Slashdot Mirror
Citizens Spy On Big Brother
An anonymous reader writes "Citizens of the world are striking back at 24/7 state surveillance by pulling out their cameraphones and filming inept officials, deadly healthcare lapses and thuggish cops. So-called Sous-veillance is seeing more and more people posting damning footage of official misdemenours to sites such as YouTube to shame them into action." I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
Oh..that's simple...camera mysteriously gets dropped and smashed on the ground (probably while you are being slammed against the car), and you get charged first with obstructing justice...with more charges to follow later as they have time to think them up.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is great. I just hope people don't stop once it all is made illegal.
Developers: We can use your help.
You might be considered a terrorist if you record the police. Wouldn't be the first time.
Oh, I'm sure they won't care, when they searched for expectation of privacy on Google, they found out there was none.
I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
I don't know where you're at, but over here it's illegal to use your (camera)phone while driving. If you're fiddling with your phone when the man steps up to your window, I'm sure he'll give you a bonus for it.
"Good news, everyone!"
"The courts might not work anymore, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served."
Marge Simpson
One simple rule for its versus it's
Who watches the watchers? The point becomes moot when everyone is a watcher.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Use a hidden camera - a really small "bullet" camera. If nobody can see the camera, nobody can talk about it, nobody can demand you stop using it, nobody can demand destruction of the footage. Or, use a wireless bullet camera to broadcast the footage to a separate location where the recorder is based. Then, if the camera is found, the recording may not be.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
Almost all of them will ask you to stop recording.
Some will physically block the camera.
Very few will try to take your camera from you.
Police (and security guards) will do this with varying levels of anger and threats.
The only two things that matter are:
1. You are on public property
2. You are not filming/photographing something you legally cannot (like a port or inside a mall)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Everyone the authorities swore did something wrong.
And it gets worse- humans actively remap their memories to make them feel better. 10 years after these incidents, the police probably really DO believe their initial lies.
I've seen it in others and I've seen it in myself and I'm more careful of it than most (or at least I remember that I am! ;) )
Police should be required to video tape everything they do and lack of video evidence should be a strong case against them.
People (not just police) have been shown to lie a lot more than we used to think. We need to change our systems of justice to fit reality.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over."
Beats me, but apparently it's more fun (and career-lethal) to film him without notification.
In some states it is illegal to film a government official.
Not that it will help them once it gets on youtube, but first you have to get it on youtube and not confiscated by the police.
What would you do if you filmed a cop beating someone and they asked for the video camera? If you answered anything but give the camera over, expect to be in pain and most likely jail.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
A whole bunch of new laws get passed making it illegal for reasons of public servant safety to take video of any police officer in the performance of his duties. I suspect that we'll also see the first exception to the laws against jamming cell phones being made for public safety types as well. Can't have those evulll hax0rs using the Intertubes to commit identify theft against our Men In Blue, can we?
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Wonder why they didn't mention Shooting Back?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If a cop lies in court, he will get away with it unless you have ironclad proof of it. One good video, even if it doesn't result in the cop going to jail, can really stir up public indignation and put the heat where it needs to be put.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King
The other example that immediately springs to mind is the guy getting tasered to death at the Vancouver airport. That may have turned the tide toward preventing every cop from getting a taser. Now the public is really sensitive and taser stories get front page coverage.
When you have one guy and one camera this is a possibility, but when you have a situation where there are dozens of cameras...
Even now most cell phones do video. Think what it will be like in 10 years. Look at what services like YouTube have done to peoples reflexive camera response; you have the camera, and you have a public forum to air the footage, so you whip that camera out at the least provokation, at the mere possibility that you might see something worth recording.
The government has a tiny fraction of the recording resources of the population, and they have more and more dangerous secrets. Who has the most to be afraid of in this situation?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Chances are it ends up like one of dozens upon dozens of cases out there, well publicized in the media, of cops abusing the hell out of people who record their actions. Doubly likely now since you're their target (unlike in most cases with camera-related incidents), and are acting in a f#$% you way toward them.
I've thought about buying one of these AIPTek camcorders. The things aren't half bad and would be ridiculously easy to carry around in public in case you ever had a good video opportunity.
