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George Orwell Was Right — Security Cameras Get an Upgrade
Jamie stopped to mention that Bloomberg is reporting on a recent addition of speakers to public security cameras in Middlesbrough, England. From the article: "`People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,' said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars."
because god forbid we might think for ourselfs, or act up.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Will people who flip the bird at the cameras and keep walking be regarded as individuals or traitors to the state?
Maybe that's why the video cameras are going up?
Is it too late for Britain to reverse its course? People get used to cameras because they provide security. Then the authorities add speakers to provide more security. In 10 years, cameras will have face recognition systems. This happens so gradually that citizens become accustomed to Big Brother's constant presence and don't question the next move.
50 years from now, I think historians will look at 9/11 (and the Madrid bombings, etc.) as the beginning of the end of privacy standards that literally took centuries to establish. We have to stop this now before it's too late.
Orwell was a man ahead of his time...
...that the only thing anybody knows about 1984 is that it's about a government that spies on its people. If that was the only thing the book was about, it would have been forgotten long ago — there are hundreds of stories like that. This particular story is interesting because it goes insides the minds of the people who make a totalitarian society work. If people actually read 1984, they might not be so quick to refer to it. Because if they did read it, they'd probably see themselves in it — and not as a brave defender of liberty, but as one of the faceless minions of Big Brother.
We should not ask ourselves what can government do with all the power they are accumulating but what will they do. A nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects something that never was and never will be.
I'm only mildly surprised that the government of a western democracy would propose such a system -- but I'm shocked that the people of any western democracy would allow it -- TFA says the camera:person ratio has reached 1:16 -- why are people putting up with this? It's time to storm parliment with flaming pitchforks. The U.K. has become an out-of-control police state -- and it is the *left* that is pushing for more cameras....
People of England, you have sold your souls.
Anyone who wastes doubleplusgood Victory coffee is probably a Eurasian spy anyway.
The core issue here, I think, is that by and large, people learn, as they grow up, *why* they should do certain things and not do others; and then as adults, they voluntarily behave in socially acceptable ways.
The problem comes when this process fails, and so as an adult a person behaves in ways which are socially unacceptable.
The issue is how to deal with this.
Clearly, the question has to be asked how these people failed to learn as they grew up, for that is the root of it all; but once that failure has occured, these people have to be dealt with, and that is currently achieved, as you say, behaviour modification - coercion - the threat of externally imposed penalties.
The longer term and larger problem is the risk that police become so effective, with all their monitoring and survelliance, that it begins to impede the proper learning of voluntary socially acceptable behaviour. For it seems to me if you KNOW that you will be caught and punished WHENEVER you do something wrong, you no longer have the ability to *choose* not to do something wrong, and so you will be unable to learn to *voluntarily* refrain from socially unacceptable behaviour.
In some cases - extremes of which are in Algeria and Iraq - the police ARE the problem. Too much power is not necessarily a good thing.
The problem isn't so much the use you describe, but the potential misuses of the system.
At the lowest level, I know of one anecdotal story where couples having a quickie in a popular spot were unaware a camera had gone up; and the security guard watching was in fact recording their sex, compiling the events into tapes, and selling them.
At the higher level, we run into a problem where a society becomes ever more effective at imposing its value system upon the members of that society. As JSM said, "society executes its own mandates". What happens when these cameras are present in a area rife with racism and the viewers themselves are racist? I can imagine blacks being harshly treated, with intolerance, and whites being let off or lightly treated for the same acts.
At a higher level yet, the issue becomes that of concern about the ways in which this new capability will interact with other new capabilities - such as massive State databases. The State has always kept information on us, but in analog systems, which are inherently so slow to use that the practical uses of that data were sharply limited. When, however, access becomes effectively immediate, what you have isn't more of the same, what you have now is *new and different*. It's is a qualitative change, not a quantative change. In this vein, mixing massive video survelliance with massive databases and police monitoring, very real concerns begin to arise - in particular, that we are finally loosing *freedom*, for we are no longer free; we MUST do what society and State expects us to do.
The terrible mind-trap here is people going "well, that only means not doing things which are bad, so what's the problem?"
Anyone notice that when you click on a reply, when you get back to the main tree of posts, there's a checkmark noting you've looked at it.
"You, with the keyboard! Yes, you! Go back and mod that post up!"
It's simple. A free society must tolerate some lawlessness or it is no longer free. Nope, it isn't right to litter or burgle or murder or rape. But it also isn't right to keep adding powers and new surveillance technology to police forces until they are as omniscient as God.
