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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."
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
As a tangent to your thoughts on the subject... I think one of the things that I (and others) worry about when it comes to "the law" (police, etc.) using technology to make their jobs more efficient is that there is never a "restoring force" that modifies the laws along with.
Allow me to explain. The current laws, like it or not, are not entirely idealistic. They were written within a certain social and technological environment. Using technology to more perfectly enforce a law can turn a reasonable law into an unreasonable one.
A stereotypical example is speeding. Most reasonable people agree that there should be speed limits. The current speed limits, however, were in some sense set with the knowledge that people would "cheat a little bit," so the posted limit turns out to be below the limit most safe drivers actually drive at. This works out okay in the end. The cops stop the people who are speeding alot but tend not to bother with people that speed by 10% or whatever. However if you use technology to enforce this law perfectly, it becomes unfair in a hurry. Or, if you use technology to perfectly enforce a law like "stopping at a stop-sign" then the law becomes unfair (remember that your bumper is supposed to be behind some arbitrarily line and you must be stopped for X seconds, etc.). Even the safest of drivers will not follow these rules to the letter; nor should they: the laws are written with very little leniency in their wording because they are meant to be used to stop people from egregious abuses of the law. They were never meant to punish everyone for doing normal daily things.
Another example would be copyright. I don't want to get into this debate too deeply, since it is a "hot topic" on Slashdot. Suffice it to say that many aspects of copyright seem reasonable enough, but when copyright is enforced perfectly, or worse when technology makes compliance mandatory (e.g. DRM) then a reasonable law gets transformed into an unreasonable law in a hurry. Many of the "well obviously *this* should be allowed" things that were not formally written into the law disappear.
Laws that make the everyday, normal activities of socially-responsible people illegal are not good laws. So the problem is that if law enforcement uses new technologies to allow them to do their jobs "more efficiently" but there is no corresponding rewriting of laws (to make them *more lax* or even repeal them), then our society will tend towards being less free.
That is one of the worries. So the solution is either to limit the implementation of technologies by law enforcement in some cases, or to have the laws modified. (Or a combination.)
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.
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make install -not war
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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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.
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".
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.
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.