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New York Plans Surveillance Veil For Downtown
News.com is reporting that a security system modeled after London's "Ring of Steel" is coming to New York City. The plan, to include license plate readers and over 3,000 public and private security cameras, aims to aid officials in tracking and catching criminals. "But critics question the plan's efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city. [...] The license plate readers would check the plates' numbers and send out alerts if suspect vehicles were detected. The city is already seeking state approval to charge drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, which would require the use of license plate readers. If the plan is approved, the police will most likely collect information from those readers too, Kelly said."
Technology will always make abuse easier, just as it makes so many other aspects of life easier.
Technology will always make jobs of law enforcement easier, just as it makes our lives easier.
Technology will always act as a force multiplier for government, just as it magnifies the capabilities of the individual user.
Just to take one example: if a system of license plate readers can detect a plate that has been flagged by some agency and prevents one, e.g., car bombing, why is that not a valid mechanism to use?
Just because it can be abused?
Or because it could be abused "more easily" than individual humans reading license plates in public?
Or because someday, someone could "come to power" who would use it against [insert ostensibly oppressed population here]?
All technology - computers, databases, telephones, cameras, the internet, vehicles, helicopters, robots, radios, video cameras, heat sensors, weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets, office buildings, body armor, remote controlled aircraft, tape recorders, wireless transmitters, you name it - can and will be able to be, and in fact will be, "abused".
But it's not the technology that's being abused; it's power.
So instead of being luddites-by-proxy, why not recognize the issue for what it is, instead of pretending that government should not be able to leverage technology to solve problems?
There is no reason surveillance cameras in public places or license plate readers in stationary locations or on aircraft should be vilified any more than any other piece of technology. Whether the cost/benefit ratio is reasonable is another argument entirely.
But I cannot and will not fault the government or law enforcement for using technology such as this, whose costs it can ultimately justify to the public's satisfaction, in public places to attempt to fulfill their charge to society.
Whether or not such systems actually do deter crime or terrorist activity, or whether they are worth the money, is really what is at issue. Not kneejerk reactions about 1984 likely to dominate some (most?) debates on this issue.
This isn't some plot to turn America into a police state. It's an effort being undertaken by local, state, and federal law enforcement and security professionals to attempt to protect the public. That is the first and primary goal. There are no ulterior motives that rise to any meaningful level. Let's keep things in some sort of perspective.
If it was your job to protect the people and property of New York City, what kinds of initiatives would you be undertaking? Hint: if your answer is along the lines that it's much better to stomach the errant terrorist attack every now and then rather than take proactive action to attempt to prevent them using whatever means you have at your disposal, you probably won't be in that job for long.
So think about this, and try to put yourself in the place of an urban security expert or a law enforcement official or a city mayor. There are valid points to be made on both sides of that debate, about costs, effectiveness, balances with privacy, and so on.
But none of them involve rants about police states or governments secretly wanting to monitor and control innocent citizens. Technology is technology. Implying that government and law enforcement shouldn't be able to use technology to the extent that it is legally allowable and its costs are justifiable is absurd.
One other point is that while things like cameras and checking ID may not always deter or prevent a crime or an attack, it often greatly assists in the investigation after the fact. We need only look as far as the London car bomb plot to know that cameras in public spaces (among a great many other tools) can be an aid. Cameras have been a valuable aid in such instances as long as they have been used. The real issue is cost effectiveness.
Could the $90M be spent a different or more effective way in a city like New York? Befo
Since most people are talking about terrorism,
the greater majority of terrorist attacks have involved some form of public transport between planes, trains and automobiles aren't cars the least of the trouble?
This sounds more like an additional taxation on driving (exactly what they are proposing for Manchester England, and what is already in use in London.
liqbase
I mean, really, at what point do we say "you can't put cameras there" and have no one say "well, if you're not committing a crime then it shouldn't bother you?"
Regards, Ian
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
BUT - from the looks of things, the license plate readers are there as a check to see if the drivers had paid their little extra tax for the privilege of putting along on the streets of Manhattan.
I almost expected to see it hit this side of the Atlantic sometime, but I'm still kind of surprised; figured that the CCTV's were another 10 years off.