> Well, given the use of those neat little ASBOs the Brits are so fond of (which basically allow the courts to
> arbitrarily criminalize ANY "anti-social" behavior), it's safe to say that any flagrant display of disrespect can
> be grounds for imprisonment (though you'd have to do twice--once for the ASBO to be issued, and once again to be
> arrested as a violator of the ASBO.) It likely comes down to the whim of the camera operator as to whether or not
> this happens.
Spot on.
It is often not a technology in isolated which causes problems, but the combination of that technology with other existing factors.
In the UK, the ASBO is basically a catch-all, where a court can decide something is "anti-social" and impose essentially arbitrary terms of punishment.
In other words, the legal system is now enforcing the mandates of society; and society, through surveilliance, is beginning to *literally* watch us all - all sixty million of us - all of the time; and if you do something the watcher disagrees with, you know he has the power to get you in front of a court, and that power alone, with all the hassle and effort associated with it for you - is enough, regardless of the chance and risk of conviction, to strongly influence your behaviour.
The problem is, those watchers are normal people - they're going to be stupid, irrational, selfish, bad-tempered, uneducated, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist. They're going to be paid minimum wage for doing a really dull job. These people are the people who are *setting and enforcing* the standards by which you will live.
If the cameras did only what a police officer at the scene could do, I doubt there would be serious opposition to them. But, in fact, the cameras do MORE than what a police officer could do. For starters, a police officer on the corner cannot hide his identity. He is not anonymous, and therefore he is somewhat accountable for his actions. Unless rules are put into place to ensure otherwise, a camera is anonymous for all intents and purposes. The target of the camera does not know when he is watched, does not know when the watcher is abusing his powers, and does not know who to point the finger at when an abuse of power occurs and is somehow detected.
> The problem is, those watchers are normal people - they're going to be stupid, irrational, selfish, bad-tempered,
> uneducated, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist. They're going to be paid minimum wage for doing a really dull job. These
> people are the people who are *setting and enforcing* the standards by which you will live.
And the particular problem with this, to state it explicitly, is that if you give an average person power and they're not being monitored or checked for how behave, they abuse that power. People are basically shit. I've had enough problems with getting first line technical support staff to behave decently - imagine how it would be if those people were watching you and could get you in front of a court?
(And pretty soon - another five years? = you couldn't just run away from the camera, because you'd have your mobile with you, and if you'd "committed a crime" then the law enforcement agencies would access the mobile provider's data to find out which mobile was where, and figure out who you are.)
At the higher level, we run into a problem where a society becomes ever more effective at imposing its value system upon the members of that society. [...] What happens when these cameras are present in a area rife with racism and the viewers themselves are racist? I can imagine blacks being harshly treated, with intolerance, and whites being let off or lightly treated for the same acts.
Without addressing the main issue in your post, I have to say something about this often-heard argument. Put more bluntly, what is claimed here is that incompetence is the safeguard of freedom: if government(/society) is bumbling enough, it won't be able to enforce unfair policies.
Yet, maintaining freedom by government incompetence is a dangerous route, because (1) it may be impotent to act when it is needed, (2) incompetence as a government policy may very well lead to corruption and waste ("it's good that I'm an inefficient government clerk; I'm maintaining freedom for the populace!"), and (3) people now need to know not just what is legal, but what is 'effectively legal', i.e. not legal but what government incompetence makes legal because no-one is prosecuted for it, which can also lead to (4) selective, discriminatory enforcement by the government ("we can't prosecute all who break this law, so we do what we can" - but those that are prosecuted just 'happen' to belong to some particular group or minority - note that this is the exact same argument as appears in the quoted paragraph above, but arguing the opposite claim).
But there is indeed an intuition that an 'overly-efficient' government is a danger. I think the underlying issue is that, in some situations, there may be a disparity between what the people want and what the people they elect want (e.g. where I live at least, the majority of the population are in favor of legalizing pot, or at least indifferent; but lawmakers are strongly against it). And the simplest way to solve the problem stemming from that disparity seems to be to just make government inefficient (if the cops don't do their job and arrest potheads, then pot is effectively free, just as if it were legally free).
But the 'simplest way' is often a very poor solution. The 'right' solution would be to protest, to fight for the causes people care about, so that lawmakers are in tune with the public; perhaps also to implement a more direct democracy. Government incompetence as a way to maintain freedom is an ugly hack, in programmer's terms; problem is, people are too lazy to do things the correct way.
Even if the group is as small as two individuals, there still need to be laws.
...anonymous coward!
Me and you. Give me half of your possession, because I declared myself a tax collector. It's been a law between us before you were born. Or I will jail you and torment you, because I am judge and enforcer before you. And do not ever tell me a society without consensus is a crime, or I'll kill you. You,
There you are, staring at me again.
