalists *first*, and then go after other people.
I asked one of the cameramen that had been hit in the head with a baton how often this happened, and why this was done... He told me that it was very frequent. The cameraman being hit wasn't newsworthy. But once hit, the cameraman would have to retreat, leaving the police unattended by mainstream media to do as they wished.
It's funny how things get misreported, even when the reporters themselves are getting injured before protestors cause trouble/damage.
Then again, I have seen the odd protestor break windows for kicks in Montreal. In particular, people who don't seem to be interested in the protest at all, but who enjoy the havoc created.
This sounds like an idea from David Brin(author of 'The Postman'), called "The Transparent Society", from a book of the same name. Basically, he says that the powers-that-be will always have the power to snoop on the ordinary people, so there is no point in advocating privacy; all you get is an false feeling of security, and you give those in power a cloak of secrecy.
Instead, he says that we shoud remove privacy from everyone, and let the public see what others are doing - basically, have everyone watch everyone else. The point of that is supposedly that it would keep corruption down and stop the rich and powerful from abusing their power.
Now, I don't say that I agree with Brin, but I just thought the idea of people going around broadcasting live video of everyone to keep the cops in check sounded like somthing Brin would like.
I doubt that the protest idea would work, though. People don't care about brutality if they think that the police are acting in their interest and there is even a chance of violence from the protesters. Remember how all the violence from the police at the WTO protesets was justified by a dozen 'anachists' defacing a Nike store? Or how much of America feels that it's "better safe than sorry" regarding Guantanamo and Abu Gharib?
Watching the watchers only matters when the public gives a damn that the watchers are brutal.
It's a movie produced by some folks who were at the 20 Nov 2003 FTAA protest in Miami. By my count it shows 14 felonies commited by police officers, including refusing to identify themselves, shooting unarmed & non-violent people (in the head), random pepper spraying, etc etc and so forth. The raised fist of today usually has a camera in it.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
How about slipping a few of these into the offices of our elected officials? If we can't have any privacy why should they?
Yeah, Boston Massachusetts is one of those cities. They installed a whole bunch of cameras, etc for the DNC (That's the "Demoncratic National Convention" for you none Americans out there).
However, I haven't heard of an instance where these cameras have been used to prevent/solve a crime. Maybe they are and it isn't being publicized, but I doubt it.
As for the privacy aspect, when your in a public place isn't it assumed that specifically that isn't a private place and you can be videotaped without your permission?
Also, the author talks about how in the future they'll be cameras that'll send the footage off over some wireless network. I suspect that riot police will start deploying jammers as standard practice on the premise that they're preventing rioters from calling in support, etc. Check out DARPA's wolfpack devices.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
My point is that it's not that you're being "filmed", but that you cannot control who has access and authority to do something with the "film". Obviously, not everyone who'd be watching the feed would have bad intentions, but some would. The most awful thing would be to have a goody-two-shoes watching a feed looking for a way to report minor infractions or misdemeanors ... a snitch.
They'd alert the police as soon as they had irrefutable proof of the slow-glide-through-the-stop-sign, or the littered candy wrapper, or the jaywalk, or someone smoking a funny cigarette outside a nightclub or something. The number of calls going to your local police office would go through the roof, all for petty stuff that draws time and attention from very serious matters.
I trust the police more than I trust joe-shut-in-with-a-crime-crusade. It's very easy to give up privacy/anonymity and impossible to get it back when it's gone. Why not proceed with caution?
.. 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
Just imagine this: people on the road could have a "SnitchCam" on the back of their rearview mirror that they could use to record your bad driving habits and then send it to the police department for $$$ (as suggested in the article). Is there ANYONE who has not broken some traffic law at one time or another? We'd all be getting fines sent to us in the mail on a regular basis, probably.
Then again, just like the photo-radar, people could just say, "Yeah, that's my car... but that's not me driving it!" Uh, sure...