Only time will tell if it actually does anything to increase general safety or not (does anyone have any crime stats showing the diff before/after CCTV in London, BTW?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I will take freedom and risk over a police state and big brother any day.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
What risks? How is your freedom impaired? There's no freedom from being identified in public.
London should be used as a comparison, but as the Brits and Americans are SO different when it comes to security (note the issue of gun crime comparisons...ALL of them), I'm not so certain that what happens in one city WOULDN'T have a near-opposite effect in the other.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Well said. I want to expand on it though.
Most people will argue 'Well, no, camera's didn't stop those subway attacks, but having those cameras in place, if it is well known, will detour criminals from committing crimes there. So sure, we lose some of our privacy, but we gain security.'
But alas, cameras do not even prevent criminals from walking into a store, shooting a clerk in the face, and taking all the loot out of the register (and really, it's common knowledge that all of those stores have cameras).
What really draws my pity out for some people, though, is that they are utterly convinced that the government is looking out for their best interests.
These people will boldly defend their trust of the government by saying, "If you don't have anything to hide, what are you worried about?".
You can, sometimes, see the gears slowly starting to turn in their heads when you reply, "Ok, I'm off to your house to search through your kids rooms. Followed by a thorough inspection of all of your wifes belongings. If you don't have anything to hide, what are you worried about?"
Privacy is privacy. Having your privacy invaded is a terribly abrasive and intrusive event. But, if they can start off small "it's just a camera on a street corner, whats the big deal?" they can will erode their way into total control. We humor ourselves by saying "Yeah, right, I know when to draw the line when it comes to this invasion of privacy. It has to happen, so we can catch those pesky terrorists, but, I'm going to keep a close eye on it to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.".. but this is bigger than us. What about the next upcoming generations? They will be so used to the cameras on every street corner, it will be second nature to them. The profound idea of what we considered privacy will be almost completely abolished, with a new definition, a new standard, to take its place. Who knows what the new stances will be? "It's just a camera in every one of the rooms in your house, and look, they arent even forcing us to install one in the bathroom. If you aren't doing anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide."
This system would make a lot more sense if the public could tune into the complete records of the webcams. These cameras are looking at public places, and are being operated by public safety, claimed to be in the public interest. The public should be able to hit these webcams if not in realtime, to give police a jump on criminals, then at latest the following day. Which would give police time to convince a judge on the record that the occasional segment from a camera needs to be censored. Perhaps even ongoing random deletions to hide patterns of "cameras of interest" which could clue criminals which cameras caught something being used against them.
But of course we should start from the premise that these cameras belong to the public, that their data belongs to the public. Then reasonable demands of justice and legitimate police process can be met within our existing system of warrants.
In fact, we should go further. All the police, their vehicles, and buildings should have webcams monitoring all their activity all the time. It should be available for anyone in the public to go through. That will not only keep police more honest, but also harness the millions of voyeurs to look for public evidence of crimes, and notify police when they see something in public. And of course there's huge potential for people to make our own "reality show" material, with the world's most exciting background sets and extras.
--
make install -not war
The questions we face with the emergence of this surveillance society are not nearly as simple as you have attempted to frame them here. It is not enough to simply fight when the abuse happens, but we must also fight the possible abuse that can occur. It must be fought against, if for no other reason, then to make other people aware of what could happen should these sorts of plans go through. This is not to create a sort of "I told you so" syndrome, but to raise awareness.
I can, in some ways, sympathize with those who want to expand the abilities of law enforcement by using this technology but they are, as we ourselves do, using this technology as a shortcut to do the work that is needed. But the simple truth of the matter is that the policing of the laws has never once benefited a society by going through shortcuts. The only conclusive method of stopping crime is a hard one to accept because of the human cost of it. It involves putting people at risk. It involves getting them to go into these places that we do not want to go ourselves. It does not and cannot involve people looking at the world through remote eyes.
We may want to believe that we can create safety through constant, unrelenting surveillance. But all this does is to create a situation much like censorship laws do: It only drives those who we want to keep close to the surface underground and makes them that much harder to find when something bad does happen.
