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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
The point is that these cameras don't represent a greater invasion of privacy than many other forms of CCTV. What people are missing is that they represent the time at which society has finally become so irresponsible, so frightened and so cowed that we're outsourcing our last duties to ourselves to the government. The issues that these things are intended to address, the littering, the graffiti, the vandalism, aren't criminal problems, they're societal problems to be policed and actioned by communities themselves, and devolving this power to government appointed behaviour watchdogs is frankly, terrifying. Once the people lose the power to police themselves, once their relationship to government mutates into "Stop that", "Put that down", "Pick that up" paternalism, they lose. I lose. You lose.
You talk about big brother? Talking CCTV cameras are more pointedly "big brother" than any other initiative proposed by this illiberal, dishonest government. After all, what does it mean? Big brother is not someone who stops you congregating in groups for legitimate protest, nor does he lock up foreigners without trial, sentence or judgement. No. This is Big Brother in all his attentive, caring, protective, advising, paternal, loving, Orwellian glory. Why vote anyone else citizen? Why go anywhere else citizen? We love you citizen. Now, stop slacking and get back to work. It's for your own good, you know.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity