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Spy Drones Take to the Sky in the UK
Novotny writes to tell us The Guardian is reporting that the UK's has launched a new breed of police 'spy drone'. Originally used in military applications, these drones are being put into use as a senior police officer warns the surveillance society in the UK is eroding civil liberties. In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business. Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?"
You're telling me that technologies once developed by the military and/or used for military applications have started being used for other applications as they become more affordable, manageable, and available.
And that governments, law enforcement entities, and municipalities have increasing access to and leverage technologies to become more effective at the jobs with which they are charged by the public?
O, the humanity.
I mean really, does anyone think that making people safer is the actual purpose of these programs? I know, I know, never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but millions of cameras, everyone photographed hundreds of times a day... Come on, who can believe that is about anything but control of society.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
FTFA:
"However, senior officers in Merseyside, who are trialling the drone, said they did not believe it was the next phase in creating a Big Brother society.
"Assistant chief constable Simon Byrne said: "People clamour for the feeling of safety which cameras give."
This is such a beautiful use of the English language that I can't help but admire it.
The people who have already been brainwashed into believing that a surveillance society is a safe society will have their warm feelings of safety reinforced by this statement, even though in no logical way can it be conceived to be a statement that it will actually make anyone safer.
The people who have not are the only ones who will read between the lines.
Thus this is a brilliant way to say something to the media without actually saying anything, and what's more, without compromising their goal of having a camera covering every square inch of the nation. The media goes away happy with a sound bite, the sheeple go away happy after listening to the sound bite, and life progresses as "normal". Which is to say, straight down the toilet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"ENGLAND PREVAILS!" (V for Vendetta in case you're curious...)
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
To say... I pity you guys/gals in England. And I thought we had a police state here in the United States. At least we keep ours under differing names (TIA/ONI/DCS1000+2000+3000+4000) and flush the minds of the people with news on Bratney, Lindsay, Paris, etc. to keep them dumb. You guys get no break.
Infiltrated dot Net
What's scary is the apparent passivity among the denizens of UK regarding this. I have not read anything about a mass protest, organized groups to put in elected officials opposed to this, etc. Seems the majority of the people over there are resigned to this type of watching. Shows that it will probably happen over here too as well as we copy from the Brits.
Not very exciting but the Beeb has a video here
wot no sig
Who is it making it safer for?
It seems any safety increase s dubious at best. I know for a fact it would not make me feel safer, it would give me that creepy feeling, the Bugs Bunny "Ever got the feeling yous was being... watched?" (minus the looney part of it) feeling.
I think there should seriously be a council or something that actually looks into whether technologies that are slated for implementation will actually have the desired effect, or if it is not true.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Read anything by Theodore Dalrymple - he's published in "City Journal", and has a number of books out (e.g., "Life at the Bottom").
His observation is that dysfunction grows to consume all the money made available to combat it. Filming people isn't going to fix anything. Holding them accountable will.
Oh and also, the last time I was in the UK, I was struck by all the kids wearing hoodies.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
everyone photographed hundreds of times a day
What they didn't mention is that with all those video cameras each frame counts as an individual photograph, so standing in view of a 30fps camera for 4 seconds counts as 120 individual photographs. Not as scary once you do the math.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
That's today, tomorrow its 13, then 14..
They have to start somewhere, get you used to the idea then slowly expand it as technology improves.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?
The UK is adding laws requiring compulsory reporting of people who might be criminals.
It really is falling into order, comrade. This is doubleplusungood.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The police have even learnt a good trick to assault you based on these cameras. I had one WPC ask me what was going on after a disturbance that I was not part of. I explained. She said 'pardon?'. So, naturally, I lean in a bit closer so she can hear. Wham ! She lays into me. On camera, it looks like I'm about to attack her by leaning in. *sigh*.
Cameras are solely in the UK to allow police to avoid doing real police work and provide a deterring presence, and to allow them to employ nefarious tactics against the criminal public. Don't ever be under the illusion that they are there for you, the taxpayer.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Or bears for that matter. In fact, in my hand I hold a rock that prevents tigers from attacking! Don't believe me? Have you seen a tiger attacking lately?
We never voted for those cameras in the UK, they were installed by default, without public agreement.
... you'd be begging for being tagged with a label of "terrorist" or "anarchist" here, favourite words of those in Parliament, and of course happily supported by the media.
... it'll be branded "terrorist action", guaranteed.
All the major UK parties have "Law and Order" as a plank of their manifestos, so it's not as if we ever had a choice of any kind that would allow even an implicit anti-surveillance vote to be made. What's more, not voting at all will always return one of these parties to power given the way that the voting system is rigged, so democracy is really just a figment of the imagination here in that respect.
And just try challanging it
I'm not sure where all this is leading, but a civil war in a few decades' time wouldn't surprise me at all. It won't be labelled as civil unrest though
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Can anyone give me a real reason for NOT having cameras in public places instead of screaming "Orwellian" or "1984" all the time?
Jonathanjk.com
I don't want a maximally efficient government. I like the fact that no one can push a button, and find out what I have eaten in the last two weeks.
If I'm in a Western Democracy that is reasonably well-off and free-market oriented, I like my government to be small, with little insight into what I'm doing or how I'm doing it. As a matter of fact, I'd like my government to be on permanent vacation, and only convene during emergencies. Law enforcement can be efficient and on the job, but should not make me do its surveillance job, nor should it rely on technology to do the peacekeeping (which includes rounds on foot).
That's my creed, and I'm sticking to it. I just wish there were a party for me.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In a more recent study, it seemed to help deter crime. A review (Welsh & Farrington 2006) of high quality evaluations of the effectiveness of CCTV as a crime prevention measure concluded that there was an overall eight percent reduction in crime in the experimental areas where CCTV was installed compared with a nine percent increase in crime in the control areas. The review included evaluations of 19 sites in the UK and the USA. Other findings from this meta-analysis concluded that CCTV interventions were more successful in car parks than in other settings such as city centres or housing estates, and that CCTV interventions were generally more successful in the UK than in the USA.
In the 7 minute walk from home to the tube station down the road, I've counted about 20 cameras that I walk through. So thats already 40 caputures a day accounted for in just 14 minutes of my daily life.
I live in London, where there are probably more cameras than most cities, but I certainly find the number of camera alarming and unsettling - it's never clear who runs the cameras, for what purpose and where the data ends up and for how long. I've also seen some pretty bad behaviour in front of CCTV cameras; I always think that if I were attacked, the grainy CCTV pictures shown on Crime Watch or in the paper would be of little comfort.
In public, you have no right to privacy.
I'd be ticked if they were putting cameras in people's homes without a warrant related to a specific investigation. But seriously, what you do in public is *public*. Hellooo.
I dunno why people feel they have an inherent right to privacy on a public street. I think that governments have every right to put cameras out in public places if they so choose.
And yes, I do think this is about making the public safer. Tracking criminals and terrorists so that they can't as easily get away from law enforcement. Providing documentary evidence of crimes committed in public spaces instead of relying on unreliable eye-witness testimony, so that prosecutions can be obtained and criminals sent to jail instead of back on the street committing more crimes.
We've already seen, in society, how putting cameras in banks and stores has helped to identify and convict criminals. It's hard to tell a court that you didn't do it when they've got you on camera shooting the clerk in the face with your gun and grabbing the money out of the cash register. This is an extension of that.
Cameras might not prevent crimes, directly. But getting an arrest and a conviction can prevent future crimes by the same person.
We never voted for those cameras in the UK
They might not have done round your way, but they do round here. We lose votes every time we don't install enough new cameras fast enough in my council.
Whoa, who modded me informative, I was just being sarcastic and trying to spark some debate into how the number of photographs or times a camera sees you can be accurately quantified. What does "300 photographs" mean? Walk past 300 individual running video cameras or actually get your photo snapped 300 times? Can you be accurately identified from each of these "photographs"?
It's ok though, all the moderaters have to do is mod my last comment up +5 funny, and then this one +5 informative. Yes I get oodles of karma but it's the integrity of the discussion on slashdot that matters.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
I appreciate your healthy cynicism, but a stable society benefits all members. You argue, with some success, that the "rich" are somehow better protected or afforded more rights, but that is more a function of the fact that their possessions themselves often afford them a better lot in life notwithstanding specific "law" that that effect.
I think you're making connections that are a little too tenuous. If lawmakers are generally "wealthy" (in comparison with the rest of the population), then, sure, it's a true statement that the "wealthy" are implementing these policies. But it's not because they're wealthy. And this notion that there is a silent plot by the "wealthy" to constantly control the "sheep" of society via any means they can - such as drone aircraft used by law enforcement - is a little too much of a stretch for me, and for most people.
