Lip-Reading Surveillance Cameras

mrogers sends us to Infowars for the following news from the UK, "which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy": "'Read my lips..."' used to be a figurative saying. Now the British government is considering taking it literally by adding lip reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras in order identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everyone says. Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."

Comments

Re:Solution

[IgnoramusMaximus]

A couple of years ago there was a massive story in the U.K. about a policewoman being shot dead by a group of armed robbers. They would have gotten away with it had it not been for an automatic license plate reading camera picking up the car details a few blocks down the road. Its instances like that which make such advanced CCTV cameras popular with the mainstream UK public. Polls asking the average person on the street in the UK consistently reveal wide spread support for advanced CCTV cameras.

This is terrifyingly similar reasoning to that employed by Nazis. Most German polls at the time would have indicated wide support for Gestapo as it was portrayed as a front-line defense against all kinds of murderous internal enemies. Fake security pitted against "armed banditry" and "terrorism" was always the traditional, time tested way to sell slavery to the brain-dead masses.

In your particular example above, privacy of many, many thousands of motorists was violated by, for all practical purposes, an Orwellian police state in order to catch one gang of thugs. I guarantee you that in a place with "two-way telescreens" armed robbery levels will be near zero. The problem is that such "safety" is nowhere near worth the price of slavery.

Re:This will all work fine

[IgnoramusMaximus]

One of the amusing parts is of course that it was the "conservatives" who used to be for small government.

Anyhow, I see governance to be akin to atomic energy. It is extremely powerful and productive if employed for peaceful purposes, but to be so it demands extreme safeguards, otherwise all of that power will get out of control and screw everybody up in a multi-thousand-mile radius. Alternatively, if allowed, some malicious minds might use it as a weapon, with devastating consequences.

That is why the so-called "libertarians" exist in deep, crippling fear of such a mix of power and danger, resulting in their demands that the whole thing be abandoned and forbidden. What they do not realise is that by abandoning that type of power, other kinds of power must inevietably (outside of utopian fairy-tale scenarios) take its place, some far more dangerous and difficult to control, something akin to allowing mass scale chemical pollution and C02 emmisions to replace nuclear energy.

Re:Solution

[TechForensics]

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same in any country." --Hermann Goering, Nuremberg 1946