Slashdot Mirror
CCTV Cameras In UK Get Loudspeakers
An anonymous reader writes, "Big Brother is another step closer in the UK where the ever ubiquitous CCTV cameras are being fitted with loudspeakers so that camera operators who spot activities deemed 'anti-social' can berate the citizens below. In January 2004 there were more than 4,285,000 CCTV cameras in the UK (roughly 1 for every 4 households). No data about the number of CCTV cameras now in use in the UK is available."
i can't see any disadvantage to this, they're only adding loudspeakers to already existing CCTV cameras. they're not breaching your privacy anymore than before
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Someone in Parliament has watched V for Vendetta one too many times.
"Afterwards she said: 'It's quite scary to realise that your every move could be monitored - it really is like Big Brother. 'But Middlesbrough does have a big problem with anti-social behaviour, so it is very reassuring.' " And this is why it is truly Airstrip One.
The Daily Mail, voice of petty-minded, intolerant, closet racist Little England, is usually in favour of these sorts of things.
>You reap what you sow, as it were.
Stick Men
This is actually a pretty good idea. A camera with a loudspeaker is not actually more of an encroachment on your privacy (to the extent where there can be privacy in a *public* place) than one without, and it can mean the difference between the camera operators being able to prevent a crime, or just having to watch and grit their teeth waiting for the police to turn up.
Honestly, I'm fairly bored with the "The UK is turning into 1984" recurrent Slashdot meme.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Well, just because it may be boring to you, does not mean it doesn't exist. We are rushing headlong into an age of massive amounts of ability to violate privacy due to the ability to store the data, and the medium to create it. We are not having a true debate in society about how to balance safety and privacy. It's a pity it bores you, but for some of us, we can at least make an attempt to have some dialogue about the issue before we jump into the abyss.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Man, a lot of people come down on the USA, however I don't think anything in the USA approaches big-brother-ness like what is going on in the UK.
Why aren't the people of the UK fighting back? To me this crosses the line for what a a government should be allowed to do. Where is the line drawn on what is "anti-social"? Who gets to draw the "anti-social" line? Is kissing your loved one in public "anti-social"? If not now, what is stopping the government from continually adding more and more things to what is "anti-social"?
Was Orwell a profit or did he just get real lucky with his 1984 story? I find the similarities of 1984 and things that "modern" governments are trying to do to be amazing.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
No-one has a right to privacy in a public area. It's not as if the CCTV cameras are in people's homes. I don't get why everyone screams "big brother!" and gets upset - unless you don't like people looking at you in the streets, and go everywhere with a bag on your head. These cameras do nothing a poiceman couldn't do, they just do it in a far more cost-effective fashion. May I suggest if you don't want people to know where you are, don't go out in public. :)
As the street was next to a very popular Chinese Restaurant the number of people setting it off was huge - just for using a public footpath! People complained enough for it to be removed (I guess) but it showed me how hard it is to argue against CCTV.
FTFA: Mr Bonner said:
'It would appear that the offenders are the only ones who find the audio cameras intrusive. The vast majority of people welcome these cameras.
'Put it this way, we never have requests to remove them.'
They present these things as though if you complain your clearly one of them.
The UK can not stand for this anymore - we need to find a voice, and a way to complain, that does not make us look like criminals.
P.S. I think it's a salient point that the example used in the article is a man being shouted at to not ride his bicycle - not a mugging, not a rape, not a murder - a bicycle.
http://skeptobot.blogspot.com/ - A site for the Renaissance man and woman
The victims here are the citizens. They ran away out of fear of being observed and commanded, not from shame of their actions or fear of retribution. I would run too, no matter what i had done, and if there was no where to run, like any rat, I would fight
It is total propaganda to attribute their fear as creating an almost religious moral awakening in them.
By increasing peoples stress levels, isn't it more likely that the rate of serious violent incidents would escalate, rather than decrease? It could become a compulsively violent society because they just can't handle the increasing stresses of our "civilization".. Or is that why they put the cameras up in the first place?
The constant privacy concerns on slashdot ( which, btw, I tend to agree with ) are, in this case, focused on the wrong end. The important issue is not the number of public cameras ( as at least one poster has noted, they are in a public area where you could have no expectation of privacy anyway ), but who has access to the other end.
A public webcam, which anybody can look at on the net, is very different from a public cam which only the cops get to look at. The people who control the data get to control the facts.
Rather than bemoaning the number of cameras and now their accompaning audio, you should be complaining about the fact that you don't have access to them.
Public crime is like bugs: if there are enough eyeballs, the problem will be fixed.
Actually, here in Cambridge (UK), they pretty much are on every street corner, at least anywhere near the middle of town. On top of that, they now have mobile units they can set up anywhere, which are used further out. Then there's all the cameras at things like ATMs, the ones in shops, the ones scanning your number plate when you park at Tesco, the numberplate-scanning equipment in police vehicles and in the new average speed cameras...
And you know what? The few relatively dangerous places around the place -- not that Cambridge is a particularly dangerous city to live in -- are still dangerous. My girlfriend still can't walk across a park alone late at night, or go through the underpass to get across the road. When they want to prosecute people for violent crime, the pictures are so poor that they can't reliably identify anyone involved. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that they can't read number plates on vehicles, either. In fact, the only thing they seem to be good for is watching outside pubs late at night to pick up any serious fights slightly faster than someone would call them in.
