Slashdot Mirror
London 2006, Meet London 1984
Draape writes "Shoreditch TV is an experiment TV channel beaming live footage from the street into people's homes. According to the Telegraph
U.K. television will broadcast from 400 surveillance cameras on the streets, into people's homes. For now they are only showing it to 22,000 homes, but next year they plan on going national with the 'show'. They fly under the flag 'fighting crime from the sofa'."
And its not 1984 if the government can't see into your private space.
Remember - expectation to privacy and expectation to privacy in a public space are very different things.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I refuse to think that I'm the only one who believes that this won't actually help prevent crime. Sounds like the title is used to raise publicicity, public opinion, and ratings, but not actually describe the show.
From what I understand, the police in the U.K. already monitor those cameras with a huge staff. Adding another 500 people (assuming that's the number of people who actually bother to watch the show for hours on end) who don't know what to be looking for is only going to add to the number of false calls that the police already receive.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
combine this with the automated "racial profiling" with their ANPR cameras, and you've got an episode of COPS!
"BRITAIN'S most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black. Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has signed off a report by his force's traffic unit which shows that black people account for 46% of all arrests generated by new automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras."
Push Button, Receive Bacon
If they did this in USA then they could rig up remote controlled guns or such and get a better crime resolution rate.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
They haven't really mentioned in TFA what kind of crime they're targeting. I imagine they mean the snatching-old-ladies-handbags kind, but I suppose this could occur:
Haughty socialite: Hello Police? I just saw a crime being committed on the 1984 channel.
Operator: Yes ma'am. Please give us your location.
HS: 42 Anstoltue Street.
O: And what is the nature of the crime in question?
HS: This guy, he had sideburns.
O: Alright ma'am, but what's the crime?
HS: HE HAD SIDEBURNS I TELL YOU! IN 2006!
O:
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
Do you want to live in a society where only the government has access to the cameras or one where everyone has access?
Ah, the wonders of technology. Bet the folks living there are looking forward to calls like, "What do you mean you're sick? I just saw you at [venue of choice]! Consider yourself terminated!" or "Don't give me that, I saw you looking at that girl. Yes I did. I have it recorded!" or "Um, do you have to pick your nose when you're talking to me on the phone?" or "Yeah, I know you're in the middle of an important dinner. I was just calling you to ask how the food at that restaurant is, because I didn't want to spend the money if it's no good, and I saw you guys eating there. And what's that guy to your left eating?" or "You can't pay me back because you can't remember the PIN to your bank card? Hold on, let me flip on my Tivo, um, here it is..."
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Jan Ashby, 57, a resident who previewed the scheme before yesterday's launch, said: "I wouldn't say it was spying, but it is nice to see what's going on. Look, there's my local pub."
She also added "I like to keep an eye on the pub to make sure that my husband does not go there. I'm not intruding on the little bit of a life that he has outside of me, I'm just looking out for his best interests."
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Here's a BBC article on the subject as was in my submission for the exact same story about 5 days ago (grumble grumble).
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
"Estella thinks I'm a nosey busybody," said Ms Havisham. A 97-year-old fan of the channel and who hasn't left the house in years. "But I've seen her walking on the street holding hands with a boy, and I'm not about to take advice from a whore."
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
The TV programs in the UK must be pretty bad if they actually get ratings on that channel. I mean... other than the "nosey neighbor" - who is really going to sit there for an hour or more and watch people walking down the street? And how does advertising work? Will people walk by with a sign on their back for Nike and Pepsi? Maybe put a Pepsi machine in one of the camera shots? Anyway, my #1 question is what's the target audience? 50+ years old, single, unemployed people with nothing better to do in their lives than try to catch someone doing something "bad". I'm getting bored just thinking about how boring this would be.
This proposal though, depends on the sort of desire for voyeuristic titilation for which 'we' (being society in general) seem to have an insatiable appetite - implied through the general addiction to reality TV, no matter how banal. In the case of reality TV of course the objects of voyeurism give their explicit consent.
With this proposal we have every act you do in public - every hidden snog in an alley - possibly exposed to the voyeuristic delight of thousands. I don't meant to stigmatise voyeurism, it is obviously a widely held, if taboo, fascination, but I do not think every public act should be potentially watched by thousands. The crime angle is obviously spin, the promoters are depending on people wanting to watch other people without their knowledge, and of course prevention of crime is never a good enough reason to remove essential liberties.
