Slashdot Mirror
Talking CCTV to Scold Offenders in UK
linumax writes "The most monitored nation of the world is getting an interesting new service. According to a BBC News story, "Talking" CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff."
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
who, while wearing bag over their head, publicly masturbates to one of the scolding cameras goes the contents of my Amazon Mechanical Turk account.
All you'd have to do in America to make this tolerable is connect it to preventing terrorists, child molesters or promoting baby jebus.
That's fantastic. Rehashed old news on another site gets the exact same writeup on Slashdot because the person who submitted the story doesn't read Slashdot and then it gets through the queue because the "editors" don't read Slashdot either.
How we know is more important than what we know.
1984 is/was taught in school so that kids would learn that things like that are bad, ie. a totalitarian system, government lies, etc. A big part of 1984 was how monitored people were, and one of the scariest moments for me was when the main character Smith had his own little secret corner of the room where none of the cameras could watch him, and he had his privacy albeit momentarily. The whole point was that this system was horrible!!!
Yet, somehow, this has morphed into a seemingly-large group of people believe that this is a GOOD thing. A doubleplus good thing. WTF went wrong??? Don't they realize they have become the EXACT thing that George Orwell was warning about??? What happened to the 60 years of knowledge that this book brought us about what life would be like living in a society like this?
No.. what you should be afraid of is when people comply with the orders issued from these cameras instead of throwing rocks at them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Whatever. The actual day to day situation is a lot more important than the legal fiction that is used to support it(Or do you think that the U.S. Constitution has Harry Potter magic power and will protect us against those that would defile it?).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Unfortunatly, there has grown up a culture of yobbish behaviour amoung a small but significant minority of manily young people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to express their anti-social anti-establisment feelings at every opportunity. There is a TV program in the UK called "police Camera action" which is a little like America's 'worlds wildest police videos' (or whatever). This has led to an increace of car theft and speeding, wreckess driving etc. also the UK courts award "Anti-social behaviour" (ASBO) notices to yobs who wander the streets drunk or stoned carring out vandalism and other petty thefts. This has led to an increase in crime and the offenders wear these ASBOs as "badges of honour". The types of people whom the talking cameras are targeted at will react with a similar negativity. These yobs will deliberatly act anti-socially so that they can promp a response. Why is all this so? Well in the UK the law gives insufficient protection to the state and the law-abiding masses and too much to the criminals. Crazy eh?
2. Talking Camera: "Please fetch your can."
3. Talking Camera: "The bin is behind the phone box."
4. Talking Camera: "Thank you for using the bin."
5. Pedestrian comes back at 2am and beats Talking Camera to death with cricket bat, or other clubbing instrument of choice.
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
the loudspeakers are augmented, for the public good, with servo controlled sedative dart guns?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
This just reads like a Monty Python sketch to me (sympathies to those who live in the UK and will have to live the joke) ...
An old man walks up to a street corner, looks around, sees no-one. Ever so slowly he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a cigarette and lighter. He puts the ciggie in his mouth, holds the light up to it, and:
CAMERA: Oi! You there! Do you really want to do that?
OLD MAN: What?! Who's there?
CAMERA: Look up, and a couple of metres to the right.
OLD MAN looks up and faces the camera.
CAMERA: You know smoking's bad for you right?
OLD MAN: I just wanted one, and I can't have them at home because the wife gives me grief.
CAMERA: Just one??! Just one you say??! You can't have just one, because once you start, you're hooked!
OLD MAN: I know that, I got hooked a long time ago.
CAMERA: Well you can get yourself unhooked right now. I won't have your type stinking up my town.
OLD MAN: I beg your pardon? I live here!
CAMERA: Not if I can help it! Now clear off before I send out the coppers!
OLD MAN makes a rude gesture at the camera.
CAMERA: Right! That's it! You've done it now!
OLD MAN: Done what? I haven't even got to have my smoke yet!
CAMERA: Don't play innocent with me, we've got the whole thing recorded.
Police siren blares.
OLD MAN: You bastard! All I wanted was a smoke and you call the bloody cops?!
Police arrive, old man runs off.
CAMERA: He went that way! After him!
--
Not funny? If only it were just a bad joke.
John Spartan, you are fined 10 credits for littering...
For once, I'd like to see news of a protest in Britain about all those friggin cameras.
One of the biggest issues I have:
Why are there so many people who don't know how to behave on their own? What are mothers teaching these days?
Anyone with any sense got out ages ago.
5. Pedestrian stops complaining about how filthy the beach is and why doesn't the goverment do anything about it.
Your argument sounds a lot like dog owners who complained about fines for letting their dogs crap on the sidewalk BUT also complained about crap on the sidewalk.
Is it really that hard to make sure your dog does NOT take a dump were everyone, including yourselve is walking? Is it that hard to drop your litter in a can?
You see, the problem for me, a middle aged white male, is that I see two choices. Talking camera's and security patrols (wich do not affect me) OR walking through areas littered with crap (affect the people who think the street is a garbage dump). Hmmm, what a choice to make eh. My convenience for your freedom to inconvenience me, yourselve and everyone else.
Sorry, you need to come up with a better example then the state repressing your freedom to litter.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One of the things that it screams at people is
"How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"
Heh. As an Australian I was particularly surprised to discover that I can be arrested for "brawling" in public in the UK even if the person I'm fighting has given me his consent. In Australia, the law is clear, if someone hits you, you can hit them back or you can have them arrested for assault, but not both. If someone invites you to hit them, "go on then, hit me!", you are free to do so. I believe this is the case in the US too. I don't really know.
What's more strange, I found, was that I never got into a fight in all my adult life until I went to the UK. There I got into a bunch of them. One caused by annoying people who wouldn't turn down their music while I was trying to sleep. (I politely asked them to turn down their music, one of them hit me). One caused by men at McDonalds rudely describing a female patron. (I politely asked them to watch their language, one of them hit me). One which I started after listening to a white guy call a guy I knew "niger" a bunch of times. My friend didn't want to get in trouble with the nearby security people.. but where I come from, that kind of talk earns you a broken nose.
Of course, a bunch of you reading this probably think this is terribly uncouth and that I am clearly an anti-social person. Call me Quentin Tarantino if you like, but I think there's a place for violence in our society.. it's a regulating force which every person has the power to exercise. Just look at how impolite some forums without violence can be.
How we know is more important than what we know.
yeah - not unusual for /.. ...but the linked story is from the bbc who tend to put some thought into what they put on their site (note the date 'Wednesday, 4 April 2007, 13:08 GMT 14:08 UK ') - just that fact alone should indicate it is actually a *new* news story and not an old one.
Max.
All you have to do in Slashdot to make a flamebait post tolerable is bash the right people, especially that last one.
Way to go!
Wow. You frighten me.
It's one thing to use "hey, it's in public" as an excuse for a lot of things, but it's another thing entirely to use it to justify eavesdropping from a remote location, videotaping people and even remotely telling them how to behave and not to be anti-social.
You might as well justify people getting upskirt material in public. What's the difference? How is it different if you use high tech equipment to listen in on people from eighty feet away and recording everything they do in public versus some crazy perv with mirrors on his shoes and a small video camera?
Why not stick video camers and audio capturing devices and loudspeakers on every lightpole and aim them directly into everyone's homes. After all, the cameras are in public places and if Joe Public could potentially see and listen to something from the road, what's the big deal about a video camera with 14x optical zoom and high quality devices that pick up audio from far away doing the same thing?
I for one love the idea of being monitored, watched and told how to behave by some minimum wage monkey in a remote location every second I am outside of my home. Yay!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I just had a story submission that answered this very question: "Narcissist Technology: Did Mamma Lie?"
h as_myspace_contributed_to_gen_1.htmle b27,0,225486,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines8
Unfortunately it dribbled out of the Slashhot Firehose.
Fortunately you can still read about it elsewhere:
http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2007/03/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-esteem27f
http://www.statenews.com/op_article.phtml?pk=4005
IANAL, but in the US you in pretty much all cases you are capable of responding with equal force (if I person punches you, you can punch them, however you can't nail them in the face with a hammer). In cases where there is a reasonable threat to your life you can respond with greater force, even to the point of maiming or death. What a reasonable threat is varies state to state, as I understand it. I know in some places they have upheld use of firearms against trespassers, and I've also heard in Texas firearms are allowed against someone defacing or vandalizing your property (though the way I've heard the Texas law is if you yell or warn the person and they stop their vandalism then shoot them it is considered retribution and you are open to criminal charges - so it is better to shoot first and ask questions later). My knowledge the Texas law is hearsay, and very well could be false, but from the time I've spent in Texas it wouldn't surprise me if it were true.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
From what I can tell, of the few people from Britain that I regularly talk to, is that they really don't care.
There is sort of an epidemic -- perceived or actual, I don't know, and it hardly matters -- of obnoxious, petty crime, mostly committed by youths, in many British cities. There's the whole "happy slapping" thing, but that's just really the tip of the iceberg, it's just a lot of vandalism, shoplifting, street crime, etc. It's the kind of thing that just really gets to people, because it directly degrades the quality of life when you walk around.
In some ways, I think it sort of mirrors feelings that people in the U.S. had back around 10-15 years ago, at the height of the violent crime wave in the inner cities, except in Britain it doesn't seem to really be violent crime. (In fact it seems to be the kind of shit that would probably get you shot by one of the more serious criminals here in America -- maybe we have some sort of natural selection in the ghettos here that keeps this stuff to a minimum? Or maybe everyone with the means to in the U.S. abandoned the inner cities so long ago that we just don't notice.)
But at any rate, the people who have influence -- mostly white, middle income and up -- aren't too bothered, because they're looking rather desperately for any way to knock the "yobs," "chavs," and other varieties of scum in line. There's a sort of (and again, this is just based on the people I've talked with) "well, nothing else has worked, so what the hell" attitude.
To be honest I can't really blame them. Here in the U.S., there were a lot of Generally Bad Ideas being tossed around back in the 90s before the crime wave crested and began to recede (and I don't think even now there's a clear consensus on why that happened -- some people, the authors of Freakonomics in particular, argue that it was actually the echo of Roe v. Wade from a generation earlier reducing the number of potential criminals; feel free to posit your own theory). If the tide hadn't turned when it did, we'd probably be looking at things like this all over the place right now.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Way to be a man and have some balls.
That is, assuming you are a man. If not, just consider that a compliment.
oh, so you think the ACLU has magic Harry Potter power.
We'll be asked to leave the establishment and if we fail to do so then we'll be arrested, yes. But in a public place, we're free to engage in whatever social activity we find appropriate to resolve our differences, so long as we're not endangering others. But hey, don't feel bad, you're opinion in the norm. You don't like X, you don't think people should be permitted to do X.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm from Warrington, in Cheshire, and they have these in place already. People are starting to complain about them though.
The only one I've seen so far (at least, the only place I've seen it 'triggered') is in the outdoor centre bit of our local shopping center, where there is a pub and some construction work going on. A few friends and I came out of the pub a bit drunk and saw some "wet floor" type cones lying around... anyway, so yeah, we're messing with these cones in a non-destructive way (just putting them on our heads - hey, look, we were drunk, stfu) and then this booming yet completely intelligible voice starts talking to us telling us to put the cones down!
Over Christmas they had a fake ice rink there and they kept telling people to get off it at night.
We're not sure where the speaker itself is, but pretty much every place in town is covered by cameras. I'm pretty sure that's not the only place they cover with these things. Having read 1984, it's extremely disturbing.
That is entirely untrue. What a lot of Americans fail to realise is that the Queen has *no* power of any kind.
The scary thing is not having cameras in public places. The scary thing is people getting used to cameras and to a Voice From Above telling them what to do.
In 2015, someone will say: well, but what about the crimes that are committed at homes by cruel parents? What about terrorists making their bombs? Let's have homes monitored!
There will be an outrage. People will gather in the streets, screaming "Give our rights back". The cameras in those streets will tell them in a firm voice, "Stop yelling and go away". People will stop yelling and go away. So will their freedom.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
1. get rid of the crown. It's long over due. Join the post-medieval world.
1. Get rid of the death penalty. It's long overdue. Join the post-medieval world.
2. GET A CONSTITUTION.
2. Get a constitution, and stick by it. Better yet, get something like the Magna Carta, which the US has no equivalent for but the UK has had for three times as ong as the US has existed
3. TAKE DOWN THE CAMERAS.
3. Get rid of the mandatory phone-tapping in the US. You might not know this, but every single call you make is monitored. While you're at it, you might want to get rid of the semi-trained armed thugs playing at policemen, too.
That's absolute bollocks. Magna Carta in 1215 placed major limits on the crown, and effectively established the rights of men to self-determination (well, the land-owning ones anyway). Don't forget, we had a civil war a few hundred years later that killed off the power of the crown for good.