Yes, there are people with power and wealth who want to protect what they have. Society will be friendlier to the "rich" because everything is by nature "friendlier" for the rich. But it's not as direct a plot as you imagine by the ultra-rich to "control" society to their own benefit. That a stable societal structure benefits the "rich" is incidental, not causative. I won't disagree that the rich have things easier. But unless you believe in punishing the rich or in true communist/socialist ideals, wealth redistribution, and so on, I don't see how that reality will - or even should - change.
i would like to submit that, with surveillance technology, we are experiencing the sort of evolution of a price point where they get so cheap, people will just plaster recording devices everywhere. i mean i can go into home depot and equip ever corner of my house, inside and outside, with cameras and recording hard drives that just a decade ago would have cost 100x as much. and they are only getting cheaper
for good? for bad? who knows, but i do believe that the era of humanity where you could go about your business in cities (and soon the countryside i bet) and be anonymous except for human witnesses is fast disappearing, perhaps forever, perhaps inexorably so. and i think it's inevitable- i didn't say it was good, but i think there's no going back
this evolution will change society. but i would also like to submit that everyone always focuses on the government putting more cameras up, a la orwell, and it is the case that governments are all to happy to stick recording devices everywhere, but there is arms race going on in reverse... and in perpendicular
what i mean is, witness rodney king and other examples of citizens with cameras. that "little brother" is just as much an issue as "big brother", that citizens are watching the government just as much as governments are watching citizens. and there was a case here in new york ctiy recently of a flasher on the subway who was caught on the cellphone of one of his victims. that's what i mean by "perpendicular": forget about the government for a moment watching you, what does it mean for society where everyone has a cellphone camera and can start recording what's going on around them at a moment's notice?
so the issue with cameras is not so much that the fbi or the nypd is watching you, but also that:
1. people are watching the government right back (rodney king)
2. your fellow citizens are watching you, and you are watching them (ie, the tyranny of the crowd is just as much as an issue as the tyranny of the government.. such as with the subway flasher example)
folks, it's some interesting evolutionary dynamics in human society going on with cheaper and cheaper eavesdropping tech. and i think the way things are going to play out are not going to be like 1984 at all, but something perhaps a lot weirder. it's an arms race
so i think we need to retire the 1984 references, and lose the obsession with an intrusive government... because we can intrude right back, and it may be your fellow citizen who is more of a "tyranny" of eavesdropping than the government anyways. what's the proper way to think about this issue? i don't know, but it is weirder and more complex than the stereotypical orwellian ideas on the subject
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business.
1. While the claim about the total number of surveillance cameras might be close to the truth, what this kind of blanket statement doesn't tell you is where those cameras are.
The vast majority of them will be in private spaces, like shops, bars, and restaurants, where owners are primarily concerned about minor crime like theft. Then there will be a fair proportion in public spaces where crowd control and security are an issue, like tube stations and airports. And, of course, municipal buildings, such as courts, police stations and hospitals will have a chunk of cameras, too.
I'd estimate that over 80 percent of those cameras are accounted for right there. Many of them aren't recording an image more often than once every few seconds. Many will be decoys that aren't recording at all. Many are black and white. Many are of very low quality. The overwhelming majority won't be user-operated in any way or have any archived long-term storage. None of them will be networked in any meaningful way that would let anybody track you in real-time over more than a few hundred yards.
2. The idea that you'd be photographed 300 times in an average day is complete rubbish. If you woke up, got on a bus, caught a tube train, changed at a busy station, got to work, visited several shops at lunchtime, went back to work, spent a few hours socialising in a couple of places and then went home, then, perhaps, I can see you possibly passing a camera around 100 times. The likelyhood of your picture actually being taken every time? Less than the likelyhood of you winning the lottery, I'd bet.
Don't forget, one way or another, Britain has been a victim of violent terrorism for at least two generations. First there was Irish republicans, now there's Islamic extremists. The former didn't much like having their pictures taken, so cameras were an effective deterrent before the fact, as well as a vital detective tool after it. The latter aren't so easily deterred but cameras have still been of limited use in going over their attacks.
If you want proof of how "effective" CCTV is in the UK, just look at the 7th July attacks in London a couple of years back. Although they were travelling by pulic transport and their identities were known after the fact, police were able to piece together only a few shots of the attackers, all from one camera, I believe. Their whereabouts and what they did once they reached London, even though they travelled by public transport, and virtually unknown. Bottom line: in a "pull out all the stops" exercise, four people were totally lost in the crowd.
