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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
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 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.
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
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.
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
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?
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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.