Another thought, who is going to wade through the millions of hours of snitched data? Police departments don't have enough manpower as it is.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
They're called agents provocateurs, and they're why it's important to record before and after the turd hits the fan. They can often be seen being brought into or out of the protest by police vans or others known to be opposed to the goal of the protest.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is just some guys idea. A lot of people have ideas... what makes this one great enough that, say, Sony would start making the cameras he is suggestions?
Some people even think about their ideas, amazing isn't it?
The cameras are being made already. They are already part of cell phones and anyone with gumption can combine a PDA with wifi and a camera. That's not the point.
The point is imagining what people will do with those cameras and the possible social good that will come from them. As long as new restrictions are not made on publishing photographs of public places, these cameras will give the public an unprecedented new witness of public events.
The same technology in government hands, however, needs to be restricted. Real harm can come from unrestricted domestic spying. The trick it to not pay people to do the spying while still allowing prosecutors reasonable access to publically recorded material for criminal investigation.
In short, it is possible for these new cameras to be used in a way that does us all lots of good. The credibility of witnesses can be enhanced without creating a police state, where the state has all of the "evidence" and the ability to harass political opponents. Recent events, such as Mary Landrie's hysterical smut cam attacks and the whole UK police cam infrastructure make me worry about the actual uses. Noise produced by people like FortKnox serves the interest of those who would do all the wrong things.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's usually the case.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Historical reference: An Account of the Boston Massacre
I suspect like most American children, I learned early on in grade school that one of the pivotal moments leading up to the Revolution was the Boston Massacre - the firing upon and murder of the innocent civilian by the evil redcoats. I even remember the illustration of soldiers firing into a crowd from a distance.
It's sad but not surprising how those text books never mention that most of the officers were acquitted of all charges by an American court; only two were found guilty of actually firing. Furthermore, they were defended by John Adams (George Washington's vice president, and the second President) who summarized his case thusly:
I will enlarge no more on the evidence, but submit it to you.-Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated. To your candour and justice I submit the prisoners and their cause.
Bizarre tangent: the two officers found guilty of manslaughter were spared their lives by invoking "the benefit of clergy," a plea that shifted their punishment from imprisonment to the branding of their thumbs.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Robert J. Sawyer considers something like this in his book "Hominids", which posits an alternative universe where Neaderthal never died out. Everyone in the Neaderthal society is implanted with a device that records their activity in realtime, piped to a physically and cryptographically sealed "Alibi Archive" that can only be accessed by permission of the person being recorded.
:-) even a straight digital voice recording would be of value.
While the novel isn't all that great, this idea is extremely interesting. For anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything (like, say, any man who has ever had a close relationship with any woman
More seriously, an ex-girlfriend of mine was a volunteer at a women's shelter, and used to complain that too many cases came down to "he-said/she-said", so I suggested the shelter start using compact, cheap, voice-activated digital recorders to lend to women who were in abusive relationships but who couldn't get anyone to listen to them. So far as I know, this plan has been adopted, although the current state of my relationship with that particular woman precludes my knowing any of the details...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
For a couple of years, I was a volunteer for the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group here in the UK. One of the main things we did was to monitor police behaviour on demonstrations to make sure that the police were acting within the law.
At the time, we discouraged the use of video cameras for collecting evidence of police behaviour because of the problems with interpretation of footage. We preferred for each monitor instead to take written notes (recorded on the day with a dicataphone) at regular intervals (once every 10mins or so) since a report that nothing was happening was often as valuable as a report that all hell was breaking loose. The police usually said they were reacting to provocation before taking the decision to modify people's skulls, and any evidence to the contrary was valuable.
While the former issue might be solved by the "network effect" described, the latter issue is not unless those with cameras record everything, or at least sample the situation at regular intervals.
In short, even if you still have some form of organisation operating the cameras, you're in for a FAR heavier invasion of privacy burden: compare a written note saying "14:55 - Nothing happening" to 10 seconds of footage showing people, their faces, their placards, their expressions... and nothing happening.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Yep. Governments everywhere have always tried to use fear to control the citizenry and to keep them from prying into govt affairs, the better to rip us off. I say make the American govt completely transparent. Cameras everywhere, publically accessible via the web, with audio.
