Slashdot Mirror
Houston Police Chief Wants Cameras in Homes
An anonymous reader writes "In one of the most blatant and frightening statements made on privacy, the Associated Press reports that Houston's police chief wants surveillance cameras in apartment buildings and even private homes. Chief Harold Hurtt wants building permits to require cameras in shopping malls and large apartment complexes. He also wants them in private homes if the homeowner has called the police repeatedly. So, if you're in Houston, don't call the cops too much, or they might install a camera the next time they show up. And what does Hurtt have to say about privacy concerns? 'I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?'"
Someone hit that guy over the head with a copy of 1984.
Sure, if you're not doing anything wrong, let's put a camera in your house. First up, Cheif of Police. Why should he worry? Of course, *he* isn't doing anything wrong. What would he have to hide?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
'I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?'
This is the most cliched argument that any law enformcemnt officer could ever give. the answer to it is that it's none of my business what you're doing, and that it's not your place to decide what's right or wrong. That's what we have legislators for. There are very good reasons for resisting the erosion of privacy, and one of them is to keep assholes like this out of our lives.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
...until there are cameras EVERYWHERE... Sorta like in the U.K. now, what is it - four cameras for every citizen? Sad, really but look at it this way: Has anyone ever done something to your car or your property while you were sleeping? Didn't you want to know who the bastard was that did it? See, it's CHEAP enough now to set up camera spying and expense was the only real reason it hasn't been done before.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?
Because, you miserable idiot, that's not the point. The point is the right to privacy, the point is the state minding its own business, not the citizen's.
Does this happen in the same country where people don't want an id card because of privacy concerns? Amazing.
But with a wimper. I suppose that is how freedom will make its' exit. That this isn't being shouted down by the city of Houston is appalling. The city council will slap this down if they are smart. We have all read the quote that goes something like "Those that would trade essential liberty for safety have neither." It still remains true. The canary in the cage in the coal mine is dying I think. Is anyone going to notice the little yellow birds' demise?
My humor is probably your flamebait
Another counter example:
Chief Hurtt is an African American. In the sixties, Martin Luther King was the victim of illegal wiretapping by Hoover's FBI. How would he respond to an assertion that 'If Dr. King is doing nothing worng, why should he worry about our wiretapping.'
You'll install a camera in my house over my dead body.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Bonus goodie points to the person who actually names the logical fallacy behind "if you have nothing to hide" etc. If possible, please include a link. More people need to know how to intelligently refute arguments such as these.
Please help metamoderate.
"...but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"
Because I want to scratch my balls while watching hockey naked, fart while making nachos in the kitchen, and have passionate sex with my wife on the couch and dining room table.
And here's the kicker... I DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT IT.
Where do you think he got his ideas from? Seriously. Most people read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, and are either frightened, or mildly disturbed ("That'd never happen. People would be outraged!")
People like him read 1984 and think, "I wouldn't use those cameras like that...", missing the point completely.
Police these days are so far removed from reality, it's not even funny. I recently read an article about police stepping up speeding enforcement on "the most deadly road" in a particular county in (I believe) Ohio. The officers bragged about writing 40+ speeding tickets in two hours, using a LIDAR gun ($2k-$4k each, often paid for by Geico), one officer clocking vehicles, and 4-5 motorcycle units pulling people over. They talked about how they really want to get one patrol car to spend one day each week sitting out pulling over speeders, and they were makin' the roads safe.
Except the reason that the highway is so deadly is because it's a single lane highway with nothing but a double yellow line between you and oncoming traffic; the fatalities are from head-on collisions.
So instead of patrolling the road and pulling over anyone who tries to pass on a double-yellow, they write speeding tickets, making more people drive EXACTLY the speed limit, which is only bound to result in more idiots trying to pass the "law abiding" "safer" drivers. Not to mention, they're pulling people over on a single-lane highway, where all those flashing lights and whatnot are a major distraction.
Way to go, guys!
Please help metamoderate.
should lose his job.