The camera footage of the attempted attacks a fortnight later weren't much better and the perpetrators were able to escape untracked through London. If these CCTV cameras were half as effective as people want to make out, then police would have been knocking on the perps' doors hours if not minutes after they escaped. The reality of the situation is different, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, frankly, an idiot.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
What's more, not voting at all will always return one of these parties to power given the way that the voting system is rigged, so democracy is really just a figment of the imagination here in that respect.
I've got 3 words for you: Vote Lib Dem. They're committed to overhauling our electoral system and introducing proportional representation, so this cycle can be broken.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The sheeple outnumber me. Who am I to tell them what they should want?
You're a Citizen, that's who you are.
"A democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for dinner.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
If you're not willing to arm yourself against the majority and their tyranny, then you might as well throw in the towel.
In order to back up that statement you have to prove to me that they are indeed being used to perform the jobs that they are charged with as opposed to engaging in their own forms of spying, and that they are more effective.
In the former case I would point out that the jobs of governments and police officers is to serve the citizens in their community. All too often however that has been twisted to the point where said individuals are, in fact, using their powers to pursue private agendas against the very citizens they claim to protect. Here in the U.S. for example during World War I laws were passed making it a crime to criticize the president "for our protection". During World War II the massive information compiled as part of the Census was used to hunt down American Citizens of Japanese descent and throw them into prison "for their own protection". During the Kennedy years the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover used the powers of his office to spy on politicians he disproved of and to subvert both the anti-war and civil rights movements including the well-documented blackmailing of Martin Luther King. During the 60's Nixon used the tools available to spy on his political rivals. In more recent years 'anti-terror' tools have been used to spy on anti-war groups (because how dare we oppose the Iraq war) and execute increasingly harsh surveillance of "problem communities" (aka black neighborhoods) in the War On Drugs.
In each case the claim was that they were serving their constituents. Nixon himself said that he "thought it would be bad for the country if the president lost an election". And despite claims that it "won't happen again" we can see even modern U.S. Congressmen claiming that it is a good idea:
Similar comments have been made about the recent attempts to spy on American's internet use and telephone traffic "for our own good".
Which brings me to my second point. There is, indeed little to no evidence that the modern tools (e.g. large scale databases or CCTV networks) actually help prevent crime which is, after all the goal. With repsect to "big name" items like the terror suspect lists and the internet surveillance their effectiveness is difficult to judge as they are largely secretive (too secretive) and the evidence that they obtain will never be used in a court of law. While the Justice department likes to point to high-name cases like Jose Padilla and the rest of us like to point out that Padilla is a) being charged in a carefully rigged situation, b) being charged for a small fraction of what they claimed they could prove but did not, and c) is himself surrounded by many many cases which seem likely to never reach trial because nothing at all really happened.
If you want a better arguing point we should look at the large-scale sweeps that were done in New York shortly after 9/11. While these netted a few illegal aliens (at least one of whom died under highly questionable circumstances) and pissed off a large segment of an otherwise legitimate population it failed to net anything useful. But this too might be considered "exceptional".
So let us turn to the daily street crime scenario. While some noise has been made about Chicago's heavy use of surveillance cameras and databases there is little scientific evidence that the cameras "did the trick". While Chicago's rate of cri
Yes I get oodles of karma but it's the integrity of the discussion on slashdot that matters.
:)
I think that's the comment that should be modded +5 funny.
The enemies of Democracy are
Its not about making their jobs easier or harder. Its about whether these devices remove people's right to privacy. Without that right, free speech doesn't exist, protection from unwarranted searches is removed, and many other rights are moot or oppressed.
Should we stop something because it makes the job of law enforcement easier? no.
Should we stop something because it removes the basic rights of law abiding citizens? Yes.
Should we stop something because it makes harassment easier? Yes.
Telephones, computers (in general), vehicles, helecopters, and remote controlled robots (depending on their application) don't infringe on people's rights. Cameras on every corner with the ability and threat of watching you even in your home do. No matter what the laws are in this, the threat of being watched in your home is always there and will always be in the backs of people's minds, influencing their actions. In this case with the drones, I will give you, its a little more gray, both in the benefits gained and the threats to privacy.
Clones are people two.