Oh, but the Rightwingers will whine about military secrets being exposed, etc. Kiss my ass! They are just using that for cover. They have been doing it for decades, carrying water for the rich and powerful and the big corporations, supporting dictators overseas in order to keep the 3rd world peasantry from having Leftist governments. Starting wars to feed the profit margins of the military industrial complex and other parasite megacorporations.
Bring on the mini cameras and shove up their asses. I wanna see EVERYTHING!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
1984 is one of your favorite books... and the CCTV cameras made you feel safe?
I guess you're getting something radicaly different out of the book than I am.
Seriously though, CCTV cameras don't make you safe. Just having a low-resolution feed that isn't being monitered live doesn't help one bit until after the fact.
Does make for more entertaining police shows though. (If only they had real crime, anyway - I remember watching a crime show in the UK, the big bust was "pop pirates" who made counterfit Panda Pop. Actually it was pretty hilarious - the cops don't have guns, so the owner of the fake soda factory just ignored them when they raided him - but I digress).
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
Don't want your protest to end in an orgy of violence? Regulate it yourself.
There have been many peaceful protests with any number of people, where the cops need do nothing but sip coffee and watch.
And there are protests where you see people getting off of busses with backpacks full of masonry, balaclavas at the ready. Where during interviews, they say things like 'We'll be completely peaceful as we block off all roads within a ten block radius and hurl insults at passers by. If the cops want to MAKE it a fight though, we're ready.'
Nobody wants to be a riot cop. So you get the newbies and the burnouts. They don't get adequate training. They know that a mob can turn ugly. They know they're under watch, and that the hindsight brigade will come down on them like a ton of bricks. They know that taking proactive action to keep things under control will land them on the news; they know that letting things happen will result in a full riot.
And they know that the TV news will never show the rocks, the insults, and the provocations. They'll just show the cops wading in and busting heads.
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Ah yes, and there are pictures of such a tiny PIN-stealing camera, disguised as an official leaflet holder:
These particular naughty people used a card reader as well, so they could copy the info off the magnetic stripe on the card as well.
I've often thought the cops should be required to wear a camera in their hats or on their uniform. Use some form of solid-state recording medium and have upload terminals in the cars and stations.
The theory goes, if they cover or turn off the camera and someone makes an allegation, the cops look guilty already and the accusation gets heard, instead of the coppers all giving the same story.
"Public" Places used to be "private" places when nobody else was around -- because nobody else was around. I believe this to be the crux of the camera problem, because that's gone.
There ought to be some law that you have to place signs that identify where cameras are located in public places if you're going to make it legal to put them there.
There is an Arthur C. Clark novel, "The light of other days" that deals with this idea. In the novel, Clark imagines the invention of a device that creates wormholes through which a person may observe anything undetected. He goes on to speculate about the effects that such utter transparency would have on our culture.
Secrets of any sort become a thing of the past causing all sorts of world changing effects from the total remaining of governments and corporations to the end of modesty.
Later in the book they learn to pilot the wormholes back through time. If anyone hears about a camera that can do this, please let me know as I would like to find out who took my wallet last year.
I can think of a way to prevent it. We've got public-key encryption hardware, and it's going to get cheaper. Suppose you have a video format that's got a slot in every frame for a cryptographic signature of that frame, and the video hardware itself is cryptographically signing the video as it records it. The private key for each camera is burned into a secured chip in the camera, and the public key is in the documentation along with the serial number and suchlike.
You can still make faked video, but you can't make faked video coming from a particular camera that'll stand up to a check of the signatures. Well, technically it's possible to do so, but you'd have to posit the ability to create a secured chip with contents of your choosing and put it into the camera without any indication of tampering and fudge the matching of the serial number and assigned key in the manufacturer's records. And of course there's also the question of numbers: if several people with no other connection to each other all have video showing the same thing, how likely is it that they all went through that trouble to fake their video and all came up with exactly the same scene on their own?
This is a great idea for the rich nations of the world, but the real trouble spots, typically, don't have such affluence.
The idea I've been pondering for a while is something that is cheap and easily distributable so that people in the places where bad stuff happens can put them in their windows and make the results available to journalists when something goes down. These could be distributed for free by NGO's, like freedom organizations, so that most trouble spots would be blanketed.
The hardware I have in mind is something really cheap, rugged and self-contined, with a walkman form factor and, perhaps, endless loop DAT tape storage and a solar power source. Journalists could knock on doors the day after an event (or dig through the rubble) and copy these tapes for later perusal. The data would ideally be encrypted, to help with authenticity and make it difficult to view in the field. Some cheap equipment actually does see outside of human visible range, so these might actually be useful at night time too. This sort of form factor might make the devices cheap enough to make it practical to distribute them to thousands of homes in each world trouble spot.
I suspect that even though people in trouble areas might be suspicious of these things, that most of them would realized the advantages of having them and be willing to participate. Since the devices are automatic and easy to hide, the danger to the operator is minimal. Also, the collection process makes them pretty much useless for military use, so there's no real danger of "bad guys" collecting the tapes for use against "good guys". The only real practical use would be reporting of abuses or setting the story straight. Regardless of which side you're on, having more info is generally a better thing for the innocent victims of any conflict.
Imagine what things might be like if there was one of these in every tenth house in Baghdad or the West Bank...
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Actually consider this: elections are on tuesdays. You have to vote in your home county. Many people work over an hour from home. Lines at the polls can be over an hour long. Polls generally close at 7:00.
If the boss tells you you have to stay until 6:00, you can't vote.
This happens a LOT.
Generally the people affected are unsalaried and in the service industry or low on the white collar totem. The boss can take 3 hours off to cast his ballot, but the phones still need to be answered, and the floor still needs to be washed.
Apathy is a large problem, but it isn't the only problem.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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.
You're begging the question. There are no issues that matter in the election, as I noted in this post Therefore, it's not surprising that people are lazy about elections. Their apathy is a direct result of the impotence of our democracy. I agree that very few people think of it in terms of "legitimate government" and "sovreignty", but you really can't expect people to think in those technical polisci terms. The proof, as they say, is in the tasting.
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Consider the laws that limit our abilities to protect ourselves,
even from telephone abuse, using an audio recorder...
Getting the runaround from a government department?
You need the other party's permission before you can
record them while on the phone together.
I would expect to see similar "privacy" laws enacted
that could limit use of video devices, like those
suggested here.
Microcams won't get used much because they will catch both sides at their worst.
The 1968 Democratic convention riots were caught on camera by news organizations recording it from the upper-level floors of the hotels they were in, safely above the street. They showed "brutal" Chicago cops charging after innocent protesters and beating them bloody. What the cameras failed to show was the urine and feces that were thrown at the cops, provoking them to go after the "innocent" protesters. Yeah, tell me again how, if you were a cop, you could remain perfectly calm after being showered with piss and shit.
Other demonstrations, other forms of not-so-obvious violence are used by protesters. Before every WTC demonstration there are grass roots classes in how to incite the cops.
Dear anonymous coward,
I WAS IN THE STREETS IN CHICAGO IN 1968. *IF* there were any things thrown at the cop, it was they were isolated incidents, and quite possibly by agents provocateurs.
I can personally tell you about the cops attacking with no warning, and the first time I'd ever seen two-and-a-half foot riot batons. I have a picture etched in my memory of one pig (not to be confused with the regular Chicago cops) swinging it at someone's head as they were falling to the ground, not 10 yards from me.
The federal commission on the riots declared it to be 100% a police riot.
So take your lieing revisionism and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Oh, and I saw *reporters* with they heads bleeding, so take that "from upper floors of the hotels" back, too.
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