This is the World-Wide Web, where not everyone is American. Your "founding fathers" aren't mine.
and as you can see from recent cigarette smoking and Trans fat ads, the bar for "wrong" goes down and down... after all, with cameras they have to find "wrong" doing in order to justify their existence...
I'm not saying there shouldn't be punishments for breaking the laws... Of course you should do that, but the mark of a free, moral person is to do the RIGHT THING when nobody is looking, BECAUSE nobody but themselves will ever be disappointed by it!!!! IF you don't have a society that breeds that kind of self-respect and TRUST, your society's already collapsing!!!!
our society is based on the lie that laws are actually made thoughtfully... they're not. It's really a small number of people of similar religious beliefs doing things their way.. when faced with the fact that society doesn't care about old beliefs, they will openly subvert democracy at any chance they get! Combine with things like Absolute monitoring it is truly scary...
Right now, if the law enforcement agencies were so inclined they could find charges for everyone of us. There are so many laws, we are all criminals.
> I dunno though, I thought liberty would only die to the sound of thunderous applause.
Liberty is dying to the sound of a billion people watching TV.
(Watching - oh, the irony - watching Big Brother.)
As far as I know, the ancient Greek invented democracy. As great as Jefferson, Franklin et al may be, don't forget that the U.S. is *also* to blame for some pretty disgusting people, too.
You're right about this myth of our safety from tyranny through government incompetence.
As long as government is competent enough to lock you up, give you a lethal injection, start a war or tap a phone, we have to be ever-diligent.
In fact, sometimes the leaders who appear the most incompetent, like this (and I mean this with all due respect) piece of shit currently in the White House, are the ones you have to watch the closest.
Don't take it from me, read the writings of those famous liberals who started this great nation. And take a look at On Liberty and The Rights of Man.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not to mentention the fact that many Native Americans would consider the founding fathers of the USA to be mass murderers. Its hard to found a new country when most places on the globe have already been inhabbited to some extent for the past 10,000 odd years. It ussually means you'll have to displace or delete the previous inhabitants.
Lawlessness should never be tolerated. Or will you let someone kill one of your family members, since (as you say) "a free society must tolerate some lawnessness or it is no longer free"? Come on: sacrifice a loved one for the good of the nation, I dare you.
Well since we are taking things to extremes, lets follow your path to its logical end: a society of ants marching in lockstep from the cradle to the grave, a place for everything and everything in its place. The diametrical opposite, what you seem to fear, is of course a barbaric anarchy, every man for himself - do what you will shall be the whole of the law. Neither is practical, neither is representative of humanity.
We are a young race, really in biological and evolutionary terms we are just down from the trees. We are still floundering around trying to determine exactly what is "good" and "evil", the characteristics of right and wrong. Some are convinced we are simply meat machines, our whole lives determined by our genes, excusing and condemning failures in equal measure, others seek to put every foible into a neat box to be repaired or removed, like most of the psychology industry, while yet others make the sight of our own bodies an abomination, along with certain arbitrary words, generally to do with the pleasurable act of copulation. Our instinctive natures and animal passions come into conflict with our intellectual and social structures. The question really is, are those structures right or wrong, did we achieve all we have in spite of or because of our passions?
I'd say that we do not have enough facts to make any definitive decisions on that question yet. Worship of the rule of law is as dangerous as not caring about law at all; law is and always has been a sanctioned instrument of vengeance, from the earliest days to the present. Thats why prisons are not places of rehabilitation (PMITA is even a commonly understood acronym!), they are places of punishment, and that is not likely to change any time soon.
And yet by adjusting the laws to compensate for our inherently passionate nature, you begin a game of brinkmanship, where people with less regard for their fellow man try to keep criminal acts to the grey areas where they might be excused their actions. Structure is not neccesarily the best way to go; neither is a lack of structure. How and where the best compromise is to be found is a question yet to be answered.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
The irony grows ever deeper - my post has been modded +1 Funny.
Huxley was right; we're laughing, and we've forgotton why.
It's a dumb statement either way.
Liberty doesn't arise when the government fears its people. The vast majority of genocidal incidents, from Stalin to Mao to Hitler and so on, arose in an atmosphere where the average citizen was fanatically in support of the dictator, but the dictator had a paranoid and irrational fear of the people.
A tyranny where the people are conscious enough of their oppression to feel *fear* of the government is one that will very soon collapse, likely into liberty. One where the fear goes the other way is one that is very liable to commit horrific crimes - and get away with it.
I presume you're being ironic?