I was catching a bus from Walthamstow Bus Station, part of a busy transport interchange in East London. On my way I saw the police kicking the living crap out of someone. I went up to start filming, and was told by a "Community Support" officer not to take pictures. I asked what law I was violating, and was met with the witty answer of "the law that says you can't film that over there". Right then. Seeing no point in continuing this conversation while the man continued to be smashed around by the Metropolitan Police, I went to the other side of a toughened glass barrier, stood on some chairs and started filming from there. It was at this point that I was grabbed by two officers and stopped and searched under the terrorism act, 2004. Unfortunately, as I shut the shutter on my K800i, all footage was lost :(
They're actually allowed to arbitrarily search anyone in London under this law, arbitrarily, as it's designated a zone of terrorist threat or somesuch. The mistake the officer searching me (whos full details I do have) claimed that I had been filming covertly. Standing on a chair holding a camera above my head, I'd not felt this to be covert, so I submitted the "stop and account" slip to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, who handed the investigation back to the local force, who stalled the investigation for long enough that the CCTV had been erased!
The rest is history, I'm afraid. There are wranglings going on with my MP regarding this, but should I be in such a position again I'll be damn sure to make certain that the footage is saved.
citizens with cameras is an idea that destroys the outdated orwellian dystopian fantasy so many posit as their philosophical starting point when evaluating trends in the modern world
"big brother" as a viable concept is dead. "1984" is pure fiction. it will never come to pass. the citizens merely use the government's own tactics and technology against them
long live "little brother"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, it's more like, if you are watching a cop beat the snot out of someone, excessively, for little to no reason, what do you think they will do when they see you filming them doing it? Most people are not willing to find out.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The smaller cameras get, the more common this is going to become.
Security guards and such get all bent out of shape if you try to take a picture inside of a mall. Cops get all bent out of shape when you record them being cops. But when the camera is so small that it can't be easily spotted...
Thomas Galvin
Does nobody else remember? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/22/220254
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Forget Sousveillance, you want Seussveillance. You have to wear a big long stripey jumper and speak in rhymes.
'Excuse me officer, would you mind,
would I be fined, maligned or confined,
if I were to tape your daily grind?
Sir, I'd like to believe,
that you and me we've
both come to perceive
That your job affords you - the responsibility to be true!
(I couldn't conceive of a way you'd
deceive me my friend, aggreive or bereave!)
A hasty repreive!; My hypothetical weave
does you an injustice. (And speaking of justice)
Enough of confession: let's return to my question.
I got impression of obsession with oppression.
Is this a true fact, or idle digression?
Would recording your good self be found a transgression?
Am I a free man?
or need I grab my tape, my cape and escape?'
Why aren't the 'good cops' turning in their corrupt, violent and evil coworkers?
Sorry, until I see more exposure of bad cops from within their departments, I'm lumping the 'good cops' in with the bad cops.
Sympathizers you know? Kinda like how we bomb the houses of people who help Iraqi Insurgents, even if they aren't actually insurgents themselves.
Aiding and abetting the enemy: abuse of authority.
Blar.
The biggest issue with filming/photographing/recording is that they can be faked or doctored in some way. We do have methods that detect changes, and as long as those work, citizen spying can work as a deterrent. But what happens when someone creates a way to doctor footage that is undetectable?
You must live a pretty sad life then, sancho. Have you never gone to a club? A concert? A protest rally? A ball game of any kind? These things materialize when anxiousness rises and people feel angry and overwhelmed. These situations are not rare. However, if you live in a cave, you are never going to be at a place where these kinds of situations occur.
Just because they don't find you doesn't mean they are any less real.
Have you ever seen a buddhist monk whistle? Does this lack of evidence means it doesn't happen often? No. It just means YOU don't have the information yourself to make such a claim. It does NOT mean *I* do not.
After all, I don't take a picture of everything I've witnessed. That doesn't make it any less true.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
This is what happened in Missouri:
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/19/1961.asp
or http://www.libertylounge.net/forums/19812-video-transcript-guy-pulled-over-crazy.html
Indeed, but as the old saying goes: "How do you eat an elephant? In many small bites, taken one at a time."