Let my lay this out for you: When George Bush takes away your freedoms to protect you from terrorists that is bad, and George Bush is evil and wants power. Environmentalists want to take away your freedoms to 'save the earth' and that is good because they have no motives whatsoever to get power. George Bush is stripping the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to habeus corpus, amongst others. The right to drive an SUV is not in the Constitution. Don't ever think the two are equivalent.
The problem with surveillance societies is that all of those laws become enforced, when before only sufficiently important ones were. Sure, selective enforcement of different laws bites, but being hit with full enforcement of an encyclopedia of law will bite harder.
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Well, I suppose that depends on the goals of the person you're asking.
However it is always a bad thing to confuse the two. If what you want is vengeance, you shouldn't lie to yourself and pretend what you're after is safety; and you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking you're safer because you've punished those who have already done bad things.
Does anyone believe that the average citizen in Soviet Russia had any more security than the average US citizen?
Despite the near total and constant surveillance?
The Government watching you does not make you any more secure.
Freedom is Security.
Yes and terrorists are too stupid to use a rental car or steal a license plate or make up a fake one.
Thank god that terrorists are too stupid to do things like that as it would nullify the system and it's only use would be to help supress political dissidents.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Will this be used to maintain picket zones? What kind of data aggregation will take place? How many databases will this tie in with? Which organizations will have access to this data? What systems will be used to cull license plate numbers/face recognition/and other such patterns? How many people will be employed to watch these cameras? What are the metrics for results that they see as being acceptable results? The UK/London results were quite bad but the government groups that they were responsible thought the numbers were acceptable enough for a larger rollout. There are all kinds of questions that should be asked - besides the initial WTF?! that goes along with such intrusive surveillance system.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I broadly agree with comment, yes of course this new data collection will enable abuse (e.g. a small few policemen are likely stalkers etc) so along with this shiny new plan why not an "anti abuse plan" ? One that describes in detail access logging & auditing - i.e. every query run on this ought be visible to every user - thus it can be determined if they use it inappropriately - etc.
Same way we expect our online bank to offer us good security - as well as their service we ought expect our law enforcement authorities to offer us the service along with protection for ourselves. Anti abuse features ought be architected in upfront and be part of the proposal !
So how do you think this would deter someone who expects to be dead committing the act of violence? Do you think the 19 terrorists for the 9-11 attack were actually expecting to walk away from their crash landings?
Excuse me but, I don't recall London's "Ring of Steel" stopping the attempted car bombings a week ago. And these were carried out in stolen cars, for which the London license plate monitoring software should have immediately flagged.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You know...frankly, I'm just not THAT scared of the terrorists. Is everyone else so frightened of them that this kind of sh*t sounds like a good idea???
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Since London calls its system the "Ring of Steel", New York should come up with a better name -- one which evokes its similarities with the London system, but is sufficiently different to avoid confusion. I suggest "The Iron Curtain".
WOHAAA! Hang on there a second. You're telling me that despite of fossil fuel power plants, intercontinental airlines, deforestation, chemical industry and whatnot, American Vehicles alone still contributes 6% of CO2 emissions and that is in your opinion a small amount? Not saying I am in favour of this scheme ( it is actually a fairly retarded way to reduce emissions ) but to talk about that as if it was negligible is really rather ignorant. Hey, I know. Since a small percentage makes no difference I assume you don't mind if we increase taxes on fossil fuels by a small amount ? Six percentage points on all gasoline and petroleum products sounds like a nice appropriate number
They may have been recognized by different individuals at different places, but each person usually knew only about single encounters in isolation. Reconstructing somebody's movements over a whole day would have required a town meeting to get testimony from all of the observers. Moreover, peoples' movements were not meticulously logged for posterity, much less entered into a searchable database for easy access by government bureaucrats.
Sure, you could always have been stalked or followed, but that has always required a large investment of time and effort by the follower(s). This has naturally limited stalking activities to a very limited number of situations. In contrast, in the future every citizen could end up being stalked by the government all the time, everywhere they go. And thanks to people who make arguments like yours, there will be few if any constitutional checks on the new powers given to the stalkers.
Just think about fingerprinting, it hasn't once stopped people from committing a crime, but it sure does make it easier to catch the bad guy.