You also forget the European constitution on human rights is now UK law; it is effectively a bill of rights. The UK might have a few priorities in law different, such as a few tighter limits on free speech such as libel and hate speech, but we have broadly the same rights as US citizens. We're certainly not all chattels (or slaves) of the Crown!
Out of interest, how has the vaunted US system protected habeas corpus? How much good is freedom of the press when all the presses are owned by a few barons in league with the government? A piece of paper is only as powerful as the will of the people to hold their government accountable to it.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Being beaten up at night is not a right that I want preserving. Cameras have cut crime. and you know, I like my safe-feeling. I live in the UK but my only experience of mugging was Los Angeles and Paris. The British would get upset if someone tried to take away important rights. If some religion-inspired leader told us that we cannot buy alcohol until the age of 21. We'd say "What is this? Some kind of Police state?".
Way to go. People here (I'm English) are too afraid to say anything to the youths. That's why they feel they can get away with it.
The cameras are in town/city centres, not pointing at peoples' homes. I don't know if you've been to the UK, but there's a culture where people get out of their tiny minds on alcohol and drugs and then beat the crap out of each other and innocent passers by. The cameras help to catch and prosecute the idiots engaged in this kind of behaviour. I'm not saying the implications aren't scary, but there are valid reasons for the cameras.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Mainly these systems are despised by people that have something to hide.
What you dont see in these sensationalist posts are some of the good things that have come out of these systems.
For example:-
There was a case about a year ago when a man attempted to abduct a girl and the CCTV systems cought it, summoned the police and then guided the police to where he had run off.
There have been murders solved by the ubiquitous CCTVs, simply wind the tapes back, study. We are not talking the odd anecdotal story here CCTV is a very major crime prevention and solution tool.
Talking cameras is already proven to but down on crime before it happens and free the hard working police force to concentrate more on where they are really needed. Besides they are only in public areas anyhow where anybody is free to watch in any case.
It disturbs me when people hark on about their privacy and how unfair it is to be snooped on constantly - the system is reducing crime and making the streets safer.
On the same vein we know have computerised vehicle licensing, insurance and MOT (road worthyness test) system - so the police can check your cars details in a fraction of a second - if it cuts down on car theft, joy runners and illegal uninusred vehicles then I cam all for it.
The UK has a very fast growing DNA database, its added to constantly by the police among others. So far it has solved numerous crimes, even when a perfect match is not found a close enough family match is generally found to help track down the perpatrator. Every few weeks there is a story about some decades old crime solved by modern techniques and the database.
ID cards will inevitably come into force in the near future - well if that cuts down on benefit fraud, illegal immigrants and helps catch wanted criminals then I am all for it.
My point is that people will get up on their soapbox and rant about the state of the nation, how crime is prevelant and people should do something about it, then refuse to allow technologies that are doing something effective about it.
I'm all for it, I have nothing to hide.
Walking alone at night in Singapore or Zurich feels a truckload safer than London. In both those places you can see kids as young as 8 travel independently (without parents) to their friends and school and walk around in freedom - I wouldn't recommend that in London either.
:-)
Yet both those nations are not so nannied and camera infested as the UK - explain?
the only difference I can see straight away is that the police in those places is (a) very available and (b) doesn't take any BS. Oh, and public transport actually works there, but I digress.
Interesting observation that affecting a "right" to drink alcohol would provoke action. That's a fascinating take on human rights
Insert
...of standing with my back to CCTV cameras, slightly bent over with my legs should-width apart, shaking about a bit while holding a bottle of water upside-down at waist height with both hands.
CCTV has done nothing in my city (Brighton) to curb drunken street violence. Parts of the city are no-go areas after dark. This problem is getting worse irrespective of CCTV cameras.
I have never heard a single anecdote about a crime in Brighton being solved or prevented by our extensive on-street/beach CCTV cameras.
Linky:
BBC: "CCTV systems 'fail to cut crime'"
BBC: "CCTV 'not a crime deterrent'"
Really this is getting irritating now. I'm fed up with posts like "where did the UK go so wrong" and "omfg1984wtfroflcopter".
