UK's Public Cameras Listen For Trouble

You're probably already aware of the United Kingdom's large network of video cameras inspecting public places. News.com now reports that they'll be listening for trouble as well. Based on a model in use in the Netherlands, new cameras will be fitted to 'listen for aggressive tones,' such as those used during an argument. From the article: "The system works by putting microphones in CCTV cameras to continually analyze the sound in the surrounding area. If aggressive tones are picked up, an alarm signal is automatically sent to the police, who can zoom in the camera to the location of the suspect sound and investigate the situation. 'Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression,' Van der Vorst said. 'With our system, the police can respond a lot quicker to a violent situation.'"

Comments

Privacy?

[megrims]

doubleplusungood

Re:Privacy?

[flatt]

Seriously Brits, that book wasn't meant to be used as a manual.

When I woke up this morning

[Centurix]

I let off some aggressive tones, I would classify the smell as Dutch too. Glad I live on the other side of the planet.

They don't have fire hoses attached... yet

[heli0]

The cameras now have attached megaphones so they can scold you as well.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=405477&in_page_id=1770

The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts - from dropping litter to late-night brawls - to send out a verbal warning: 'We are watching you'.

Re:They don't have fire hoses attached... yet

[Hogwash McFly]

You! Yes, you! Stand still laddie!

The police will soon learn to ignore the "alarms"

[gamer4Life]

Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression

And at least 90% of verbal aggression ends up leading to nothing that the police can go after. But who knows, maybe they'll have an adjustable tolerance level, or maybe the police will get their kicks out of watching people argue, like a soap opera or watching COPS.

When did aggressive tones become a crime?

[Anonymous Coward]

People are yelling at each other. We better send the police to haul them away!

Re:When did aggressive tones become a crime?

[eighty4]

IANAL (but I do have a law degree in the UK) and assault is defined as causing the victim to legitimately "fear for their immediate public safety" - no physical contact is necessary.

Therefore, in the right circumstances agressive tones could constitute assault.

Yes

[LunarCrisis]

'Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression,' Van der Vorst said. 'With our system, the police can respond a lot quicker to a violent situation.'

Yes, in fact, they can even arrive at the scene before the violent situation errupts! Oh wait, didn't they already do a movie about that?

What would be more accurate and cost-effective...

[arc.light]

Mandate that every UK resident pay to have a tracking device and microphone implanted in their body. Since you couldn't trust UK citizens to police themselves, outsource the monitoring of these surveillance devices to India.

Movie Plot

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sounds like a great opportunity for a denial-of-service attack. The terrorists want to blow up ALL OF LONDON!!! so they take 50 or so cell-phones, download custom ringtones made of people yelling at each other and then tape them up near the cameras in various innocuous locations around town.

Then, when they want to do something nefarious in a place that happens to be in front of some cameras, they just have someone call a bunch of the phones and all the camera monitoring people will focus their attention elsewhere.

Kind of like starting a fire on one side of town right before you go to rob a bank on the other side.

cue the typical slashdot indignation

[circletimessquare]

"oh the outrage! it's george orwell's 1984! those who seek security over liberty deserve neither! our privacy is totally gone, might as well install cameras in our toilets!"

hysteria, histrionics, panic, fud... snore...

in every single aspect of life you can imagination, moderation always wins. balance always wins. complexity always trumps simplicity. life is nuanced. it is made of balancing multiple complicated concerns. you can not bludgeon life with an idealistic platitude and expect to make sense or be wise

what are losing attitudes in life? idealism. absolutism. fundamentalism

the absolute adherence to an idea: "privacy above all else" is wrong. as would absolute adherence to ANY ideal be wrong

every single ideal you can imagine, there are scenarios in society where justice and common sense demand that that ideal be broken

so when would absolute adherence to privacy be wrong?

