Slashdot Mirror
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."
"People sould not fear their governments, governments should fear their people."
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
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?
Lasers added to cameras with speakers to deal with those who don't obey
The next step is to add a "non-lethal" weapon to these cameras, something to cause pain "when neccessary". Something like Active Denial System. Yes, we need these. Just think about all the children this will save.
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 think there is a great oppertunity for advertising here.
If I can put billboard advertisments in areas where these cameras are pointed, I get a load of people constantly watching 24 hours a day.
The space will be really cheap too, as I could put the ad's in places where pedestrians would not see them, but the camera operators will.
Perhaps special placards could be attatched to the cameras, where I could affix full colour adverts for tasers, video recording systems and handcuffs.
There is always an oppertunity for someone to make money, and I am that man!!!
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.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/17/16 56258
"Sir please close the raincoat and move along, you're scaring the pidgeons."
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!"
But remember not to take your mobile phone with you, since that will be tied into your ID card and the cops will be able to see which phones were present at the right time as the smashed cameras and prosecute you.
This is part of what scares me about all this; we seem to be creating these massively effective tools for behaviour enforcement, and not giving a thought to their misuse. What happens if in ten, twenty, fifty years time, the State goes bad?
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.
I'd explain in detail why this is such an obscenely bad thing, but I just don't have the energy. Seems like English-speaking countries in general are a bad place to live if you enjoy personal freedoms (and no, I'm not comforted by the fact that it's much worse in most Arabic speaking countries. This isn't a fucking playground; "they started it!" isn't a valid excuse.)
The only problem is that it does not go far enough. Put the feeds on the internet too, open up all the cameras, and install more in all government buildings (if you're a public servant the public should be able to monitor you while you're on the clock). If someone wants to track my movements with a camera I say go ahead.... but only if I get to know who's watching me and I have the ability to watch them back. An open and transparent society can make the world both safe and free. The only thing wrong with traditional surveillance is the imbalence of power between the watchers and the watched.
Actually, I just realized you *could* be arrested after only one "anti-social" sign of disrespect. Apparently, the courts issued a pre-emptive ASBO for the entire town of Skegness, allowing the police to imprison anyone (for up to six months) whom they deemed disruptive even if they haven't actually broken any laws. (Explicitly included was the power to disperse any "crowd" consisting of two or more people.)
I don't see what's stopping them from issuing a similar ASBO covering the entire camera network...
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.
My bet is the guys on the monitors run an asshole of the month competition, I mean even without speakers it must already be a common occurence.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Personal "diary" cameras that log everything we do, from our point of view. Everything is written to a bio-encoded storage device. The data on that device is considered to be part of ones person, and can NOT be taken or used against the owner under ANY circumstances unless it is surrendered by someone of sound mind.
Now we all record everything. And it's up to us if OUR data is used against us or someone else. If no one will turn over their video, then you have no case.
An added benefit of this model is it removes the known bias of witnesses. Now you have digital data.
> The other terrible mind-trap is to fall down the rabbit hole and proclaim the world is ending every time something
> new happens.
What, like global warming?
Sometimes you know there really is a threat that would end our world; and it's happening now, and hasn't really happened before, because we, as a species, have through our numbers and technology vastly more influence and impact upon ourselves and our environment than we have ever had before.
A free society must tolerate some lawlessness or it is no longer free.
Uhh... actually, a free society should not tolerate lawlessness, since the law outlines actions that are prohibited - actions not to be tolerated.
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.
Talk about a straw man: this technology makes nothing as 'omniscient as God', and it's a bad 'slippery slope' line of thought to think that it's going to lead to that.
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.
The real question our philosophers and ethicists are yet to answer, is: Is 100% effective law-enforcement desirable?
The security cameras allow us to place a (virtual) police officer on every corner and between — a single real officer can have eyes and ears of 5 or 10, while working in a comfortable environment. That's a dramatic boom to law-enforcement. Whether or not that is a good thing depends on the answer to the above question...
And before you reach for the "Reply" link to type: "It depends on the laws," — yes, thank you, I know. It depends on a number of other things too, and even the obvious dependency on the laws is not as straightforward... For example, rogue law-makers would not exist either...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So the problem is the camera operator makes a mistake or calls you nigger or whatever. A cop on the scene has a badge and knows he can be identified. The fact is that anonymous people in power invariably abuse that power. It is a trade off. Yes maybe you can lower crime, but you also VASTLY increase the power of the state to abuse, and also you train citizens to obey a "faceless" master, making it easier in the event of abuse of power to control citizens.
We in the English speaking west have some fantasy going that ONLY Nazi Germany or ONLY Russia can invoke vast state abuse.
This is not so, any of us are capable of this.
First tell me how you are contraining this systems so that they are not open to abuse and then use. Not before.
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.
The problem is that it's Britain we're talking about. "Nuisance" crimes committed by youths seem to be more prevalent there due to the oft cited "yob" or "chav" culture. In Britain, there is an underclass of people (most of whom are white) who have absolutely no respect for the law or for other citizens.
Given the ridiculous class divisions that still pervade that country, there are few prospects for them, and so they might as well be hooligans. In some ways they aren't the worst. The English middle class are absolutely insufferable.
I can't say that I like the idea of cameras, but Britain is such a pathetic and dysfunctional country (try organizing a fucking train ride next time you are there, or getting served in a store) that I don't have much pity. It has to be the least efficient country on the planet. Even though I'm entitled to, and it would probably make me more money, I will never go back there to live.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
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!!!!