"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
1. People have an annoying habit of abusing their power. Statistically, there are just as many criminal police officers as there are criminal normal citizens. I certainly wouldn't give an average citizen, for example, decryption keys to the password file on my computer. I don't want to give an entire police department a video feed entering credit card numbers into websites. Or plans for protest marches at the RNC. Or meetings, for example, of a group trying to get a new police chief elected. The police and other information gathering organizations have in the past most definitely not been bastions of holyness when it comes to ethical management of valuable information.
2. There are secrets people have that aren't illegal. Maybe you're seeing a psychological councelor, and the stigma attached with that could lose your job if that slips out. Maybe you got really drunk and made a mistake that you don't want to break up your family. Maybe J Edgar Hoover just doesn't want people to know that he wears women's underwear. Why should people know any of that? Why take the risk of telling that to people, and just pray that it doesn't 'slip out'.
3. Because there are lots of little things we do every day that break the rules. These include: j-walking, downloading MP3's, subletting without telling your landlord, recording sporting events without express written concent, undocumented domestic help, recreational drug use, stealing cable, logging on to other people's wireless networks, "leaking" company information to your girlfriend, anything besides the missionary position (in many states), cheating on your wife (in many states), rolling stops on empty streets, u-turns in the middle of empty streets, locking your bicycle to the handrailing, lying about your age to get into movies, lying about your age to get senior citizens discounts, lying about your age to avoid getting senior citizens discounts, telling your company that you're "sick" when you really mean you're "sick and tired of this crappy job," not reporting e-bay sales as taxable income, grabbing an extra newspaper when someone else buys one from the machine, putting chairs in the street to save your parking spot, stealing office supplies, stealing the towels, littering, loitering, the office NCAA pool, etc etc. All of these are necessary for the functioning of our society in some way or another, but are illegal. Yet we would go batshit insane without a few personal pet vices.
And the system has been built with this in mind: nobody wants to stop your weekly 5$ poker match, they wanted to stop the gambling houses where people lost their rent money. Enforce the letter of the law, and the intent of the law gets lost.
4. Because there is a big difference between serving the public interest and fascism.
The ______ Agenda
Respectfully, but pure wrong. Pig cameras in public are a gateway drug, part of your conditioning, your brainwashing and state sponsored terrorism to get you to accept more and more crap. And whenever it's conveneient for them to NOT show images, like the "plane" that hit the pentagon, they refuse to show them. They get you to stop for "courtesy checkpoints" where they "ask" you if it's OK to search your vehicle. They get you conditioned to use a thumbprint to do business, conditioned against using cash, conditioned to have "free speech" zones, conditioned to accept that big politicians can blast someone and not have to give a real time interview to see if they have been drinking or not, conditioned to think it's normal that "the national debates" can only have the two major partys in them, condition you to eat black box voting and like it, condition your kids in the schools, after first drugging them, that conformity and absolute obedience to authority is the norm and to step outside of it makes you a criminal, you are being conditioed to accept the fact of "detainees" and people who can just disappear, you are being conditioned to accept "unfortunate intelligence failures", 16 of them in a row, conditioned to accept "collateral damage", conditioned to accept hundreds of new and bewildering laws passed that you could fall victim to, conditioned to have your wife or kids strip searched by pervos at the airport, conditioned to watch your job or your neighbors job just go poof and then go bankrupt and call it a "great" economy.....
and on and on..how much more evidence is really needed? Then you have fascist gangsters like this pig chief saying what he did, in all seriousness. Any one of them...hmmm, ALL OF THESE THINGS and it isn't even close to stopping yet??
Nope, it's way past time to roll it back and JUST SAY NO to ALL of it. They crossed the line years ago, any defence of them is illogical and unwarranted, it's a pure slow speed fascist takeover, perfectly clear, nothing different from any third world fascist takeover except these boys are a little slicker how they are doing it, and having you on candid camera 24/7 and RFID tagged and working for their pig corporations as a second world serf slave is EXACTLY their goal. Look back 20 years. Now look at right now. Now turn around and look forward 20 years. Watcha see? How are things doing? Really, is it going to get magically better somehow unless there's a firm line that they have to go back and stand behind? They sure as hell aren't going to do it voluntarily!
You have to look at the big picture to get the full grasp of this.
NOW is the time to get scared, concerned then angry and change this stuff. We still have 10% of a chance, your kids won't have any.
Yes, since im a adult, and intrested in protecting america from terrorists, ill go install a high-res camra in the local junoir high schools girl lock room. After all, if they are not doing anything wrong, they have nothing to fear ...
5 times per week to the same house
then later
2 times per month to the same house
then later
2 times per 6 monthes to the same street
then later
we are installing cameras because its the law
Any liberties violated are precursers to total enslavement you just have to wait long enough.
... If you expect opposition to your proposal, you propose something even more draconian than your original goal to see how it goes over. This achieves two things, first, it tests the water, just in case people are ready to give in. Second, if the people aren't ready to give in, you scale it back to less draconian, and all of a sudden the scaled back solutions don't seem nearly as bad, and the "controversial" ideas go forward masquerading as "reasonable", due to the now common comparison with the "unreasonable".
They're hacking us people. They are hacking our minds. They know exactly what they're doing. This isn't tinfoil hat stuff, they have highly paid strategists that study how to pull shit like this off. We're in deep doo doo if we, as a people, don't begin to recognize the nature of this social "matrix".
The cure is simple.
Install the first camera(s) in this Police Chief's house - in every room, then wire it up to the public access channel.
Install the 2nd set of camera(s) in the Mayor's house.
Finally, the Police Chief's and Mayor's office.
Simply claim, if you aren't doing anything wrong, why should you mind being monitored 24x7, and since you both are in public office, your lives are now 100% public.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
He didn't, of course. The submitter (or perhaps Zonk) made that up. He never said "IN homes". he said "in large apartment complexes", meaning the public areas, and the exact words for honmes: "if a homeowner requires repeated police response, it is reasonable to require camera surveillance of the property". Which means the OUTSIDE of a property, unless the police chief is a raving lunatic. The lack of emphasis on this in TFA indicats this was understood to be the meaning. Not to say there are no problems with the idea, but argue about what he actually proposed.
Selective enforcement is an abuse of power whether suffer from it or not. Perhaps you are more attractive than the other poster. Perhaps you are a girl with big tits or a mother/grandmother that looks sweet and innocent. Perhaps you are frequently the officer's type. Doesn't matter. Fact is that society treats people unequally based on appearance. That goes for men as well as women.
In 25+ years of driving I've been let off exactly one time because I'm not the kind of driver that gets let off with a warning. Just because you've can recall more times than I've ever experienced doesn't make you a better driver or mean that police don't abuse their power. In fact, it's evidence of it.
Malls yes, apartment building corridors no. My apartment building, like most these days, is a secure building; the outside doors to the building are locked, and the only way to get in (unless you break in) is to have a key, or have someone who lives in the building buzz you in. This is not a public space; it is a place where people live. Sorry if I sound like a bit of a fanatic on this issue, but apartments are routinely dismissed as though they weren't "real" homes -- which implies that apartment dwellers do not have the same rights as homeowners -- and it pisses me off.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My question is, if I'm not doing anything wrong, why do I need to be watched?
Frank
Houston, TX
Parent's comment reminded me of a case from a few years back.
There was a congressman...or was it a police chief...who favored the position that once garbage was placed at the curb, it was considered abandoned by the owner, and was not subject to search by warrant. The police could just pick up any given bag of trash and search for evidence...no privacy concerns.
All was well until a local paper picked through his trash and publised the contents...unread magazines and solicitation letters... food boxes...that's what I remember.
Man, was he pissed...and suddenly his view didn't apply to him.
So, hell yes, let's put publicly accessable GPS devices in police cars, let's have webcams in police stations...in every room. Let's watch the watchers.
Also reminds me of that sherrif in Arizona who had webcams in his jail...the man was ahead of his time.
Huh?