well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis? and guess what? if you lived in such an environment, you would LOVE these cameras

and in fact, that is the case: ask residents of housing projects what they think of these camera systems: they LOVE them. they get a life again. they can go outside again. the thugs get chased out of the public areas

and those who complain about these systems are usually your sort of middle class to upper middle class busy body who is disturbed by the idea of cameras... but not so disturbed about the prevalance of crime, because they don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. in other words, their opinion is formed on a half-truth, formed in a vacuum disconnected from reality that doesn't see all of the factors in play. propaganda is based on half-truths. it's an appeal to emotion, rather than an appeal to reason. "cameras bad! end of story!" the oh-so-wise slashdot crowd falls for it, brainwashed on the topic. a kneejerk, thoughtless reaction

please, slashdotters: try to understand the exact nature of the world you live in. your antithetical, hysterical reaction to these camera systems is an opinion born in a vacuum of any other considerations. sometimes, in life, the choice is between a fuzzy, complex negative, and a slightly worse, also fuzzy and complex negative. not between an obvious negative and an obvious positive. but to register some of your opinions is to see that in your mind, its a no brainer choice between absolute good and absolute evil. uh... no

some of you have opinions about these camera systems that seems to start with the assumption that the british government just likes to put up cameras and spy on its citizens for no good reason. can you possibly imagine a good reason why the government AND its people would want these cameras? or is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains, cheerfully twittering their hairline moustaches, rubbing their hands together, boldly thinking up new negarious plots to remove all of your freedoms for... no good reason at all. just general cartoonish malice. right?

can you imagine that there is actual reasonable problems these camera systems solve? can you imagine that the people installing these systems are actually well-meaning people? can you imagine that those who like these system are actually thoughtful concerned citizens happy with the cameras? no? yes? well: can you imagine a better realistic solution to the problem these cameras are solving because the privacy implications bother you? you can? good!

because now we're constructively engaged in the subject matter, rather than registering your typical lowest common denominator knee-jerk propagandistic hysterical opinion about these camera systems

it's tired. wake up. you live in a difficult world. to actually help and solve its problems just registering your holier-than-thou righteous indignation and unloading your hysteria doesn't actually help anyone. imagine that. address the real problems, and stopping stamping your feet like kids having a temper tantrum

Re:cue the typical slashdot indignation

[MBC1977]

So in other words, you would willing give up freedom for security. To be honest as a member of the armed forces it is people like you who honestly scares me. I can deal with bullets flying towards me. I can deal with the possible IEDs on a road. I can even deal with dying if it comes down to it.

What I can not deal with is the loss of freedom. I don't want to be tracked from point A to point B because somebody thinks they need to know about my whereabouts. I don't need my conversations with another individual recorded, no matter how loud or soft my voice gets. Considering I know more than a couple of students, professors, commanders, etc., who's voice gets EXTREMELY LOUD at times when engaged in a conversation.

I don't need sensationalistic politics or politicians who feel to earn their paychecks they need to introduce some outrageous tracking and monitoring scheme, which essentially now makes the citizens feel like criminals. No society is free of crime, because Man has wants and needs and sometimes in some individuals those wants and needs are larger then others (in a negative way).

To close, you may like living in a "Demolition Man" society, where everything is tracked and controlled. But eventually, such a society will foster members who are soft and weak, and unfit to take care of themselves. And then they will be overrun by someone who's utterly ruthless and without fear or respect of rules and laws.

Re:cue the typical slashdot indignation

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

in every single aspect of life you can imagination, moderation always wins. balance always wins.

Tell that to all the people in North Korea. Or Saudi Arabia.

Re:cue the typical slashdot indignation

[smallfries]

Privacy != Freedom. Maybe it was 200 years ago, but this is no longer the case. Privacy was an illusion that briefly flourished during the industrial revolution. Prior to that we (mostly) lived in small communities where the modern concept of privacy was unknown. Now we live in a society with the information technology to show that privacy is an illusion in our large-scale communities.

Once privacy was seen as a support for freedom - if you don't know what somebody is up to then you can't stop them. In more uncertain political times this was seen as a necessity to stop political repression. In more unstable parts of the world it is still a necessity today for certain groups of dissadents.