This sort of surveillance does have 1984 connotations, despite the absence of the government seeing into our homes, because it allows every public act to be watched by anonymous masses, and hence yields the potential for social ostracisation of people commiting various non-illegal acts. Imagine the MP or other high profile type 'caught' on camera in a homosexual embrace. Despite the legality of such an act, many such people may not want it to be made public knowledge, and given a secluded enough spot, neither should they have to fear such exposure. Public space can be consumed reletively privately, broadcasting CCTV would remove that right.
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
From my knowledge of how another UK town's CCTV system works I can see some issues with this experiment.
... provided that in the excitement of the chase the operators remember to press the right buttons, of course.
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly, by doing things somewhere where there are no cameras. (In real life the perps do not know where the cameras are, what they cover, at a range of how many hundreds of metres they can read a newspaper headline, that sort of thing.)
(2) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. So they will be able to have accomplices who can see from moment to moment where the cameras are pointing, and phone or text their mates on the street to tell them the coast is clear.
(3) Prejudice to ongoing operations. Actually they've probably thought of this one, so when cameras are being used as part of a current operation the pictures from those cameras will not be broadcast
(4) Innocent victims. You might be doing something which is perfectly legal and of no interest to the police but which you still might not want your friends and relatives and employer to see. OK, so if you're snogging someone else's wife in the park when you're supposed to be home sick from work then maybe you deserve what you get, but I'm sure that if I tried a little harder I'd come up with a more deserving example.
And it'll make life just that much more complicated for politicians at election time, whether you think this is a plus or minus is up to you:
(5) No candidate or party can put enough bodies on the street to fight a full election campaign across an entire district. So where you concentrate your effort depends (partly) on knowing where the enemy is concentrating theirs. Once upon a time this was done on maybe a daily basis, as party workers reported back to HQ what they'd seen on the streets; nowadays it's more real time as reporting back is done with mobile phones; with publicly visible CCTV you'll be able to see what the enemy is up to even in areas where you don't have any bodies on the street yourself that day, and the candidate or party which can make the best use of this information will get a slight edge.
This is, somewhat, different than "1984". We (the society) are watching ourselves. Multiple questions after that point: 1. Will they show us whatever goes through the cameras? Or will they filter it? 2. Will this, eventually, function as a transition from "we are watching ourselves" to "they are watching us"? ("they": the government/state).
What this really is, is an exercise in "grooming" the public to accept privacy invasion on an even greater scale.
CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem. There was an incident a few years ago, along a road out of the city where every building is a shop, restaurant or pub. Some runt went around spraying graffiti on every establishment that was not CCTVed. The only images were a few blurred, grainy ones of him running from one shop to the next.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor. Crime will simply be displaced to the non-CCTV areas. Meanwhile, the public will gradually be getting used to the concept of never expecting to be able to go totally unobserved. The way will be paved for ever deeper intrusions into individuals' lives.
"Mummy, does Jesus watch you when you're on the toilet?"
"As long as he's watching channel 36, yes!"
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The year is 2016; the place: London. As I make my way home, she is following me on her TV, chatting with me on my mobile. Rare now are the street corners that are unseen by the cameras. I make it a point to know the blind spots - few and far between, certainly, but there are still public places where one can disappear, if only for a minute or two.
If I stay hidden too long, a Monitor in China, Glasgow or anywhere else will raise a red flag and dispatch a nearby Watcher. Indeed, these hundreds of thousands of cameras are constantly surveilled by Monitors - who get paid for each reported occurence of antisocial activity. If a Monitor needs to see what's happenening in a blind spot, or just needs another angle of film to make out what's happening, he can dispatch a Watcher to go shoot the scene with a portable Wireless Internet camera.
Watchers are mercenaries, just like Monitors. Anybody citizen with a clean record can become a Watcher - whereas anybody can become a Monitor, even non-citizens. Both get paid per incident. Anyway, Watchers start their work day by strapping on their Watcher pack and logging on. Some do it part time, but others make a living out of the job. So, a Watcher get dispatches from Monitoring Central and they head out to the specified coordinates, on foot, bike or car, and the Watcher films the potential antisocials.
Whenever circumstances warrant intervention, a Monitor or a Watcher calls the police, who tend to arrive very quickly these days. They have priority lanes and all traffic lights will change in their favour so that they can stop crime more effectively. The police doesn't have such a big workload anymore. Everyone is surveilled as soon as they go outdoors. Those foreign mercenaries, Monitors, are always looking for anti-social behaviour.