Almost all policemen I've meet even the one's I like and think are good people all want MORE... More surveillance, bigger guns, less interference from courts... to catch the "bad" guys. And almost all fall into the "christian" trap of thinking they are doing the work of "god" and country...even when they do the messy work nobody wants to do like smash people in the face. It's not a societal norm to want to go out on the street and cage men. Ultimately that's what happens to ALL of them... they can't stop and think that in a free society it's not RIGHT to cage ANYBODY... so there better be a damn good reason! Fundamentally, they are mentally ill people... just like they would say about any slashdotters on here at 5AM!!!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
By the way: Go watch 1984. Not only is it a good movie
Better yet, read the book!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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.
Amusing that you should chastise someone elses strawman and then build one of your own.--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
I dunno though, I thought liberty would only die to the sound of thunderous applause.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I worked for a corporation that DID in fact fire a security guard for such an action. A couple was in their car in the parking garage engaged in the oldest pastime, the guard made a copy of the video and it found its' way back inside the company. Note: the garage was a corporate property but was required to admit a certain number of public auto's due to agreements with the local city government. The guard was terminated, NOT for the act of filming the intercourse, but for removing the contents of the tape from company property without permission. As for the couple, they were told to stuff it, in public they ZERO EXPECTATION of privacy.
To my knowledge there was no attempt at sales or publishing the segment, the word got around because the guard was showing to other guards and a female security dispatcher overheard and reported it to us...
I KNOW this to be fact, because at the time I was working as corporate security and was involved in the initial interviews of all three indiviuals.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Hi!
What class divisions are there here (uk) that you don't get in every other country? I'm honestly asking - it can be hard to view your own country from the inside.
What do you mean by that the middle class are insufferable? You don't like their mannerisms?
> 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.)
Do I have to do all the thinking round here? You also put cameras on the people watching the camera operators.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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.
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.
I could live with universal surveillance as long as the streams (and speakers) were open to *all*.
Last post!
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.
Which in turn has conditioned people to believe that being watched 24 hours a day is NORMAL. :/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
(Both working and shopping in retail stores, I see plenty of people just drop items anywhere they feel like it, instead of returning it to its rightful shelf-space. This causes plenty of inventory and cleaning problems, but hey, it's not my problem, right?)
That helps create jobs. Acting in that manner is so morally right, you're pretty much required to do it if you're a decent person.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Nope, it isn't right to litter or ...
... Lawlessness should never be tolerated. Or will you let someone kill one of your family members, ...
;-), and I don't think it should be illegal. But it is, and I carry it nonetheless. Should I receive an extreme punishment for my publicly-admitted lawless behavior?
;-)
Talk about a straw man.
Actually, it's the escalation of the comment to killing that's the "straw man". The parent's point was that "lawlessness" includes not just murder and other awful crimes, but also such things as littering. A blanket statement that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated" isn't just saying that murderers shoult be punished to the extreme; it's also suggesting that litterers should receive an extreme punishment. And this is the crux of the problem.
For example, like 80-90% of American men (depending on which survey you've read), I currently have a small "Swiss Army" pocketknife in my pocket. In most of the US, this is illegal, since it's a "concealed weapon". I carry it because, well, I use it several times per day. It's light, it's no effort to carry, and it's useful. I've never used it to harm a person (not even myself
And this isn't at all a facetious or extreme example. A curious PR campaign that appeared here (Massachusetts) last year was about the installation of metal detectors in the doors of courthouses around the state. Since this was done, they have reported over 10,000 confiscated weapons per year from people entering the courthouses. This has been bandied about a lot to "educate" people to the lawlessness of the low-life parts of our population who end up in the courthouses.
But a few months ago, I heard an interest radio interview. The radio guy was talking to a few law-enforcement people about the problem, and started probing to find out just what sort of weapons all these people were trying to sneak into the courthouses. The law guys obviously didn't want to give the details, but the radio guy finally got it out of them: Almost all the "weapons" were pocket knives, "of the Swiss Army type".
So yes, the law-enforcement people in this supposedly liberal state are making a big fuss over people carrying 10,000 weapons per year into the courthouses, and they're talking about small pocketknives. They mean people like me, and they do consider my pocketknife a "weapon". When you say that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated", in this state you're not just talking about murderers. You are also saying that I'm a lawless criminal and my small pocketknife is a criminal weapon that should not be tolerated.
This is really what the UK cameras are all about, too, when it comes down to it. Yes, we like the idea of murderers, robbers and rapists being caught and punished. But we're not too comfortable with the idea that, if we whip out a Swiss Army knife to slice open one of those damned "clamshell" packages, we risk arrest and fines or imprisonment for carrying a concealed weapon.
(And the small 1-inch blade on my knife is a good tool for that sort of awful packaging. It's the safest portable tool I know to attack them with. I do wish it were legal, but until the law changes, I'll probably continue to be a concealed-weapon-carrying criminal, as will most American men and around half the women.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I think the two are probably quite related. Littering shows a deep disrespect for the outside world, and litterers probably have tendencies to other antisocial crimes. Also, have you seen thugs and violent criminals out in public? They are constantly littering - perhaps the worst litterers I have ever seen.
I think there's something to be said for the "broken windows-esque" idea that a society that does not permit littering and anti-social behaviour, will also not tolerate violence and other more extreme forms of anti-social behaviour. It's also amazing how many violent criminals get picked up because they break smaller laws - like speeding or fare evasion - where they otherwise would never have been caught.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I presume you're being ironic?