This is not necassarily the best balance in a stable society. We guarantee political freedom through the rule of law, and it seems to work reasonably well. So privacy is not necessary in the way - which is not to say that we don't need it at all. Privacy can be split into two types (I think I'm refering to Mann here although to be honest I forget the reference):
      Personal Privacy
      Public Privacy

Personal Privacy is your right not to be observed when you are in a private space, such as your own home. The majority of people would be uncomfortable with this type of invasion, and this the disturbing part of 1984. The typical slashdot kneejerk reaction that the GP refered to is confusing this with public privacy.

Public Privacy is the "right" not to be observed when you are in a public space - say a shopping mall. This doesn't exist. In public spaces we are observed all of the time by the other people in those public spaces. There is nothing to stop people corrolating that information to track us if they wanted.

Whenever there is a story about "Crazy Brits and their CCTV fetish" on slashdot the two types of privacy are typically confused. In Britain we have a lot of CCTV in public spaces, and people are quite happy about that. It is not impinging on a right to freedom, it is just following through the obvious implication - if you are in a public space you are being observed.

Re:cue the typical slashdot indignation

[Anne Thwacks]

I have said all this before, so its fairly well rehearsed. Obviously, I am a child of the 1960's :-)

I live in London. There is clearly a group of people somewhere hell bent on stirring up paranoia to justify this stuff. London is at no more risk of violence than at any other time in the last 60 years, according to any credible statistics. The number if people being killed by terrorists (Islamic or otherwise) is massively down on what it was (and sure as hell not because of cameras)*. The number of innocent people being killed by armed police is perhaps a bit higher, but still lower than any big city in the USA.

So what has changed apart from the availability of technology that can route backhanders to people with good connections?)

When my parents were school age, their houses were being bombed and they were regularly machine-gunned by Nazi dive bombers while cycling to school. So when I was young, everyone thought it was perfectly safe to go outside and play on building sites or with farm machinery or wild animals, swim in the river, and in fact: Run along and play, don't hurt anyone, don't break anything, and come back when its meal time. Serious crime was reported in the press, but without salacious details, and sexual crime was reported only using long medical terms that most people could not understand, or be bothered to read.

So we played with snakes, climbed over the rubble of bombed houses, dived into the river despite the abandonned prams and bicycles, made home-made fireworks, leapt of garage roofs and played ball in the road, and experimented with drugs and wierd music. Only a few of my friends were injured severely, and none died, except from cocaine! We knew damn well not to fall off roofs of two story buildings, cos landing carelessly of a gound flor roof hurt badly. We knew to be careful with home made explosives, because a friend nearly lost his hand, and we knew how to make and do things with any old stuff that came to hand.

Todays parents are too old to remember this, and have media that tells them about every murder or rape fifty times a day. Children not exposed to minor risk are unable to comprehend that playing chicken with 125MPH trains is a bad idea, that driving a real car is not like "Grand Theft Auto" (especially as automatics are rare here, and there is nothing like a clutch in a computer game) so they steal cars and kill children by accident.

* Terrorism in England mostly means the IRA - a bunch if Irish criminals funded by misguided Americans, and to some extent, misguided Irish. They killed loads of innocent people, and quite a few innocent animals too! This has declined because coverage of other terrorist groups on TV has shown them that Terrorist incidents are massive own-goals in terms of publicity. If the USA made it possible for all Palestinians and Iraquis to have a TV, then terrorism in the middle East would soon collapse. Why do you think the Taliban imposed a telly-ban? Yes I do have friends from the Middle East (on both sides).

what the hell is this for?

[oohshiny]

Our lives have become safer than any time in history; what the hell do we need this stuff for? While the occasional murder or terrorist attack is sad and tragic, we could save far more lives by spending this money on public health.

In addition to not giving us much bang for the buck, there is a grave risk that all this surveillance technology will be used by people to undermine our democracy.

Re:what the hell is this for?

[zCyl]

Our lives have become safer than any time in history; what the hell do we need this stuff for?

Don't complain, celebrate. Declare a national "Yell-at-a-Camera Day" and get everyone you know to participate. :)

They Dutch model is working different

[Reemi]

The Dutch system, and I could not determine from the article if this is valid for the UK system as well, is continuesly filming but does not store the data.