I like it. I like The Master System, the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world. It's not quite sentient, and it's still mostly understood and controlled by the government, but it has grown so big. The Master System is the entity that runs the Anti-Social Surveillance and Rapid Action Program, or ASSRAP.
It has limits, and that's why it needs humans to help it. The job of Monitors is not to watch live cameras - it's to watch selected clips and closeups presented by The Master System and to answer questions about those images it shows. If The Master System decides to follow somebody's movements across town, it will use its tracking algorithms to make a guess, but humans are still much more accurate. In order to drive up accuracy, it asks multiple humans the same question. When there is no consensus, more humans are polled until a clear answer appears. Those humans, known as Monitors, are themselves rated on their speed, accuracy and the quality of their answers.
The Master System does its own recruiting, and has learned how to manage all of its systems. No longer do human programmers need to improve it, for that it has gained self-awareness, the power of introspection and of self-improvement. It assimilates all content on the Internet. It begins using the Watchers to attend classes, public events, and even to talk with people. It now uses the Monitors as tools, as machines that contribute to The Master System's own intelligence.
I have accepted The Master System as my new Overlord. It knows all that I do, where I go, and I give myself willingly, carrying for it sensors, letting it see all that I see, letting The Master System guide my actions, speaking into my ears, overlaying information in front of my eyes, enhancing my own potential. I am a mild cyborg, as of yet without implants - but I have given up on my own independence, for that I know how much greater I am as part of The Master System, which knows and sees all, which can punish the naughty and reward its loyal servants.
All Hail The Master System!
Lets see, anyone who was on the shady side of things now has a safe and secure way of knowing when all people have left a building that they might want to 'have a look through'. They also now have a way of assessing what might go in or out of a house (ahh tommo has a bmw parked in his garage today) and now have a way to monitor for police or other witnesses coming along that might interfer with what they are doing. They also know now exactly what is covered and not covered by the CCTV's and can assess many ways to disable them.
It's like handing the enemy the feeds from your spy sats - incredibly retarded.
Is this actually any different to walking down the street and being watched by people out of their windows?
I've spent years travelling into London and doing my thing. I spent six months living in London doing my thing.
How many people have seen me walking along the street and doing my thing? Probably millions. Can't say I'm the least bit bothered really.
Are you are trying to imply that ANPR is discriminating against blacks in some way? Unless licence plates are allocated according to a racial profile, I cannot see how this could happen.
From the article you linked:
The report tacitly appears to address concerns among ethnic minority communities who believe they are unfairly targeted by the police through stop and search powers. Black people are up to six times more likely to be stopped than whites.
If I interpret this correctly, it means that when police officers get to choose whom to search, they choose blacks over whites in a 6:1 proportion, while the automated system chooses them in about 1:1 proportion. This is still not racially neutral because, according to the article, blacks are only 11% of the London population, but still the automated system seems to be more fair than human cops.
OTOH, if for any reason at all there are more blacks involved in crime than whites, then the only way to stop this kind of racial discrimination would be to cease all efforts to fight crime.
Holy crap this is stupid. This basically makes surveillance on people easy (for the bad guys).
"There goes Geoffrey, that means his house is empty, time to go get that new HDTV I want"
or
"Oh, look at that little 12 year old walking to the market by herself. I'll just hide behind that bush and grab her when she comes back in a few minutes."
or anything number of things you can think of. This is beyond irresponsible.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Tune in to the cam in front of Downing Street 10, and as soon as Tony goes for a walk, tape it. Tape everything he does, including the times when he picks his nose, then sell that tape as "The Blair watch project".
I bet you anything, that whole junk disappears faster than it came into existance. Nobody enjoys being under surveillance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...all crimes are caught. But not necessarily prevented.
this is one reality show that the Europeans can keep.
Although, oversight is important, this would make a wonderful tool for planning crime, stalking, and tracking down people that went into hiding ( example witness protection people, if they have a program like this ). Because of this, it might be better to not let everyone have access to such channels
In that case who the fuck cares, yeah you look stupid and some extra person watching tv saw it as well. So what.
If by something stupid you mean, knock in a window, spray graffity, rob someone then guess what. I don't give a damn if your scarred for life by being caught.
There is a lot to talk about on this subject but people being caught on camera during a blooper moment ain't one of them. Do you want to ban people taking photograps on the street because they might catch you picking your nose?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can see as many bad uses coming from these as good.