No, it hasn't. It doesn't help at all if the person commiting the crime never had a record. Nor does it help lead to suspects.
Also these will help prevent innocent people from being wrongfully arrested.
Really? Finerprints have prevented innocent people have been sitting on death row for years, only recently being released? And they've stopped the execution of innocent people? These things have and continue to happen, finger prints or not. I suspect cameras will have the same effect.
Have you heard of communism, moron?
So choice is, either we're free people who aren't too chicken-shit to defend ourselves, or we are a bunch of chicken-shits who need nanny government to watch our every move, and regulate what we do.
I can't figure out why in the world anyone would want to bring all of the nastiness that was the soviet union to the United states, other than that most people these days are chicken-shits. Unfortunately, the most tragic part is that 90% of conservatives fall into the chicken-shit category, and 90% of liberals are communists anyways so they don't seem to care, and actually are welcoming the chicken-shit conservatives into their grasps.
Hope you idiotic conservatives enjoy your 8 years of Hilary, you've earned every second of it.
I hope that clears things up.
Not all suicide bombers are successful - today 4 of 6 would-be terrorists (London 21/7) have been found guilty because of the evidence which included considerable CCTV footage. They were identified and tracked using CCTV in the 2 weeks following their attempt. Not all members of the team were suicide bombers. The 2 accused for which the jury has not yet reached a verdict were also identified by CCTV although they did not take part in the bombing itself. Even successful bombers can be identified and the security services can learn much to help prevent subsequent attacks. So while I accept the thrust of your statement, you are being much too simplistic in your analysis of the value of anything that assists in the detection and prevention of terrorism. The police and security services might not be successful every time but as long as they prevent the bomb that would otherwise blow you up, don't you think that would be a direct benefit to you?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
The problem is that everything you do that you don't want at least one person to know about is a potential way to blackmail you. For example, do you limit your donations to the Democrats to less then $250 because you know your Republican boss can check online to see which employees to fire or not promote or not give a raise to? That's an implicit blackmail.
Then there is explicit blackmail, like the person with access to the database that sees who is driving in crackville and threatens to report them, unless. Or the person who makes obvious 'detours' to his secretary's apartment every so often.
Privacy is like bees. A particular bee or any given sting might seem like a small problem, but once you get a whole cloud of them around you then your only chance is to freeze and hope your clothes don't look pretty in ultraviolet. It's not even so much a slippery slope as it is a death by a thousand cuts.
With current tech, everywhere is public. Night Vision, Low Light CCD, Thermal Imaging, chemical sniffer chips, millimeter wave radar, low and high altitude photo surveilance with 100x or better zoom, Computer programs that can supposedly tell the difference between the green of a pot plant and some other weed from 10,000 feet away (and that have a 20%+ false positive rate).
Data mine all these, and every single person in the area will do something that constitutes probable cause, a dozen times a day. I don't usually use 'alls' and 'everys' like that, but just to take one example - how many people drive past multiple elementary schools on their way to and from work, every day? No kids of his own, passing by two schools and seven day care centers on the way to work, slows down responsibly, route is two blocks longer than the computer generated shortest route (but is actually a few minutes faster with the usual traffic), that's enough. Many judges would issue a warrant to search a home or tap a PC connection just for that.
Any time the IRS thinks you may have failed to declare income, they could easily get a court order to use that camera footage to see if your spending habits reflect being paid possible extra cash under the table. Right now, they have to justify the costs of an investigation, but here, a state government is doing the work, and the funds are coming from the Homeland Security dept. so it's suddenly a lot easier to afford. Again, it's a method that will generate a whole lot of false positives. (People who live outside of camera zones usually don't bother as much to drive there to shop, except possibly on days when they are doing a whole lot of shopping. Drive 40 miles each way for a special all day shopping trip and get a lot of things you've waited months for. The IRS will usually assume that's the way you spend money every Saturday.). So now the IRS is tending to selectively suspect people who live in suburbs, small towns and the country, probably totally without realizing they are biased that way.