Politics has become corrupt and inaccessible enough for the "common man" at the federal level, there really isn't much you can do to change it. You get to vote for a president once every 4 years, and you get to plead to mostly deaf-ear turning congressmen and "representatives" to make changes in Washington for you. (If they *do* listen to you, it's usually just coincidence, because people with deeper pockets than you are paying them to do what happens to be the same thing you wanted.)
Where you can STILL make a difference is at the local level. Your individual voice is FAR more meaningful as a member of a local community than as a member of the U.S. citizenry as a whole.
I think change has to "trickle up" from the local and even state levels, so frying all these "small fish" consistently is about as effective a message as one can send.
I've often wondered about this... Whenever I call my credit card company, utility companies, etc. the first thing you hear on the call is "this call may be recorded...." Does that give me implicit permission to record the call without notifying whoever I end up talking to? It doesn't say "this call may be recorded by Acme corporation for training purposes but you do not have permission to record this call".
I wonder if such an assumption can be made when it comes to getting pulled over by the police, etc. It seems to be common knowledge that a lot of police cars are now equipped with cameras, so is there any reason I, as a private citizen, couldn't hook up a similar video camera to my dashboard that records video & sound just like a cop car, and not even bother to tell an officer who happens to pull me over.
Don't confuse using force to subdue a violent person at a public venue with using undue force. I have been to clubs, raves, concerts, protest rallies, ball games, and other public gatherings. I have not seen the police use undue force. Meaning, when someone gets out of hand, the police/security subdued the person by immobilizing them, usually with a pile, cuffing, and moving the person out of the way.
In the cases where I have seen police use batons or tasers, the person was striking out violently. That seems justified (or more justifiable).
Of course abuse happens, maybe more often then we see on the news because victims don't report it (fear of reprisal), but it is not, I believe, a common occurrence.
And people in authority who abuse their authority, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
This is why they have cameras in most cars now, in a sealed box that the patrol officer cant get into.
Hard to fake the evidence when you get get to it. It serves to watch *both* parities for when they end up in court.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gentlemen...welcome to Soviet Russia.
The cop is a real d-bag, until he notices the camera. Then, he's just concerned with the driver's safety. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/19/1961.asp http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/21/madcop.video.ap/index.html Officer Kuehnlein vs. Brett Darrow The officer was fired.
Where I live, starting salary for a police officer is in the mid-20000s. You do get what you pay for. If you pay next to nothing, you are not attracting the best. Instead, you might end up with low paid people wielding power. How many in the Slashdot crowd would quit their jobs to be a police officer? It is a low paid profession, and therefore you get what you pay for.
I heard something going on behind my apartment complex. I looked out the window, and a cop was beating a guy in the face with a collapsable baton. He continued doing this for a couple minutes, then walked the guy back to the car, face bloody and crying, and drove off like it was nothing. Even at that time I was thinking to grab our family video camera but didn't do it. Knowing what I know now, face strikes are never to be used as they can most often be fatal, he didn't call for any backup, so the man wasn't resisting... Just messed up all around, even if the guy "had it coming". Other than that, I've never had any problems with police and they have been angels (rolls eyes).
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
This is beginning to remind me of the story "The Light of Other Days". In it the technology is discovered to allow anyone to view someone else, no mater where they are (Wormhole CAM). The concept of privacy is completely destroyed.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
...the cops take an extreme dislike to perfectly legal citizens who employ any sort of cop-watch, especially so with cameras. The link below is a video beginning with a citizen filming the abject harassment of two citizens on the street in an upscale part of downtown, ending with the cops confiscating his camera.
http://blip.tv/file/778170
You don't tell the police that they are being filmed. You just quietly film them, and when they do something inappropriate you give the tape to the local TV station and sue the department into the ground. This strategy has three advantages. First, it will be a hell of a lot harder for the DA to charge you with wiretapping when you are a local celebrity. Second, you might get something for your trouble.
Finally, and most importantly, it will force the police to behave as if they were being filmed all of the time because they just won't know who that one tinfoil hat dude is until they are being fired for beating him.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Q. I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
A. The case of Brett Darrow, Missouri:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2715792117793977759&
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5591813350444656353&q=source:010563705515560372049&hl=en
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2007/100907Motorist.htm
Any other questions?, I got a whole folder dedicated to "official" ABUSE.
