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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?'"
How can someone say something that crazy and be taken seriously? Who does he think he is, Dvorak?
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.
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?
m l. Perhaps Mr Hurtt would like a camera in his home, given that he seems so enthusiastic about them? Maybe it could be placed in his bedroom, or somewhere equally degrading.
Try telling that to Shi Tao http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0909/p01s03-woap.ht
Anyway, doesn't the fourth amendment protect against unreasonable search and seizure? I'm pretty sure this would count as an unreasonable search.
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
"He (Houston Mayor Bill White) called the chief's proposal a 'brainstorm' rather than a decision."
I'd call it a brainfart, myself. This is something so creepifying I almost want to say it's a bogus article.
There's more than one idiot from Texas.
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.
First, nobody is talking about live surveilance in homes. He's talking about all the times that cops get called out to domesic violence 5 times per week to the same house. Put a closed circuit camera in the house with a padlocked VHS recorder. That way its no longer he-said-she-said...
People have NO IDEA the type of assholes cops have to deal with.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
All we would see was his face.
HTTP/1.1 400
... just wait until I find some pictures of my granny naked at the age of 80 that I can hang in front of the camera, covering the entire lens. You want to add a microphone? Sure, if you want me to add a headphone and an mp3 player playing an endless loop of my entire modem handshake sound collection. ;-)
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
"If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free..."
"...If someone intrudes on our privacy - by peering into our home, going through the personal things in our office desk, reading over our shoulder on a bus or airplane, or eavesdropping on our conversation - we feel uncomfortable, even violated.
Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do.
A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life. ...But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm... [go ahead, read the rest, its well-worth 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.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Wrong, according to whom? You? The mormon manning the camera who thinks drinking is against God's law? The Jewish officer next to the Mormon who has a problem with my delight in cooking pork?
Everybody sees the world through their own lenses of right and wrong. If I am being observed by somoene with a radically different belief structure than my own, it stands to reason that in their eyes I very well may be doing something wrong. It is completely the right decision to want to hide my behaviors from such people, allowing them to navigate through the world with their own peculiar perceptions without slapping their personal prejudices against me.
We do not live in a homogenous society. We live in a society of great diversity where people are offended on a reasonably consistent basis by the behavior of others in society. Offense and prejudice breed harassment and worse. It is absolutely critical that people hide their personal lives from each other, and especially those who have the authority to act on their prejudices. Anyone who thinks differently - well, those are the ones who have the most dangerous prejudices of all - the ones who think they have the authority and RIGHT to force their view of the world on others.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
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.
The problem I have with the whole "if you have nothing to hide..." argument is that it can be really hard to even know when/if you are doing something illegal! For a variety of reasons:
People have a hard time separating their personal judgement from what is law
A prime example is our history of sodomy law. All it takes is one deeply religious person in power who is unable or unwilling to separate church from state before you have a problem.
From the current Florida lawbooks:
Are you living in Florida with your unmarried girlfriend or boyfriend right now? (Oh wait, this is Slashdot
People misinterpret things, especially when they don't understand
What happens when big brother misinterprets your repeated login attempts because you forgot your password as attempted illegal entry into a computer system?
Or how about when you open your e-mailbox and receive those "hot teens!" spam and you're mistaken for a pedophile because you "downloaded child porn" thanks to the attached jpeg?
There are plenty of silly, stupid and broad laws on the books
I won't even bother to comprehend how many silly, stupid and broad laws there are. Check out some of your state's dumb laws (DumbLaws.com coral cached) and discover your true criminal identity.
And lets not forget about the growing issue of computer crimes created by politicians who have been bought or simply don't understand. If the RIAA/MPAA gets its way, it'll soon be illegal to put a DVD in your computer or record your favorite movie aired on TV to watch later.
... anyway
My point is that you are mistaken to think that you have nothing to worry about if you've supposedly done nothing wrong.
First, everyone in this country has probably broken or will eventually break a law or two unknowingly or willingly. And secondly, history has proven that whoever has the power to monitor the people will undoubtably abuse that power according to their beliefs and to their advantage -- whether it's in public locations or in the privacy of your own home.
This idea is constitutional and is permitted by US constitution in that the the citizens have a right to monitor the government.
As far as am concerned, THAT is a true use of my money. I get to exactly note how my money is spent.
What do you say Mr.Policeman?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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".
I work in local government. I am around cops all day. 2 of my friends actually became cops. Over the period of 2 years while training and first year of service, you can definatly see a change in their attitude. They become very detached from reality. I think very few cops these days actually become officers to uphold the law and make the world a better place. Some do it for the rush and excitment. A lot do it for the power. Some do it simply because it's a steady government job that doesn't require anything more than a high school diploma.
A great deal of police think that if you were clocked at 45, you were going 45 and you are just lying. There's this attitude that if you were pulled over or arrested, you are guilty (even before trial). If not, that would mean the police are wrong (oh my, god forbid that!).
What happened to you is actually a common police tactic. Not ticketing you for the primary accused charge, but some made up lesser charge (seat belt, tail light, reduced speeding ticket). Most people won't fight it because they are scared if they get in court the officer might bring up the original charge and have a huge ticket. Guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it. Which is sad, because a lot of people pay for tickets they should fight because they are scared. The police are very aware of this and use it as a common tactic to make a ticket stick.
And that's the sad state of many police departments in the united states. Making the world safe and fair for us by upholding the law is only about 10% of their motivation anymore. Revenue and power through selective accusations seems to really trump that these days.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen the police flick on their lights just to run a red light. Or let off their friends when they pull them over. The clincher? I'm at a crowded restaurant one night (30 minute wait time). Cop walks in with two chicks, looks at the line. Walks right past everyone and finds a recently vacant table. Asks them to clean it and sits right down. And no one said anything because he was a cop. That really sums up their attitude right there.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
This guy makes for an interesting goolge search.
Disappointed about not having anyone to arrest they arrest everyone at K-Mart. They actually practiced at a Wendy's restraunt the week before. I believe with the mayor and police chief watching. They even arrested families that had a receipt showing that they were waiting for food, for tresspassing. In order to crack down on groups of youths collecting in high crime areas where they might cause trouble. They needed a scapegoat, and so after the backlash, it became the officer in charge at the scene decided to do it on his own. The test a Wendy's was determined to be an "unrelated" incident
And we can be sure that he would protect are constitution rights. Just like he would for his own officers. So why not put the cameras in. You can't talk to anyone if you criticize my department
But he just wants to make sure that everyone is not breaking the law. Unless they are an illegal immigrant. The police chief has issued a direct order to police that they cannot enforce any immigration laws because it creates to much political conflict with city officals getting relected. I just have trouble with the police being told they cannot enforce a law. At this point the Police chief has become lawmaker & enforcer. If they want the illegal immigrants to stay, they need to change the laws, not give the police chief the right to do whatever he wants.
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.
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?