According to BBC Radio 4 these things are helicopter type devices with 7 cameras on board, their key benefit is the fact that they are rapidly deployable. However they have a range of... 500 meters, oh and they are categorised as "toys". (they are apparently lighter than a bag of sugar too, although the size of the bag in question was not mentioned)
So its not a Predator type UAV sitting for hours 500 miles from the launch site, with a tangle of sensors and weapons attached, more of an instant CCTV camera, maybe useful for crowd control or events... (or just for propaganda value).
Saying that I a not terribly comfortable with the direction this is taking, I close to a city centre (with a really low crime rate - except with regard to burglaries...), and it bothers me that in 5-10 years there may be stealthy drones airborne over my house or garden without my knowledge, taking pictures.
I wish we could get back to having a few more Police officers knocking about, on foot, talking to people.
Exactly. The "death of privacy" scenario has far less to do with your government that it has to do with your fellow citizens. Individuals have just as much ability to leverage cheap technology as governments do. I know the day is coming when I will be recorded almost constantly in public, but it won't be by government cameras alone. It'll be by the cameras installed outside every home and business, and carried by every person I pass on the street.
I've been waiting for some manufacturer to offer an inexpensive CMOS image sensor and microphone unit that plugs into an iPod and records compressed digital video. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. You clip the unit to the front of your shirt, plug it into your iPod, and you're good to go for hours. In a few more years iPods will have the capacity to record days of continuous video as long as the battery holds out. I worry far less what the government will do with the images made of me; the goverment can at least be changed or influenced by votes, legislation, and protests. I have no influence whatsoever over the hundreds of individuals who'll also be keeping me under surveillance.
What's a fair level of wealth? What is unfair? Who gets to decide?
The power and connections that come along with wealth are unavoidable, and the saying, "It takes money to make money", is as true as ever.
Your conclusion that "most" wealthy are rich due to luck and don't actually contribute anything tangible to society is only correct if you are perhaps considering the super-wealthy, which constitute such a small number of people that they're not even worth discussing. And they aren't the ones controlling the world - it's a much, much larger group of people. To say that one is in the "wealthiest 1%", which has been a sound bite in many previous discussions on this topic, doesn't take a lot of income. As of 2000, it was just over $200,000/year. Is that what you consider "wealthy"? There are millions of these people, and most of them are wealthy because of their own hard work and contributions to society, including the business they often run which employ so many others. We're not talking about faceless megacorporations, here. We're talking about the millions of businesses that make economies run.
The bottom 50% of wage-earners in the US pay less than 3% of the tax burden (with many at the bottom paying nothing). The top 5% pay over 60% - the top 1% almost half themselves. What if we made the bottom pay nothing, and put all the tax burden, on, say the top 5% or 1%. Would that be fair? The rich would still have so much more than the poor. Should we maybe take some away from them and, you know, spread it around? How do you limit wealth you consider "unfair"? Why is it "unfair"? Who decides how much is too much?
If you're concerned about limiting freedoms, that would be one of the more egregious affronts to "freedom" I could think of.
>I was in London a while back, and the cameras in the underground stations did make me feel safer.
Which is what they are there to do and why they are a problem.
They make you FEEL safer.
They do not make you safer.
+----------------- | What is the question!
BRITS: "1984" was supposed to be a warning, not a gorram instruction manual!
Now with actual linkage goodness.
You can't take the sky from me...
When I was a kid I always thought it was the coolest thing when ever the St Louis police helicopter (aka the Brown Hornet, it was brown, duh) landed in the parking lot of the Wendy's down the street. They'd kick the observer out to grab a bag of burgers.
I moved to the UK last year for work, and the only difference between the US and the UK is the fact the CCTV camera are labeled in the UK and typically not so in the US. Other than that there don't seem to be any more or less of them. What you don't see much of is the police. They don't "Fly the flag" near as much as they do in the US.
The only other thing that cracks me up is the radar cameras, most of which seem to have had every possible form of vandalism done to them. From being painted over to being blown up. I even saw one funny picture of a guy with a porky pig mask on with an fireman's emergency gas powered saw making short work of the post one was mounted on.
One poster who said they were from London said that they counted twenty cameras during a seven minute walk. The area seemed to be one with high surveilance.
Do it twice a day and you have forty camera photo ops. If you go home for lunch, that ups it to eighty.
Now add shopping, socializing and other activities and you might hit two or three times that, especially if you are doing them in high surveilance areas.
Then add in the factor that many people may spend longer periods out in public, increasing the odds of encountering a photo op. Using the same figures, a twenty minute walk might mean encountering sixty cameras each way.