I live in the UK, very near to Middlesborough where the idea was piloted and I've seen (or rather heard) the things in action. I would argue with a lot of your beliefs that it is turning the UK into a place where privacy is not respected or that we are constantly monitored by the state as we are not. Never when I walk down the street do I feel as if I am constantly being watched even though there may well be a few CCTV cameras in most town centres.
CCTV monitors public places, if you are in a public place, almost by definition you have accepted the fact that someone is going to see you (whether it would be a person or a camera) and I'm not going to argue with that, having a camera there is nothing more than having a policeman stood there (with an exeptional memory, granted but still effectively the same) and everyone these days seems to want more "bobbies on the beat".
Now with speakers being connected to the cameras, everyone seems to be in uproar, yet again about privacy. But in reality I can not understand why. They still monitor public places, they dont follow you into your bathroom, they are the same cameras, connected to the same screens where the same policeman or woman sits and watches for signs of crime or antisocial behaviour (something that everyone would like less of) only now that policeman or woman can let an offender know what they are doing wrong and that they have been seen doing it... exactly the same thing a policeman would do if he was stood in the town center and witnessed it in person.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that just because it is a camera and not a policeman doesn't mean it encroaches on anyones rights any more than before it is simply technology allowing our policeforce to be more effective. Effective in a one policeman can cover more square-footage point of view and from the evidence gathering side of things.
Personally, I am against these cameras going country-wide for the sole reason that will cost the taxpayer a lot of money and that they do not fit well into every situation -in some cases nothing short of more cops will do. But for giving streched police forces a more efficient monitoring method -I'm all for it in selective cases.
I just had to comment on this. It really bothers me people being what to say, ignorant towards this whole surveillance trend that has been ongoing the past years in Britain.
The consensus that "if I'm a law abiding citizen, that means I've got nothing to fear" generally works well for a lot of people; those who have forgotten how easily democracies are overthrown and that their idealistic society might not exist forever. I mean, creating the perfect infrastructure for a totalistic government by placing cameras and loudspeakers everywhere just doesn't seem right for a presumably liberal government lead by Labour. It is my hopes that people will soon begin realizing that this is not the right way we're going.
In Denmark (neighbor to Great Britain) the government has just introduced an "Anti-Terror Act" giving the intelligence services and police exorbitant privileges in terms of tapping every phone in some general area without an approval of a judge. Also presumably all internet communication between privates (including email and such) are to be logged (someone must have a lot of storage to use on this one since this is a LOT of data).
My main point is, that the surveillance trend is not just something we see in Britain and that this is something I fear will not stop by itself when we're adequately watched.
Went there once on a 6 month contract...
Likely message from the cameras...
"Hey, you...What you doing climbing the camera pole..yes you in the football shirt (half of Middlesbrough turns around thinking it's them)..put down those bolt cutters...this is police property and...hey..what's that sound? Are you cutting my brackets...I'm warning you, there's a car on its way...stop that right now...don't you know these cameras are very hard to resell...we have the serial number&*£(...."
AT&ROFLMAO
What worries me isn't so much the invasion of privacy by CCTV, or being patronised by being told to pick up litter, but rather that this technology threatens to render CCTV ineffective.
CCTV is pervasive in British cities, but there are too many cameras and too few operatives for every camera to be monitored all the time. Criminals are deterred by the uncertainty of whether they are being watched. However, once CCTV becomes reactive, the absence of a verbal warning could be taken as confirmation that you are not being watched.
Suppose you're a would-be mugger in the centre of Midlesborough. You drop some litter and mess about with traffic cones, and if there's no verbal warning then you know there's a good chance that you're invisible to surveillance for the time being. Knowing you're relatively safe from being caught, you can now select your victim with impunity.
So when TPTB decide that domestic violence needs to be more strongly protected against, pointing the cameras at people's houses will be fine? While the GP did do some straw man with his upskirting, he does have a valid point. You can't make excuses like this for further wrong behavior. If drunken brawls are a problem, put more police on the streets near these bars. Don't put up cameras that will threaten you with arrest because you dropped some trash.
Clones are people two.
How many cameras are surrounding the estates of the wealthy who actually steal real money? I'd imagine if any exist, they point out at the hoi polloi, never in at the lives of the powerful, who never are monitored without their consent.
Kind of like how the cameras in convenience stores have stopped criminals from robbing them? Crime will always be there. The question is do you want to give the government, whether it be state or federal, this much more power. If it's not stopping crime, then what's the point?
Can I bum a sig?