Personally, I think it's all gone way too far. I now shop at other supermarkets that don't spy on everyone entering or leaving their car park, I don't sign up for any new "loyalty" cards in shops, etc. I have even reached the point that I'm considering voting for a political party I never thought I'd support, on the basis that they have given a solid promise that they will repeal the ID card legislation Tony's cronies have forced through. Whatever else I think of that party, I will almost certainly vote for them next time just for that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And you know what? The few relatively dangerous places around the place -- not that Cambridge is a particularly dangerous city to live in -- are still dangerous.
Thank god someone else realised this. Video camera are not a deterrent! They're only useful for solving crimes - they're totally useless at preventing them.
Cameras aren't cops.
Except that guncrime is so rare here (as in you can count most fatalities due to guncrime in double digits most years) that it would be a pointless exercise.
Because the majority of people in the U.S. are fucking idiots, that's why. As long as they get their daily update on the antics of Paris Hilton, football on tv, etc... they don't care. You can park a fucking tank on every street corner, and they wouldn't care.
If it doesn't personally and immediately effect them, they couldn't give a flying fuck about what is going on. It's wide spread apathy in the populace. The only ones that do care are ex-military, and the tin foil hat squad. I live in the U.S., and even I say fuck them, they get what they deserve. One of these days something else will happen that will give them their wake up bitch slap, and they'll look around bewildered and ask what the hell happened.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Joking aside, many of us who were alive before and during WWII do see the parallels of today's Western society to that of Soviet Russia.
Scarier than that, on "the other side of the line" people were wandering around saying things like "it can't happen here, we're a democracy" -- but it did.
Thank God it can't happen here, happen here, happen here. . .
KFG
After watching the movie, I did.
And, uh, there's an awful lot of similarity. I really don't see your point. They did munge the whole "what kinds of tests were being performed" and the whole "plague" thing, which was necessary for placing it in the future rather than an alternative past. (C'mon, mainframes?) But for the most part it was a close adaptation, in keeping with the anarchistic theme of the original.
But disapprovingly calling the movie "politically correct" seems to be one of the vaguest and least intellectually-rigorous accusations I've seen. Politically correct for whom? The movie has glowingly positive sequences about blowing up government buildings and murdering state leaders, for chrissake! (Oh, wait, you mean standing up against a totalitarian government is "politically correct"? Well DUH! I should hope so! "Politically correct" does not exclude "morally correct"!)
The formula is:
:)
1- See the movie, enjoy.
2- Read the book, enjoy.
If you read the book first, you won't enjoy the movie because the movie is NEVER as good as the book.
See the movie, then read the book: It's the only sane thing to do
You can't take the sky from me...
Probably because the people who the cameras are supposed to catch would simply blow them up.
In the UK, I imagine it isn't quite at the point of open warfare in the streets, where nobody's got anything left to lose.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I disagree heartily. Certainly the way most book-to-movie adaptations are done, its true, becuase the director (or screenwriter) can't get it out of their head that cinema is a completely different medium in almost every way. It's like directors think its like porting between operating systems, when it should be more like writing it again from the ground up in a different language. You approach a problem differently in LISP than, say, Java or C. If you wanted to do the smne thing, you would go about it using different tools.
For evidence, two examples. One, Dr. Strangelove (etc. rest of title etc.) was based on a very serious book "Red Alert", and while the novel was good, the movie was excellent. The movie was better because Kubrick realized the sort of accidental and very black humor that was easily exploitable on film in a way that the book could not put across. As a point of reference, someone about the same time made a direct book-to-movie port of "Red Alert". It was decent, but nobody remembers it.
Example the second, Fight Club, a very good novel by Chuck Palahniuk, was I think improved upon in the film. Many of David Finscher's directorial trademarks helped to disorient the viewer in a way that I think Palahniuk was trying to directly explain, all using nothing but mood and deft editing. A direct port book-to-movie would have been terrible, instead of better.
Ultimately a story can be enriched by its introduction to celluloid (or, these days, virtual celluloid; Baudrillard is somewhere creaming his pants) so long as the director keeps in mind the advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the medium and also how those adv. and dis. compare to those of novel storytelling. The key is tha the director must at first be respectful of teh message(s) being conveyed by the original author and find ways to express them that are available in the new medium, especially to make up for those that are not. Mixed example: in Starship Troopers, (a movie I am heavily conflicted over), does a good job at least of building the federal society's parameters not through exposition, but rather through clever advert propaganda snippets. In a movie, the audience would have collectively suicided rather than listen to (rather than read) Heinlein's political musings.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
You might be surprised how many of us old folks there are on /. I turn 61 next month and am in full agreement with AC's post above. In fact the sequence of events is so much like history repeating itself that I'm tempted to start making predictions about what happens next. By the time enough of "We the People" realize what's happening it will be too late to do anything about it without a great amount of bloodshed, because as Thomas Jefferson said: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
They'd tell of fearmongering from the government and the media (which itself was government-run). This fearmongering was used to turn the people against other nations and peoples, and even against certain ideals.
It was ever thus.