Once a certain sound is detected, the camera starts to record, including a previous time span (30 or 60 seconds) from the past. People are even advised to shout when being attacked or witnessing a crime!!

This means, normal day privacy is protected and crime can be fought very efficient. The people living in that concerned district love the system.

Re:They Dutch model is working different

[wheelgun]

I'm sure they do love the system. That's the scary part. It's also sad. The countries where these systems are blossoming are the same countries that sacrificed for decades to defeat the exact kind of societies they are turning into. When I was a kid there was a rumor that the KGB had all the parks in Moscow bugged. The idea that 'good guys' like the UK, Holland, and etc. would consider using such systems was simply not contemplated.

Shweet

[The Bungi]

Next time I'm in London and I'm about to pop a cap in some ManU cracker at a pub I'll say "prepare yourself for the afterlife, dear" in a very soft voice. It sure beats "YOU"RE GOING DOWN MOTHAFUCKER!!!"

$DEITY bless technology.

Help, Mimes!

[Tablizer]

This will just encourage crooks to become mimes. It is one thing to be mugged, another to be mugged by a mime, for godsakes!

great idea

[eagl]

That's a great idea!

Here's an extention of it - modern cable tuner boxes have to send some information back to the cable company, so why not just put a little microphone in the tuner boxes? Then the special police software can be fed the sounds from inside your house, and if there is any sound of violent disturbance, they can respond. It's commonly known that rape and murder often occur in the home, and we're finding out more and more that in this new age of terrorism, violent crimes against society often begin in the home as well.

Since not everyone has cable tv, the government can put one of these boxes in everyone's house using the same infrastructure that tracks and enforces the TV tax. They have the customer records and housing database, so it's stupid to let such a volume of government collected personal information go unused.

Think of all the crime we could stop before it's committed! If crime can be stopped at the point when it's still just griping about the government or your boss, then we'll all be safer.

For those who don't THINK about what you read, reference "sarcasm" and "satire", along with "Orwell: 1984".

Statistics.

[Ihlosi]

So, how many verbal arguments do not lead to violence ? Did they consider that too ? They better had, or they might be dealing with lots and lots of false alarms.

Stick to your guns people

[KKlaus]

Don't mod this guy's argument up. Not only is it filled with straw men (See:" is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains" for one) and emotional appeals (See: "well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis?" for one), but its the same damn argument we hate when we get from politicians except now somehow its fooling us because it comes from a regular person.

The safest place would be a high-security prison, as always, and policies that make it more and more difficult to exist if you are not quiet, well adjusted, and "part of the system" are bad. This is one of them, becaues now apparently if I get mad I no longer have the right to yell or I get police attention. I guess I better become the type of person that won't be tempted to yell... so I guess I better never get mad... so I guess I better not care about anything too much that I might ever get upset over...

The argument against this type of stuff is never that it is totally ineffective at its stated goal. I'm sure this type of stuff can and will cut down on certain types of crime. Maybe even significantly. The argument against it is that it is a bad trade, and that we need to attack the causes of crime, instead of treating everyone like slaves (I mean I can't yell anymore or I get the police looking at me? Come on.), just because some people still become criminals.

Don't run away from your stance on privacy just because someone points out that some people get hurt because the police aren't allowed to monitor everything. It's called the price of a free society.

Re:"Yes, you, comrade #454325. Get off Slashdot!"

[0123456]

"Even if our cameras are watching us, at least there's no Patriot Act here ... yet."

The British government don't need it, because we don't have a constitution to protect us. That's why they can force ID cards on a public who don't want them and lock people up without charge.

Quite frankly I think it's absurd to see the British people sit back and watch TV while the government remove ancient protections against government abuse that our ancestors fought and died for. But hey, I no longer care, I'm getting out of here before Britain becomes a total-control, total-surveillance police state; when those who chose not to emigrate along with the 'paranoid' start complaining about the restrictions on their lives, I'll remind them that 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'

The funny thing is, I strongly suspect that it's far more likely that these powers will be left in the hands of a neo-Nazi party like the BNP rather than a neo-communist party like Labour; Labour have done so much to screw the country up that support for extremists is growing rapidly.