The point is, if you accurately describe your own lifestyle, I can show you how Law Enforcement could over-react to it. Nobody is completely average in all respects. A hobby as innocent as model railroading sounds to some suspicious types like a good way to attract potential child victims for molestation. If nothing else, you post on Slashdot. Somewhere within the group of people who can access those video records, there's a federal agent who considers Slashdot a hotbed of Libertarian radicalism.
Occasional surveilance, i.e. by police patrols, doesn't tend to trigger paranoia in cops (usually). Near constant surveilance, accompanied by data mining techniques that routinely produce spurious signals from random noise, will. You, me, and everyone else will all be doing some innocent something that somebody somewhere now thinks indicates a potential crime. That will "justify" them investigating us in our homes, clubs, businesses and other places, where there IS a routine expectation of privacy.
If Law Enforcement is corrupt they will abuse the additional power. If Law Enforcement is honest, it will take them 30 years or so to learn enough about spurious correlations from data mining to stop unwittingly committing the same abuses.
Who is John Cabal?
The reason cops do that is because they don't know if the occupants of the car are going to start shooting. Every cop knows that their life could be on the line during a "routine traffic stop". This seems only prudent, and isn't at all comparable to this sort of surveillance (which I definitely disapprove of).
I am officially gone from
They did have more security but for a different reasons.
a) Kids didn't have any means to distract themselves indoors so all kids were outside.
b) Old geezers lived in the same neighborhoods as everyone else (no escaping to Florida)
c) Old geezers didn't have any means to distract themselves indoors.
All of this lead to everyone lurking about outside in such a way that it was very hard for anyone to be up to no good without a whole cabal of witnesses there to see you.
People watching can be quite the hobby even in big American cities even now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The problem is that everything you do that you don't want at least one person to know about is a potential way to blackmail you."
." nitwits that there are things people do which are not illegal, but which they have the desire and the RIGHT to keep private from the government.
That's great. I think I've been trying to formulate a sentence like that for about 6 years now. A concise and non-anecdotal way of suggesting to the "If you're not guilty . .
Cross NYC off my list of travel destinations as soon as this goes into effect.
Anonymity has always been a reasonable expectation. Through most of history, though you may have been recognised by people in your town, skipping town and creating a new identity for yourself was a simple enough thing to do. The surveillance and tracking capabilities we have today were unthinkable even a few decades ago. We've traded global anonymity for local anonymity. To say that we haven't "earned" freedom from constant surveillance is to believe that it hasn't always been a simple right, which I personally disagree with.
Its turning out (and the bad guys will figure out) that there's nobody watching the monitors. Scotland Yard is replacing a few thousand patrol officers with tens of thousands of cameras, probably manned by a few dozen people. And not highly paid(?) and trained officers. Just some goofball willing to sit and stare at a screen for hours (think about law enforcement by Slashdotters for a frightening example).
The recent bombing attempts by the clown squad seem to demonstrate that the bad guys have figured out that there is nothing to fear. It was just good luck that these people who could't even figure out how to light gasoline on fire (two out of three times). Sure, they caught the subway bombers on CCTV. Days after the incident. Whoops. Too late.
If the bomb in the London night club district hadn't been a dud, a constable on patrol could have cleared the streets in the few seconds between the car being abandoned and detonation. CCTVs? Sorry, we're busy rewinding tapes for some shopkeeper who got robbed. All you've got is some moron parked on the sidewalk. Petrol? No, I can't smell petrol through a camera.
Have gnu, will travel.
I see no way for the orwellian "big brother" scenario to materialize in the United States,
Really? Don't you? Lots of things (national ID cards, police surveillance cameras, license plate readers, etc.) can be used to protect us. They can also be used for ill. And once they are in place, we have basically no way of knowing how they're used. The truth is: power corrupts.
yet terrorists are beating down our door.
Are they? Where? Support your statement.
If this system gets abused it will have the lid shut on it faster than you can say hot potato.
Would that this were true! Unfortunately I fear abuse of power goes unnoticed more often than not. How many times don't we find out about these things until the damage is already done? It makes me more than a little uncomfortable to think about how things like the Patriot Act are getting abused on a daily basis.
We already have cameras at airports. I don't think the terrorists were marked with big yellow dots, though.