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CCTVs Don't Work in the UK
ShakaUVM writes "People who give up a little bit of liberty for a little bit of security deserve neither, the saying goes. But what happens when people give up so much liberty their entire country resembles an Orweillean dystopia — but the pervasive monitoring doesn't help to solve any crimes? That's what is happening in the United Kingdom today. While the Guardian tries to put a good spin on the entire fiasco, the fact remains that CCTVs only help with 3% of all street robberies, the very crimes they were supposed to be best at protecting.
Should England finally move to eliminate its troubling state surveillance program?"
More to the point, other countries (like mine) should look to England's failed example and refuse to follow it.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Don't compare the opression Benjamin Franklin and our other founding fathers lived through with a few cameras in public areas. These monitor the same things that any police officer can without a warrant.
Ummm lets do that 1984 Checklist
1) Government declares an unwinable war against a changing opponent and people listen - Nope, most brits were against Iraq and almost everyone (even some in government) think it was the wrong target in retrospect.
2) Government demonstrates effective control over people - nope they can't even hold onto CDs
3) Government enforces complete control of society and the media - Nope, they get slated everywhere
4) Abandonment of the rule of law when they choose - nope they can't even get the detention extension they want
Ahh but there are CCTV cameras which catch bugger all information. Maybe the CCTV cameras should go but lets be clear this isn't about liberty and security its purely a cost control mechanism, its a free market decision in otherwords.
Go and read 1984 before talking about dystopia and ask yourself where you can find a country that actively spys on its citizens and where senior people state they are above the rule of law.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Wasn't a major point of 1984 that only a tiny amount of unusually sensitive people would recognize a totalitarian state for what it is? There was no hope in the proles in Orwell's future England because their lives were just as miserable before as after and they didn't have time to ruminate on things like Winston Smith and Julia. When Smith tried to ask an old man about former days, he couldn't seem to make any argument against the current state of things. Thanks to Smith's own work in the Ministry of Truth, the population couldn't actually read about how bad things really were.
In this instance, I agree England is not yet an Orwellian dystopia. However, dystopias have a way of establishing themselves without many noticing.
The idea behind CCTVs is deterrence, right? We disincentivize street crime by raising the chances that the criminal will get caught. Except, when has getting caught bothered a criminal? The CCTV system assumes a set of motivations that the average well-off, law-abiding citizen has. But most robbers are not robbing for sport; either they're dirt-poor, or they're addicts. Getting out of heroin withdrawal is such a strong desire that the threat of jail becomes abstract in comparison. So what if the cameras see me?
I didn't realise that I was entitled to so much privacy when I'm out in public!!
which is totally what she said
The point put forward in TFA is that the risk of being on camera is a preventive measure. The 3% figure is a meaningless figure when it comes to measuring the preventive effect in my opinion. When measuring efficiency, one would like to know the relative frequency of street robberies before and after a CCTV introduction.
I'm skeptical that the system brings benefits to outweigh the cost, but we should at least argue honestly about the system's alleged efficiency.
political opposition IS "Terrorism" and crime.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I don't know, do you exaggerate much?
The headline said "resembling an Orwellian dystopia". A city with government owned and monitored cameras at every corner does in fact resemble an Orwellian dystopia. Sounds like a perfectly sound comparison to me.
Perhaps if you didn't inflate "resembles" to mean "is", you would have understood.
The enemies of Democracy are
But, that doesn't seem to be the case. People aren't concerned about it:
That doesn't sound like people are worried about the eye in the sky at all. It sounds like they're ignoring it, and the police are finding the system too damned awkward to actually retrieve the useful images.
First off, kudos for the public shag.
But, how can you on the one hand say you don't mind the eye in the sky, and on the other hand be somewhat surprised that the bored operator wouldn't zoom in on that if he saw you doing something naughty in a park? If you know they're watching, why would you be surprised they actually did watch?
I mean, it's not like the police are swamping the operators with requests for the images. In all likelihood, he and a bunch of guys pass around copies of all the public nookie they observe. I'm sure there's a whole underground trade in CCTV porn -- from what I hear, there should be a lot of material in the UK.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, Americans' big problem with being recorded has nothing to do with liberty and freedom. It has everything to do with being a record of their stupidity, bad behavior, and criminality. And, even then, most people only care about it if it impacts them negatively.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The introduction on CCTV (as well as new stadium improvements and regulations recommended in the Taylor Report) are credited with ending mainstream hooliganism in England. CCTV was used to find those responsible for acts of unruly and destructive behaviour associated with football matches and punish them. For me this is enough reason to support CCTV.
... after all it is in public.
But then again I don't really have a problem with being filmed while in public
Perhaps most of the footage never gets seen. That makes sense; there is just too much of it. However, if they get reports of people protesting, or handing out opinionated fliers, they have that footage, and the opportunity to do something about it.
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You seem to be operating under the notion that companies install CCTV systems to protect victims of crimes that occur on company property.