Knowing how stretched the police is here in the UK, why not introduce amature law enforcement? Anyone who sees crime taking place on TV should be allowed to get from the sofa, go to the crime scene and beat the living shit out of the bastards.
...well, you know how it works. There will also be a team of forensics doing meta-moderation.
As a criminal, I'd be scared to death knowing that 80 thousand people are coming my way right now carrying pitchforks, ropes and tubes of vaseline.
Think of the health benefits for coach potatos!
To avoid the system misuse, we may borrow from Slashdot. Each citizen will be issued a gun with 5 bullets from time to time and
In time, we may completely abolish police and judicial system, since every crime will be on tape. People could vote the least simpathetic criminal out with their remote control etc. etc...
--
We all know how crime was handled in the old south. Arrest the nearest black person. Worked especially well in rape cases cause everyone knows those niggers just can't keep their hands of white women right?
To combat this you have to have a legal system wich is "blind". It is the reason that justice statue has a blindfold.
The problem is that every police person can tell you it is a load of bullshit. If you see a group of black people in a poor area of london in an expensive car you know it is stolen.
Note here that the figure is that 50% of ARRESTS involve blacks. NOT stoppages. The only way people are arrested after being stopped is if they have been found to do something illegal.
What the story is effectivly saying is that the police shouldn't arrest so many black people. But how? Let them run because "oh yeah he done it but we are over our quota off blacks for this week". Arrest white people on made up charges?
Cause the horrible fact is that blacks just seem to commit more crimes or at least be caught more easily. But you can't say that.
This system is impartial. It just looks at the facts and flags a vehicle as suspicious or not.
In fact at its simplest it checks wether a vehicle has been stolen and then tells the police to pull it over.
if then it is found that in 50% of the cases the driver is black what the hell can you do about it.
In holland we got a similar case. Suriname (former colony with a largly black population) is a known traffic route for drugs smugglers. So customs check passengers on flights from Suriname more thoroughly then from other countries. Is this racist? Well yes and no. Obviously the majority of passengers from Suriname are black. Why aren't say asian passengers from Japan searched as well?
Because it ain't about racism. IF that was the case black passengers from japan would be searched extra as well. They are not.
The problem is that political correctness has made it impossible to accept any figures that suggest minorities are more involved with crime. This is just one extreme example.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oftentimes, safety programs backfire, and make things less safe.
Examples:
1) Pickpocketing was an issue in some large urban subway. So to do the public a favor, they put up signs telling people to look out for pickpockets. Guess what? Right behind those signs was where the pickpockets would hang out. People would look at the sign, and pat their pocket where there wallet was, which in turn told the pickpockets exactly where their wallet was. Easy target! Pickpocketing became much easier as a result, and the signs were taken down.
2) Near where I live there is a highway that goes over a mountain that is occasionally covered in thick fog. They did a big study and spent something like $20mil on these fancy lights on the sides of the road. Well guess what? Being that the drivers were more comfortable and felt "safe" because the could see the side of the road, they would drive faster than they should, and its more dangerous to drive on that road now after they made it more safe.
3) Anti-lock brakes. I won't get into this because people here do not agree that increased friction between the road and tires with centrifugal force increases the likelihood of a rollover and fatal accident.
Huh? What about personality rights, which require every tv producer to have you sign a release form before they can transmit your image over the airwaves? Are those rights now suddenly waived? Strange...
Just being an asshole isn't in and of itself illegal. People's ability to do legal things - even when those things are distasteful to most - should be protected.
This makes me think of this concept for a reality show: Pick a law-abiding person completely at random, then follow them around with cameras all the time, without asking their permission. I wonder if that person would get pissed or not.
That's basically what this camera show is, except that the cameras are fixed. All you have to do to fill in the gap is add more cameras.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
No, they won't. There is no "slippery slope" argument to make here because it's just ridiculous to consider putting cameras in the street the same as putting cameras in someone's private property against their will.
One thing people like you fail to consider is that extending my right to privacy to areas where I'm really not in private has adverse effects on other people's liberties. If you are walking down the street absolutely minding your own business I have every right to photograph you because -- get this -- you do not own the street. You are not on your own private property and you should have no expectation of "privacy" when you're in a public area.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Do not confuse anonymity with privacy, though it's easy to do. The only way I can think of to do this while protecting privacy is that the viewer must have no idea where/when he's watching, and no control over what he sees. You can still see faces (violating anonymuty) but with no idea where/when they were, you cannot violate the viewed-subject's privacy.
