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Cameras Help Cops Catch a Killer
CrazedWalrus writes "Philadelphia police recently captured a serial killer with the help of a combination of Homeland Security and private surveillance cameras. Police examined video from 50 different cameras and pieced together relevant footage from 12 of them, and eventually were able to identify the murderer. Once caught, he confessed to several other murders spanning the past eight years. Without these cameras this killer would probably be stalking the streets of Philadelphia today. With results like that, is there really a good basis for argument against these cameras?"
Just because some intrusive technology was used for good at one occasion, doesn't mean that it completely turnes the tides on the discussion. it's still an intrusive technology.
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I never understand the comment "with such a good result, can we argue against X?".
The point is, you can always justify any intrusive technology by pointing to the good results. "If we lock everyone up, there would be no crime! Can you argue against that?"
We always have to look at the tradeoff between the intrusion on our freedoms and the the results that the technology brings. As for cameras, I think that in some cases/locations they make sense, but that (for example) the UK has gone way overboard. But that is just my opinion.
The cameras that were used were a combination of private cameras and security cameras put up around a post office. This is not about a sophisticated government network of cameras used to track people (although those do exist in Philidelphia). It's about a resourceful police department. It's good to see a story about the cops doing some good.
A real policeman watching the criminals with his eyes can also grab hold of said criminal and stop them from doing the misdeed.
A policeman watching over camera is just a reviewr for britains worst police movies 74.
I would rather the money be spent on real policemen doing a real job at policing.
liqbase
Most people don't object to privately operated security cameras.
As long as the cameras (and personally identifiable data in general) are hard enough to access that they will only be used to prosecute major crimes, most people would be perfectly happy. After all, since the beginning of time, officials could interview other witnesses and find out who was doing what, and when.
The privacy concerns really come into play when the cameras are online, and easily accessible. Then it's a force multiplier for the authorities, allowing them to track hundreds and hundreds of people with only trivial effort, as well as prosecuting every trivial violation of the law the cameras see.
In other words, it's not the cameras, it's the databases.
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Essentially the main problem is that it tilts the balance too far in favour of the government forces. There is a delicate balance between personal freedom and government control, which means that if the government should become corrupt, the people will still be able to overthrow it. If you allow all-pervasive control by the government, this becomes much more difficult.
Governments throughout the world, throughout history, have shown repeatedly that they are subject to corruption, so keeping the required balance so that peoples can overthrow their corrupt governments is paramount.
The difference is one of quantity and duration. The "policeman watching you in person" will quickly forget if you aren't doing anything out of the ordinary. The camera (potentially) results in a permanent record.
"But why is a permanent record bad, when I'm doing nothing wrong?". You aren't doing anything wrong today, but what about under the laws of tomorrow? What about if you later become a public figure, and they have tapes of you picking your nose? Is it suddenly a privacy intrusion then?
Also, with better and better computer processing, ALL of the cameras can be watched ALL of the time. This is a quantum leap above what "the policeman on the corner" is capable of. What if the police had officers on every corner, and were taking notes 24 hours a day of everything that happened, everyone who passed by, etc. Would that make you pause to think? That is where we are headed...
I am getting so disgusted with how people's fear, insecurity, and single-minded drive for personal safety is driving public opinion and laws toward a police state. At the rate things are going now, ten years from now we will live in a society of 0% crime and 0% fredom. Surely a state-monitored camera in every house would reduce crime? Think of the lives it would save! Lets do it!
Idiots. They don't realize what they are losing because their fredoms and rights are being nibbled away a little at a time, all in the name of personal safety.
Did you know, if you toss a live frog into a boiling pot of water he jumps right out, that's no surprise. But put him in a pot of room temperature water and he stays there, even while you are slowly turning up the burner. An hour later you have one dead frog. It's amazing how similar this is to how the sheep behave.
The proponants of things like this try to present it as a choice, you either do as we say or you deal with the consequences. You can either be safe OR you can live in a cage. They don't discuss the possibility of being safe without living in a cage. This issue is a small one, but that's how it works, your fredoms are chipped away a little at a time over a long term, and leaves you staring back at 20 years ago wondering who let it happen.
You did.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If that policeman was watching me all the time, following me everywhere I went without any evidence that I might be up to anything naughty, then there wouldn't be any difference.
We've got at most couple of years' grace period while there simply isn't enough bandwidth and processing power for the deployed cameras to be actively monitored at all times. There's a presumptive freedom that comes with that, and we're going to lose it. With a lot of luck, we might eventually get it back.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
Actually, if you're going to be pedantic, the exact quote is "The cameras are correlated with an increase in total injury crashes, with the increase being between 7% and 24%."
So your statement that "more accidents are reported when there are cameras present" is a nonargument, because when people are injured in an accident, the accident gets reported anyway.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The difference is that I and many other bystanders can watch the policeman in person, whereas if the policeman is watching me on camera nobody gets to watch h(im/er) aside possibly from other policemen.
The issue I have with most surveillance technology is the information gap it creates. If they get to watch me, I should get to watch them too.
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In a truly free society new technologies must come with laws that require transparency
Bullshit. If you mean all new technologies must have laws then what you're saying is before any innovation is allowed the politicians must have their own interests met first... I don't care to subject the pace of innovation and the growth of the economy to a bunch of politicos out for themselves or their single consituency.
If you mean only technologies used by the government... then you need overriding laws that can be applied to various situation. Otherwise, if a police force used technology in a new and innovative and non-intrusive way they'd be subject to have having the case tossed out of court because they used the technology without governing laws.
Filming in public does not go against the Fourth Amendment. Your proposal does. That is the difference.
"Why think about the actual issue brought up by the parent post, when you can just taunt Slashdot like that's relevant"
MicrosoftRepresentit (1002310)
Maybe you need more explanation than that elegant quote provides and you couldn't follow it, so here goes.
I'm not saying we definitely shouldn't have the cameras - in fact, in most cases I'm pro public-cameras but anti-wiretapping. But I am saying that anyone who thinks the topic doesn't deserve continued discussion or doesn't think that quote is relevant doesn't understand the issue.
Liberty:
In some hypothetical selfish dictatorship you might decide to execute 100 people if it's guaranteed to stop that serial killer, because your goal is not weighed against the good for the people.
In some hypothetical benevolent dictatorship you might decide to execute* 2 people even though only one of them is the serial killer - if you think the killer will kill more than 1 more person, the benefit DOES outweigh the cost when viewed across all people.
In the United States as envisioned by our forefathers we value PERSONAL liberties. So the benefits must not merely outweigh the costs but must _massively_ outweigh the costs to the individual. Under their model, the government wouldn't execute 2 people unless it would save not merely 2 but at least tens of other people, or more... This is the principle upon which we have the freedom of one person to speak when no one else wants it and one person to practice a religion everyone else might hate.
Taking away the ability for someone to walk from one house to another without being recorded is definitely a liberty that has largely been removed. Perhaps the benefits do massively outweigh the costs, but that calculation depends on factors such as how much oversight is placed on the camera operators.
Murder:
The only other point I want to note is that some people have said that since death is more or less the ultimate penalty, 1 death = infinite anything less than death. That's simply not the way the world works. If you want to know how much death is worth, perhaps calculate how much it would cost to reduce the average number of traffic deaths by one by improving cars - or more effectively by improving driver's education classes. Even better, simply strengthen the currently idiot-proof tests to get your license. That would cost the governments very little and put the responsibility on the driver to learn how to drive better. (Naturally a nationwide program would cost a lot and reduce deaths by alot - you'd need to divide to find a unit cost.)
Or the costs for better medical accountability to reduce needless deaths during medical procedures. Or the costs to stop someone in the US from dying of hunger. (Not to mention the much-lower costs to reduce some kinds of death in other parts of the world.) Or the costs for meat-safety inspections that are more independent of the meat-packing industry that cause deaths through foodborne illnesses. Or the economic impact of improving the health quality of foods and dividing by the reduced number of deaths from heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer.
The numbers will vary, but they're all lower than you'd think.
*Obviously if you can actually arrest them you could put both of them in jail and hope it sorts itself out - and there are a zillion other tricky police things to do, like letting them go and watching both of them really carefully. That's why this is a hypothetical. Maybe the killer is flying away in a little stealth plane with a hostage and you only have this opportunity to reliably shoot him down.
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