This, however, is business and not altruism. Businesses need CCTV to protect themselves from prosecution and to ease the insurance claims process. For example, they need to know that some guy in a hoodie ran up to that old lady, threw her on to the ground and ran off, not that she slipped on the wet surface left by an employee. They definitely care about that. The identity of the attacker? Not so much. So the expenses surrounding the recording and storage of high-resolution images is simply overkill for the company's needs.
Let me quote the article:
The video, shot by a WTXF-TV helicopter, shows three police cars stopping a car on the side of a road.So are you suggesting we use news choppers for surveillance? That article has NOTHING to do with CCTV.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
It's the same reason to be happy about RIAA strategy. They fail so badly their tactics will be much harder to use anywhere else.
You're optimistic. In politics, results do not feature strongly in the feedback cycle; politicians are not typically looking to see whether a policy achieves its purported end, but rather that it will be tolerated by the people.
That is: experiments test feasibility to a politician, not utility.
The politician's mode of thinking is not strongly connected to any kind of scientific reasoning, but rather to correct intent ("evil" must be "fought against") and, to some extent, social theory. They understand democracy as a check upon the excesses of "theory", but they do not consider theory in the scientific sense, but rather in the social science sense.
Is it any wonder that politicians and their kin in management talk of the "difference between theory and practice"?
Wikileaks, no DNS
The debate, once again, should not be around a particular method of law-enforcement, but whether 100% effective law-enforcement is desirable...
It means, you can not exceed speed-limit by 1 mile/h, nor drop a candy-wrap on the street, nor ask for money on subway. You will also not be beaten by a cop, nor will they be able to treat fire-hydrants as special parking spots reserved for "the force". Etcaetera...
Do we want the laws obeyed and enforced 100%, or do we want to live some "wriggle-room" for the dystopian future, when it will be needed to fight some kind of oppression?
I would say that yes, we want laws to be 100% enforced. But we need to get rid of 99% of the laws. The alternative is laws that everyone is guilty of violating, and enforcers who can immediately find a reason to arrest and convict anyone they see fit.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Or perhaps you are basing your comment on the headline from a year or two ago that took the number of security cameras (including private ones) per mile on the busiest shopping street in the UK and multiplied it by the number of miles of roads in the UK?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh boy, I can see it now. My fellows will surely welcome the chance to harass their "neighbors" &c.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
And unfortunately, freedom-limiting measures are welcomed by a majority of people on this sceptred isle - two such examples are ID cards (which were overwhelmingly popular until it emerged that people were going to have to pay for them - and not just a token "don't lose it" fee) and 42-day detention without trial (which remains popular with just about everyone, because they somehow believe that it'll "only catch the bad guys"). My family still live in the town which first proclaimed that it had 100% CCTV coverage, and they said it made them feel safer - even though my brother-in-law has been hauled over by police a couple of times for trying to use an ATM at midnight. Yet it doesn't appear to have made the King's Lynn I remember (and ran the hell away from a decade ago) any less prone to violence or vandalism...
The great advantage of having perception define reality, rather than vice versa, is that it merely requires that people trust their perception unquestioningly. Manipulate their perception and they'll swallow any bullshit you throw at them.
You forget the main point of any realistic dystopian society: at least initially, you have to allow a few dissidents to "prove" that dissent is allowed and that the people are "free". All the while, the people in power are concentrating their power and limiting the media's right to cover dissent by uncovering dissidents and getting them canned, limiting which press have access to key government events, planting people in editorial/analyst/writer positions, bribing commentators, and outing confidential sources, undermining the credibility of the media and endangering the lives of dissenters. I could probably go on for several pages like this.
We can get away with criticism because we are relatively unimportant and unable to create a credible threat against the power structure, whether through force, through block voting, or through running for public office. Someone important criticizes the administration, though, and bad things happen....
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Allright! If I see that hippie smoking marijuana then I can dedicate my time to help incarcerate him! I never liked that guy, his raibowy t-shirt bugged the hell out of me.
The point being that it takes sane law for this to happen. If you comandeered a camera only to catch somebody smoking pot, would you rat them out? Smoking pot is, after all, illegal here.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I'm more interested in how many crimes are prevented by the presence of CCTV. This is much harder to monitor, but deterrence is better than the post-crime investigation that the summary seems to be focussed on. I remember standing in many's a chip shop late at night and seeing potential fights diffused because the drunken potential fighters knew they were on camera. Also, I don't know why so many people on this thread have gone off into the weeds talking about 1984. Last time I checked, there was no Ministry of Truth in the UK, the media (particularly the BBC) give the government a grilling on a daily basis that would horrify the average American politician, and there is NOT a camera in everyone's bedroom.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"A retired military man with a German Shepard, a baseball bat and some good intel" chasing people he considers undesirables from the streets merely to increase the amount of money he can get from his house sure sounds like one of them.
So it seems.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.