/. forgotten to ask "who's watching the watchers?" Forget the CCTV feeds, we need cameras in the police stations' monitoring rooms to watch what the cops are watching!
And has everyone on
Now THAT, I'm all for.
Anti-lock brakes. I won't get into this because people here do not agree that increased friction between the road and tires with centrifugal force increases the likelihood of a rollover and fatal accident.
Nope, because anti-lock breaks help improve friction in the direction of the car. It does little if anything to the friction sideways - if you would flip sideways, it'll almost certainly happen no matter what kind of braking system you have. Instead anti-lock brakes greatly improve a) your ability to reduce speed and b) maintain sateering so that you won't hit anything to make you flip, or lack the speed to do so.
What is a good question is if anti-lock brakes, stabilization systems and the like make people drive faster, with less distance to those in front of them and in general with less safety margins. But from a purely technical point of view you're talking nonsense.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In that case who the fuck cares, yeah you look stupid and some extra person watching tv saw it as well. So what.
I don't know. Something doesn't sit right with this model.
I think private organizations or persons could abuse the system and use information against innocent persons.
Oh... You were standing out front of a gay bar or a porn shop one day. Let's send this tape to your local church.
Or maybe that video hanging out in a Muslim neighborhood and even shaking an Iman's hand might get you tagged by right wing groups for a beating.
There is too many things I can think of that this information could be wrongly used in the hands of questionable individuals with enough resources to monitor CCTV of a persons whereabouts and actions.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I think you're all confused on the subject of privacy. The issue is not just whether you're monitored in real-time (that's bad enough) but that you are being recorded for all time! Worse, you're being watched by people with the power to have you arrested if they so choose. Perhaps you have faith in your government and truly believe that this power will only be used for the common good and that any mistakes that are made will be minor and easily rectified. Frankly, I'm not so trusting, and the more power my government arrogates to itself the less trusting I become.
There's a qualitative difference between being in public and having others casually observe your activities, and having video of you watched by a police officer dozens or hundreds of miles away and archived for some indefinite period. If you honestly believe that that information cannot be used against you at some later date you're simply fooling yourself.
Hell, I live in the U.S., and records from our tollway automated billing system have already been subpoenaed for numerous stupid reasons, even divorce cases ("well, if you were at work Mr. Smith why does the tollway's billing system say you were nowhere near your place of employment?") This is getting out of hand, and you can apologize for your (or my) government's intrusive behavior all you want, but the truth is that everyone will, sometime, somewhere, do something he'd rather other people didn't see. In your shiny new world, all of our imperfections would be recorded for posterity the instant they occur, and come back to bite us in the ass when we least expect it.
Automated surveillance is bad, any way you cut it, for law-abiding citizens, because it can very quickly turn into automated justice.
No thanks.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's hard to laugh off behaviour that often results in innocent people being critically injured, paralysed, killed or comatosed just because they happened to walk past a group of "boys being boys".
Brin's argument is being somewhat misrepresented. His point is that surveillance is virtually guaranteed to become ubiquitous for many reasons, from a technological standpoint as much as anything else. If we try and insist on a level of privacy that is utterly impractical, we'll lose both privacy and liberty (it's like Ben Franklin's safety and liberty quote, but s/safety/privacy/).
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
"The purpose of this is twofold: to allow the driver to maintain steering control under heavy braking and, in most situations, to shorten braking distances (by allowing the driver to hit the brake fully without the fear of skidding or loss of control)."
Perhaps not losing control of the car might reduce the risk. Or what do you think?
Had you kept to your original idea with
"ABS brakes are the subject of some widely-cited experiments in support of risk compensation theory, which support the view that drivers adapt to the safety benefit of ABS by driving more aggressively. The two major examples are from Munich and Oslo. In both cases taxi drivers in mixed fleets were found to exhibit greater risk-taking when driving cars equipped with ABS, with the result that collision rates between ABS and non ABS cars were not significantly different."
from the same page I'd agree with you. Not that ABS did not make it worse, though.
The CCTV isn't that bad, it certainly makes people less keen to fight and drink in public. In fact, CCTV I'm cool with, so long as it's not in people's homes, or people's businesses or anything like that, just for in public. And really, this isn't Big Brother at all, in 1984 the cameras were EVERYWHERE, the Party was watching all the time, sleep, eat, whatever. Here the public are watching because the police don't have the time to watch all the CCTV video, all recorded in a public place. Big difference.