Of course, this is all conjecture. It would be interesting if the group that came up with the 300 photo count provided the data and statistics they used to derive the number. Then we could argue methods.
Going slightly tangental -
The thing about surveilance cameras is that it's impossible to surveil them all.
Think about it - you could have ubiquitous surveilance, but you're never going to be able to monitor each camera. The more you add, the larger the problem gets.
The data arguably only becomes relevant and useful when a crime has been reported / caught / noticed - digging the data stream becomes useful.
Until such a time when each and every camera can read your mind, or you KNOW it's being watched, odds are with you that what you do will be unnoticed, nefarious or otherwise.
I'd like to take things back to the good old days of 90% tax rates and a booming economy where the middle class could actually look forward to their children having a better life then they did. Wealth is a positive freedom: the freedom to make money. Survival is a negative freedom, the freedom from having the means of survival taken away from you. Extreme wealth means extreme imbalance of wealth, and thus extreme poverty, meaning that many will be denied access to the means of survival. This is a greater restriction on freedom than any restrictions on wealth.
As to who decides, the majority decides. If the minority of wealthy don't like it, tough. They would not be wealthy without society. If they don't like it, they can leave and go live by themselves on a deserted island some place. Which is more of a choice than most of them propose to give most of us, that choice amounting to: make money for us as "consumers" or die in a gutter.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"proportional representation, so this cycle can be broken."
From the US, which has had proportional representation in 1/2 of the legislative branch for over 200 years, all I can say is "BWAAAhahahahaha"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
For the cameras to exert social control, the perception of surveillance is what counts. This is good to the extent that it deters criminals from commiting crimes. The main criticism of these cameras, however, is that they change the behavior of everybody. People behave differently when they believe they believe they are being watched. They act in accordance with how they believe their behavior will be perceived. This perception therefore acts as a powerful form of control, one which is internalized by those under surveillance. See Foucault's characterization of the Panopticon.
Surely you have known people who "put on a face" in public. Perhaps they conceal their intelligence or hide their beliefs or suppress their individuality. If our response to surveillance is to suppress the unique or unusual dimensions of our character, it also gives us permission to exhibit other behaviors. This happens all the time with bullies - witness the recent British phenomenon of happy slapping; it seems perhaps relevant that this is happening in a heavily-surveilled society. Similarly, crimes like those of the Nazis or of Rwanda could probably not have happened without surveillance.
Surveillance can eliminate difference and diversity, while also suppressing morality. All that matters is the perception - there need not be anyone recording or watching the cameras. That is the great danger, and those who make the argument are hardly "idiots".
You were watching propaganda designed to sell you a bad bill of goods.
The best way to sell a bad bill of goods to somebody is to mix in a few good nuts with all the poison pills you want people to consume.
Interestingly, even with the cameras in place, the crime you describe still took place, so it didn't make things any safer for the victim. Further, jokers who attack people generally find their way to prison regardless. That's just how it works. So since the crime took place even with cameras in place, and since these guys were headed for prison anyway, how does that validate a surveillance state?
-FL
Bob Shaw had an interesting take on the surveillance society back in 1972.
Basically, a scientist creates 'slow glass' - glass through which light passes much more slowly than regular glass. Many of the inter-connected short stories are about specific applications - a detective waits for the image to come through on a piece of 5-year glass to prove that the man who'd been executed for murder was the right one; a murderer uses a piece of slow glass in his car windscreen to make it appear another man is driving his truck.
The end of the book is the scientist who created slow glass (Retardite TM) realising that the governments of the world are using it for espionage and worse, dusting the entire world with microscopic crystals that will capture images of everything, everywhere.
"From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We're all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into a entomologist's killing bottle."
But less than a page from this realisation comes a short epilogue which contains this sentence:
"In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes, and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere."
Maybe universal surveillance is a good thing, as long as it's genuinely universal. Maybe if the politicians and lawmen knew they were being watched 24/7 along with everyone else, they'd have to behave properly as well.
Surely having your curtains closed in broad daylight on a large number of occasions when *public* surveylance shows you were clearly in the house along with certain other undesirables will then construed in court to suggest to the jury that you were clearly up to something.
Maybe not conclusive evidence either way but one stroke of the brush towards painting you as a terrorist.
See, for example, current terrorism trials in the UK pointing out that someone occasioanally attended a certain mosque where a certain preacher sometimes delivered anti-western speeches. Exactly what that has to do with the actual evidence about wether the person in question physically constructed a bomb is beyond me.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.