Related:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/128000201931?r=261000401931#261000401931
~hylas
The Eye-Fi products will help anyone in a situation where pictures are attempted to be deleted from a camera. By buffering images then transmitting pictures to the internet via WiFi, you can effectively remove the ability for people to confiscate film or memory cards.
All you need is a near-by wifi station... Which isn't too hard, but it would be awesome if WiFi devices (phones) had client that could receive as well. You and your friend could embed in a crowd and if the photographer is discovered, your friend's cell phone could be the backup. With the iphone, and other phones you could then automatically email images to others in near-real time...
The eyefi also somewhat supports GPS tagging too, which may help with authenticity.
(I am not affiliated with Eye-fi in anyway, other than having one on my wish-list)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
To answer my earlier question: "What is the evidence?"
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Today we have a media that feeds on salicious gossip. We have YouTube and other web sites that host any video you care to upload.
What this means is that if I take pictures of someone being arrested for some socially-unacceptable crime (child molestation, for example) it will certain make the local news and can be posted to YouTube and others just for laughs. Of course their being arrested has no bearing on their real guilt which might take a trial months later to really decide. But by the mere fact of their being arrested we can destroy their lives. People for the most part are very reluctant to give up the notion that you have to be guilty to get arrested.
Did you consider that randomly recording police actions will often lead to this sort of thing far more than "catching" the police in some sort of abusive actions? No, of course not. All cops are corrupt weasles that just want to abuse their power over ordinary people and every interaction between a police officer and ordinary citizens will result in some kind of abuse.
The reason that "professional" photographers have stayed away from perp walks and photographing arrests is because doing otherwise is clearly abusive. Sure, some people will do anything for a picture that sells. And think how much a video of some celebrity getting arrested will sell for...
There are a lot of authoritarian fuckwits who can't stand it when people stand up to authority. They are small minded bullies who worship power, think humans are basically evil, and must be beaten into civility. The idea of these 'evil' humans refusing to take their beatings frightens them, because a human who hasn't been beaten into submission is a free and therefore dangerous human.
I'm being a little harsh here, as authoritarianism is actually a mental virus. If you've ever mentally beaten yourself up for a perceived failure instead of simply noting it and refocusing on how you want to be, you are very likely infected with it yourself. People infected with the virus do not need to coordinate their actions consciously, yet work together to spread the virus through abuse and fear mongering.
Always try to be impeccable with your words and thoughts and do not use them to harm yourself or others. Use reward, not punishment, to motivate yourself and others to behave in positive ways. Punishment will never create new and positive behaviors.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Everyone is spying on everyone else, eh? Are they going to start printing the newspapers in invisble ink? :D
I demand the cone of silence!
Bow-ties are cool.
I have to wonder how many folks realistically have met bad cops. I'm a visible minority where I live and I've never had any problems with cops. I've been stopped once at a drunk driving checkpoint in my life but that's it. Yes I was sober, and they were polite. Maybe it's the one bad apple symptom where it takes only one or two bad cops to give everyone a bad name. I still believe that in general most cops are good and do their job. Otherwise why in the world would we continue to support them financially. I also suspect the comments are somewhat exaggerated, people get nervous around cops (even for no good reason), it's probably more natural to say nasty things about them than good.
The thing about kids is you can't make it all about them. If they think the only one they're hurting when they misbehave is themselves, they calculate the cost/benefit.
Once a kid is a little older, if you play it so they're not the only one benefiting and losing, they start to realize that other people are depending upon them to do what's right. Kids want more than anything to fit in socially...even if the social group is their parents (especially when young).
The problem is that many parents don't see why they should be inconvenienced by someone else, even if it is their own kid, so they isolate the negative consequences to the child. But that doesn't give the kid a sense of his effect on his local environment...or it mitigates it somewhat, so the kid learns that his negative behavior only affects himself (the same is often true of good behavior—parents naturally want their little angel to get all the credit when they do the right thing, so they try to direct all the benefit that way).
Example: A kid is acting up in a restaurant. Hopefully, the parent did the right thing in getting the child excited about going to the restaurant as a kind of plus, so just being there is a fun experience. The parent should: (1) tell the child once that if they don't settle down, they'll pay the bill and leave immediately, food or no food and then (2) do it. Most parents won't follow through without a big to do, because they themselves want the meal. But this isn't the right answer—the right thing to do is get up and go, and suffer the consequences of your kid's bad behavior with them. Make sure they know your skipped meal is no fun either, but they had the chance to fix it and there's no going back.
If the kid learns early that there are inflexible rules of the universe, and once you run afoul of them the path is determined and quickly followed, they shape up quickly. If parents don't have the will to pursue the behavior they want and not settle for less, however, in the end no one gets what they want.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
I am not sure if this will help, but I have mentioned it to people in the past as to if it is 'legal' for them to record something.
http://www.callcorder.com/phone-recording-law-america.htm
This varies from state to state. The following is also helpful for noting particular oddities by state:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/state-law-recording
http://www.rcfp.org/taping/states.html
If anyone knows if this covers video recording as well and if it doesn't has a link, please let me know. I like keeping a list of such things.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Actually, I have second-hand knowledge that there is such a rule for the departments in the DFW area. I work security, and some of the people I know are ex-law enforcement with the same story.
It's not written policy, maybe because the press would have a field day, but at the psych review, the department shrink discourages you from joining, saying you would find the work unchallenging and boring. You are then encouraged to apply to one of the federal law enforcement programs, a flattering and more effective variation on "Wouldn't you be happier somewhere else?" If you answer that with "I wanna be a cop more than anything..." they will let you in, but not without trying mightily to talk you out of it.
Funny thing is, both of the guys I know got tired of the nonsense and did quit within a few years.
I grew up on military bases. I've seen MPs do their job with honor, courage and professionalism. Maybe that's because you're never quite sure if that snot-nosed kid you pulled over happens to be your CO's nephew, and military towns tend to be small circles. Maybe it's because of the military tradition that distinguishes the man from the uniform. Maybe it's because when you actually are a certified bad ass, your ego's need to scream "I'm not Officer Dude!" to some little kid on a skateboard goes way down.
That's not the case on the civilian side of the fence. Your local PD doesn't want the chess geek. They do want ex-high school football players, guys who have been behaviorally conditioned to take a hit and do exactly what they're told. They don't even want men who can understand the law. One of the two guys I'm talking about is technically awesome, but still can't understand why the first and fourth amendments are important. "If I searched your car, it's cuz I knew you had drugs in there, and all the warrant did was let bad guys get away..."
They don't want soul searching. They don't want anyone to grow a conscience. They don't want line officers declining orders because "That's an illegal order, Sir." They want men who will do exactly as they're told, when they're told.
At least, that's how it is down in DFW, and I suspect most of the South. I hope your local PD is filled with Knights of the Round Table.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Cops starting out are lucky to make $20k/yr. Competent people can and will take other jobs, so recruiters aren't left with much choice. Base pay should go up a lot. Keep the pay up for awhile and competent people will push out the incompetent, and corruption will go down because it will become a job worth keeping.
Police advance and are rewarded for the number of tickets they write and "criminals" they catch. This encourages a predatory relationship with the public, abuse, and corruption. The rewards are much greater for catching someone committing a crime than for discouraging a crime.
IMHO I'd like to see the word "criminal" banned as hate speech. How is a person who committed a crime supposed to consider a law-abiding lifestyle when they have been permamently branded as a crime-committer. How is society supposed to seriously support their rehabilitation when they've been given this core identity?
Down here in San Diego County an off-duty cop shot a mother and her 8yr old son in a road rage incident. Every piece of dirt on this mother was leaked to the press, she's been charged with child endangerment, and the cop who has been on leave is just now being charged with rather minor crimes. We need real accountability. The incident was recorded. Recording the police is a great start, but doesn't do much good if prosecutors ignore it.
I should say my impression of the SDPD has been fairly positive, especially in the city. I've seen them provoked and they were pretty good about de-escalating the situation. Still think all of the above applies.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -