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The Road to Big Brother
brothke writes "In The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society, Ross Clark journals his struggles to avoid the myriad CCTV cameras in his native England. That's difficult given the millions of cameras in public locations there. Before going forward, the use of the term 'Big Brother' in both the title and throughout the book is erroneous. Big Brother has its roots in George Orwell's novel 1984 and refers to an omnipresent, seemingly benevolent figure representing the oppressive control over individual lives exerted by an authoritarian government. The term has been misappropriated to describe everything from legitimate crime-fighting, to surveillance cameras, to corporate e-mail and network usage monitoring. Localities that deploy CCTV cameras in public thoroughfares in the hope of combating crime are in no way indicative of the oppressive control of Orwell's Big Brother. Should we be concerned that such a scenario play itself out in Ross Clark's UK or in the US? Likely no, as US government agencies are widely decentralized and isolated. Just getting the networks within a single federal agency unified is a daunting task; getting all of the agencies to have a single unified data sharing mechanism is a pipe-dream. Look at it this way: the US Department of Defense has more networks than some countries have computers." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society
author
Ross Clark
pages
200
publisher
Encounter Books
rating
Powerful topic, but poor delivery and answers.
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-1594032486
summary
One man's account of how to dodge Britain's million of CCTV cameras and other forms of surveillance
The Road to Big Brother details Clark's attempt to be invisible to the millions of CCTV cameras in Britain, and details other types of national & agency databases and how they can be misused. Clark notes astutely that while much data is being gathered, often the most important clues are missed, and a lack of proportion often is the result.
Some of the books observations are flawed. In chapter two, Clark writes that VeriChip markets its RFID chips with the aim of speeding the passage of authorized people through security checks. But its Verimed chip is made for patient identification and emergency patient management in hospitals. In Chapter 11, Clark comments that Facebook is essentially a forum for drunken college students who cannot conceive that any harm could come from disporting themselves in semi-naked poses for everyone to see. There is no indication that the comment was meant to be humorous, and there are many legitimate sober uses for Facebook.
Perhaps the worst distortion of the Big Brother hysteria, of which the book provides no source, is the claim that the CIA and FBI appears to know what airline meals a person chooses when they cross the Atlantic. Terrorists do their best to be stealthy, and will likely opt to bring their own special meal, rather than stand out and request a special one. It is not clear what the CIA and FBI hope to gain with such data.
The book documents numerous CCTV failures, from Brighton, England to Baltimore, Maryland. Chapter 3 has a 2005 quote from the Maryland Attorney General stating that CCTV's had yet to solve a single crime. The book also repeats the problem of fuzzy CCTV images and highlights other technology failures as far back as 1998. Surveillance technology has significantly advanced in the last 3 years, let alone decade. Focusing on failures from a decade ago is in no way indicative of the state of the art, nor does it do anything to solve the problem Clark addresses.
In the last 60 days alone, CCTV has been used to identify the alleged Craigslist Killer and shooter at Wesleyan University. While Clark may not realize it, CCTV and other related technologies has indeed revolutionized law enforcement. The underlying problem is that Britain's millions of cameras were deployed in the hope that they could magically solve crime. Cameras alone achieve nothing; but CCTV combined with trained humans and other crime prevention and detection methods are a powerful set of tools that many police departments are embracing.
The book notes that two CCTV schemes were sold to UK police in 2001 with the premise that they would eliminate crime and increase the number of visitors by 225,000 a year. Any police department that would believe such a marketing claim, without pilot testing and proof of concept should themselves be arrested for ineptitude.
The book would be better off quoting this year's CCTV successes, rather than those of obsolete equipment. As to the fuzzy image problem; newer, more powerful and often inexpensive cameras easily and quickly solves that predicament.
All is not lost on the book. Chapter 8 — Me and My ID, in which Clark documents how ineffective national identification cards are. National ID cards are all the rage and are being deployed in the hope that they will reduce terrorism, illegal immigration and other of society's ills. Clark notes that even if national ID cards were able to identify everyone correctly, and that is a huge assumption, it is still not clear what they would achieve. National ID's have been touted to reduce insurance fraud, but medical insurance fraud is often executed not by false identification, rather by patients lying about their circumstances.
The book touches upon, but does not really answer, nor go into enough details on why people allow such pervasive use of electronic surveillance technologies to seamlessly enter society. Be it CCTV cameras that film public parks or attempt to catch speeding drivers; many are deployed with little to no protestations.
While Big Brother achieved oppressive control over individuals, the real danger of surveillance systems is that they can easily be misused. Rather than achieving their crime fighting goals, they will mislead police with myriad false positives. Part of Clark's frustration is likely that the UK Police believe in some sort of CCTV Kool-Aid that their collogues in the US have not consumed. Why that is so prevalent in the UK is something that Clark doesn't address.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society should have been a book that details the problems with a surveillance society, but often reads like it emanates from the ministry of misinformation.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Some of the books observations are flawed. In chapter two, Clark writes that VeriChip markets its RFID chips with the aim of speeding the passage of authorized people through security checks. But its Verimed chip is made for patient identification and emergency patient management in hospitals. In Chapter 11, Clark comments that Facebook is essentially a forum for drunken college students who cannot conceive that any harm could come from disporting themselves in semi-naked poses for everyone to see. There is no indication that the comment was meant to be humorous, and there are many legitimate sober uses for Facebook.
Perhaps the worst distortion of the Big Brother hysteria, of which the book provides no source, is the claim that the CIA and FBI appears to know what airline meals a person chooses when they cross the Atlantic. Terrorists do their best to be stealthy, and will likely opt to bring their own special meal, rather than stand out and request a special one. It is not clear what the CIA and FBI hope to gain with such data.
The book documents numerous CCTV failures, from Brighton, England to Baltimore, Maryland. Chapter 3 has a 2005 quote from the Maryland Attorney General stating that CCTV's had yet to solve a single crime. The book also repeats the problem of fuzzy CCTV images and highlights other technology failures as far back as 1998. Surveillance technology has significantly advanced in the last 3 years, let alone decade. Focusing on failures from a decade ago is in no way indicative of the state of the art, nor does it do anything to solve the problem Clark addresses.
In the last 60 days alone, CCTV has been used to identify the alleged Craigslist Killer and shooter at Wesleyan University. While Clark may not realize it, CCTV and other related technologies has indeed revolutionized law enforcement. The underlying problem is that Britain's millions of cameras were deployed in the hope that they could magically solve crime. Cameras alone achieve nothing; but CCTV combined with trained humans and other crime prevention and detection methods are a powerful set of tools that many police departments are embracing.
The book notes that two CCTV schemes were sold to UK police in 2001 with the premise that they would eliminate crime and increase the number of visitors by 225,000 a year. Any police department that would believe such a marketing claim, without pilot testing and proof of concept should themselves be arrested for ineptitude.
The book would be better off quoting this year's CCTV successes, rather than those of obsolete equipment. As to the fuzzy image problem; newer, more powerful and often inexpensive cameras easily and quickly solves that predicament.
All is not lost on the book. Chapter 8 — Me and My ID, in which Clark documents how ineffective national identification cards are. National ID cards are all the rage and are being deployed in the hope that they will reduce terrorism, illegal immigration and other of society's ills. Clark notes that even if national ID cards were able to identify everyone correctly, and that is a huge assumption, it is still not clear what they would achieve. National ID's have been touted to reduce insurance fraud, but medical insurance fraud is often executed not by false identification, rather by patients lying about their circumstances.
The book touches upon, but does not really answer, nor go into enough details on why people allow such pervasive use of electronic surveillance technologies to seamlessly enter society. Be it CCTV cameras that film public parks or attempt to catch speeding drivers; many are deployed with little to no protestations.
While Big Brother achieved oppressive control over individuals, the real danger of surveillance systems is that they can easily be misused. Rather than achieving their crime fighting goals, they will mislead police with myriad false positives. Part of Clark's frustration is likely that the UK Police believe in some sort of CCTV Kool-Aid that their collogues in the US have not consumed. Why that is so prevalent in the UK is something that Clark doesn't address.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society should have been a book that details the problems with a surveillance society, but often reads like it emanates from the ministry of misinformation.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
From an article in the San Diego Reader:
Last week in a Spring Valley business park, a tower nearly 100 feet tall sprang up seemingly overnight...I approached three men, dressed as though they might be engineers, who were standing in the parking lot outside NSM Surveillance on Via Orange Way. When I asked them what the tower was for, one of them responded with the joke, "We can't tell you. We'd have to kill you."...By Wednesday afternoon the tower had disappeared.
Though that particular product was probably just a communications tower, the article describes how easy it is to set up an Orwellian society, especially with a systems integrator such as NSM Surveillance.
Even worse than Big Brother would be what is described in the summary: A set of decentralized agencies full of politics/bureaucracy that have rules with little or no unification and no compassion or human oversight. Suddenly, instead of a force seeking only power there is a "force" that is simply a mass of rules and surveillance with the illusion of trying to control when in fact it only creates massive inconvenience for people ala Brazil.
Basically: Given the choice I would almost rather be imprisoned/watched by an entity with an agenda rather than a decentralized, inept morass of bureaucracy. I fear that is what we are moving toward, however. See Red Light Cameras as an example.
-
Some book reviewer really woke up on the "sniveling apologist bootlicker for incipient fascism" side of the bed this morning.
That figure was made up by a lazy tabloid hack writing for the Daily Telegraph, who counted the number of CCTV cameras in about a quarter mile of the main street of a particularly unpleasant part of London, and then multiplied by the total distance of roads in the UK.
It's not even believably wrong - it's so mind-buggeringly flawed that it defies human comprehension as to how anyone could possibly think it's even nearly right. If that figure was correct then you would pass a CCTV camera every 20 metres on every road in the UK. My driveway alone would have three or four cameras on it.
I really wish people would stop spouting such patent nonsense.
Perhaps the reviewer may also wish to check out the Home Office Research Study 292, 'Assessing the impact of CCTV cameras' (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf) before attempting to explain how useful they are to us, and maybe also have a read of Database State (http://www.jrrt.org.uk/uploads/Database State.pdf) to check the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust's report. Then there's the recent House Of Lords publication Surveillance, Citizens And The State (http://publications.parliament.uk).
Actually, I am not so sure of the real value of these cameras. I mean, yes, in many circumstances they are helpful, but in all?
Sure the craigslist killer may have been harder to catch, but men like him have been caught without any use of CCTV cameras before. Had he not been caught yet, some more lives may be lost or damaged, However, we are talking about overall policy of society... a single incident of a single "bad guy" does not a case for public policy make.
With the advent of a DHS, with the successes, its not hard to see how creeping centralization can happen. I know that some police departments are often given direct access to private security cameras in many buildings, and particularly of the outward facing cameras that overlook city squares etc.
It may be hard to centralize them now, but technology only makes it easier.
Then look at the CORI system here in MA. A recent study found many accesses that were probably unauthorized. As far as they can tell, a significant portion of local police will think nothing of using the system to look up famous people's information. Of course, thats only been identified by looking for searches on famous names. An ex-girlfriend, Wife's new boyfriend, etc, there is no telling.
Tehcnology gives new abilities. However, when you build infrastructure that has the potential for abuse, you have to build in proper checks and balances, or trust not just its designers, but the operators of the system, now...and into the future.
the new Big brother will not run on a platform. He is quite happy to "creep on in" on the backs of otherwise good intentions. Like the recent no fly list issue. A plane that merely flew threw US airspace was detained and a reporter questioned... because someone put him on the secret no fly list, and somehow the US government got ahold of the passenger manifest. Was he put on the list as a mistake? Or was he put on because someone didn't like what he had to say and wanted to harass him? Where are the checks and balances?
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Unless you have some better plan for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN than a ubiquitous surveillance system running SCORPION STARE, we're all going to have to live with these sorts of inconveniences. Being spied on is nowhere near as bad as the alternative.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I don't think the author of this entry is entitled to define exactly when and how the 'Big Brother' example/metaphor can be applied in language.
Yes, the Big Brother in Orwell's 1984 has specific definitions, but in reference/example/metaphor, people apply abstractions and generalizations that are not necessarily definitive of the original context. In such context, only elements or small aspects of the original concept may apply and it is usually up to the reader to bridge the relationship through active thought.
Samzenpus (the Big Brother in this case) is trying to tell us all how to live!
I believe the reviewer defines Big Brother too narrowly from Orwell's work. The oppressive dictatorial Big Brother is the ultimate icon or archetype of this concept. The more disturbing reality that people are reacting to is the inevitable buildup of the infrastructure of Big Brother. If anyone, acting as a smaller "big brother," say someone in law enforcement or some intelligence agency, decides to snoop on you ... perhaps as a result of one of the myriad false positives that this infrastructure produces ... the effect at the personal level is very similar to the dictatorial Big Brother that is spying on everybody. In the U.S. this gets uncomfortably close to violating the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Both the book and the review are wildly biased, though obviously in opposite directions. I think it's safe to say that the truth lies somewhere in the wide area between the two. For what its worth, I'd guess the truth is in the area of "Politicians legitimately trying to do what they think is right but screwing it up badly by not realizing the unintended consequences of their actions".
Saying that the cameras aren't anything to do with Big Brother is like saying "This isn't really a handgun, handguns are tools used by murderers and I'm not one so this isn't a handgun". It's possible for a society to have benevolent pervasive camera presence, and I'd still call that Big Brother. It's a dangerous tool that, much like a chainsaw, can be very useful and beneficial to a society. But always remember it's dangerous! You can't just say "Look at the good uses of this tool, now stop criticizing it".
Agent: "Sir, I have an idea"
Boss: "What's that Jenkins?"
Agent: "Lets do a big budget reality TV show called Big Brother, that way the term Big Brother is further misunderstood by the general public and they'll stop calling us that"
Boss: "That's brilliant Jenkins!"
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It is more likely than you think.
When government keeps getting bigger and bigger, it starts to behave and act more like Big Brother than our founding fathers.
The government that governs least, governs best. Whomever said that be it John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or Napoleon.
It seems at least in fiction, there is a way to fight the UKian Big Brother but I wouldn't advise it to UKians, least if they don't want to get arrested. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I don't think the reviewer is a cop. But I do think the reviewer is a paid-up member of the UK LieBore Party. Or a Guardian Journalist (much the same thing).
It is a terrible review. Totally biased in favour of Government and anti-privacy. He's basically bloated full of security-theatre koolaid.
If he's British, he must be the last man standing that supports the Government right now. Maybe they paid him with expenses money.
Arguments of the form "group X doesn't want to hurt you, therefore technology Y is not dangerous to your freedom" completely miss the point; once technology Y is in place, it is waiting, ready for use by group Z which does want to restrict your civil rights.
The apparatus of a police state is dangerous even in a democracy because it makes it so much easier for some rogue element to end democracy by imposing a police state without free assembly, free speech, free practice of religion, etc.
It has, perhaps, been some time since the reviewer read Nineteen Eighty-Four. In my mind, and that of many others, the salient feature of Big Brother was that he was watching you. Everywhere. The telescreen panel in your apartment is two-way. You have no privacy. Citizens of Oceania fear that some innocent action could be misconstrued resulting in a one-way trip to the Ministry of Love for a bit of Q&A with the Thought Police. Whether Big Brother actually existed was immaterial. Someone was watching you; always. To use Big Brother as a metaphor for omnipresent surveillance is both appropriate and suitably cautionary.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"Before going forward, the use of the term 'Big Brother' in both the title and throughout the book is erroneous."
The usage of 'Big Brother' to refer to any sort of general surveillance is not only common, but perfectly valid. It is indeed a reference to 1984, but it primarily references the ever-present posters that remind people 'Big Brother is watching', not the oppressive government itself. If -someone- is watching, that someone is often referred to as Big Brother, because BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING, not necessarily because that someone is part of an authoritarian regime of oppression and misinformation.
thinking that TV cameras are the slippery slope to 24/7 facism is not hilarious; it is reasonable fear. ...people would have gasped.
Suppose the british , by spending money, make the cost of cameras and software cheaper - surely that will hasten the day when, say N korea will have cameras implanted in everyone at birth...that is not wacked out/. fear m ongering, that is a reasonable fear.
I wonder how old you are: the loss of liberty and freedom, just in my shortlife (i'm 53) is astonishing - but it happens slowly, or in a climate of fear 99/11) and you don't really notice how bad things are: if you ahd told people on 9/10 that to get on an airplane, you had to show up 2 hours early, not carry a penkife,
...fears of television cameras to capture speeders is apparently the gateway to the downfall of western civilization and liberal/libertarian ideals. gee, maybe its just to catch speeders?
That's a laughably naive supposition. The first mistake you make is assuming the speed has been set for the sake of safety, and not to catch 'speeders' as a profit-generating exercise. There have been numerous stories about places where traffic lights are set up so more people will run the red and get ticketed. There's also this story. Note the 20-fold increase in tickets year-over-year. Living in the area, I can assure you it wasn't because everyone decided it was time to start speeding. As noted in the article, there were an obscene number handed out in off-hours construction zones where the speed was reduced at all times, rather than using the reduced speed while passing workers sign. Both signs can be found in this pdf link.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Starting with a specious criticism concerning the "erroneous" use of the term Big Brother, this review wanders through to the useless conclusion that this book should have been about something other than what it was about. What the review thinks that the book should have been about is immaterial, and making that point the conclusion of the review just marks it as a bad review.
There may be some accurate and useful criticisms here, but it is impossible to tell. The review is a disorganized mess of anecdotes from the books, which are rebutted with little to support the reviewer's case. What is needed is first to portray a useful summary of the book and its thesis, and then make criticisms based on that. There is no useful exposition of the book's theme, only a laundry list of criticisms that seems more like an extended whine.
To examine one specific criticism, it does not seem reasonable to expect a book to cover events that happen after it is written, let alone those that happen after it is typeset, printed, and bound. By citing only the apprehension of the (alleged) Craigslist killer and the Wesleyan University bookstore killer, the reviewer actually suggests that there are no significant successes for CCTV within the timeframe of the book. Is that the case? The audience is left to guess, because the reviewer does not seem to know.
To sum up, this review is simply a collection of specific points made about the subject book. The reader is left with little idea of the scope of the subject book, its themes, or any thesis that Mr. Clark presents. But it was not for naught; now I know that I should probably avoid Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
Big Brother has the power to take away all that from "little brother".
You only need the government to realise every young person totting around with cellphone cameras etc is a threat and then your main point starts to fall down. You also misunderstand that these things can also become part of the surveillance mechanism itself. Just what is happening to those pictures you send over a mobile network?
George Orwell did paint a fanciful worst case scenario, but very few academics come out and say it's outright poppycock, because it still has some plausibility. I also think you forget history, Gestapo, Cold war anti-communism in the united states. Yes the west has spent some time scrabbling for traction on the slippery slope.
Today's CCTV + Wiretapping world is far removed from Big Brother, yes, and a lot would have to go wrong for it become reality, but that doesn't make it OK nor not worth fighting.
I suggest Cory Doctorow's Little Brother as further reading: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
Don't mess with slashdot hysteria. Oh and get off my lawn.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
is why the feed from these cameras aren't publicly available, and why the cameras aren't installed in the offices of our public officials, police forces, and anyone else doing the public's work. I'd argue there's an even greater need for us to keep an eye on them than there is for them to keep an eye on us.
Install the surveillance cameras for yourselves first, and then we'll gladly allow you to watch us in public. And please don't cite "privacy concerns". We threw those out the window a long time ago.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
The proliferation of government surveillance systems is not amusing. It is disturbing. The fact that persons such as yourself dismiss the potential negative implications of omnipresent authority as paranoia is frightening.
In the novel 1984 Orwell described a government (the Party) that used ubiquitous surveillance as an instrument to consolidate power and oppress the populace. In reality, governments are installing cameras, creating databases and using technology to invade privacy on a massive scale. The correlation is obvious.
Furthermore, even if the cameras are, as you argue, only going to be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes, is that an acceptable practice? Can a society be free when there is 100% enforcement of the laws?
I guess that would depend on the laws, now, wouldn't it? Though, given some of the more insane laws on the books, and the barrage of new ones poured forth that target the "worst" in our societies (think sex offenders and terrorists), I would venture that "perfect" law enforcement is no more a legitimate function of government than maximizing tax revenue.
Also, your argument concerning "Little Brother" is flawed. Rodney King's tormentors were not convicted of any crime. Indeed, episodes of police brutality, wrongful prosecution and judicial misconduct rarely end with the offenders being punished. A citizen with a cell phone tends to be outmatched by the power of the government.
1984 is fiction. But many in power act like it's an instruction manual.
Ancient example:
Under the democratic Republic of Rome, the stadium games served as a way for Group X (the Senators) to entertain the people. Just for fun. But once group Z (the emperors) arrived on the scene, the games devolved into a way to kill undesirables like criminals, slaves, and Christians/Jews.
"This job would be a lot easier if instead of a Republic, we had a dictatorship. Ha, ha, ha." - G. Dubya Bush
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The difference? There's no enduring record of your activities if there's just a cop on the corner. With a CCTV and sufficiently large storage, someone could go back and count exactly how many times you pass by certain places. Now what if those certain places are deemed "unseemly" such as drug hangouts, or fronts for illegal activities. They now have evidence that could be used in a warrant against you. "Your honour, the defendant was repeatedly seen in the vicinity of the smuggling warehouse, it seems only logical that we can now search his home for anything linking him to the smuggled goods." And you don't get to argue against a warrant while it's being requested. So now the cops have a foot in the door. Why would they focus on you? You trod on the foot of an off-duty officer, and didn't grovel enough for his liking, thus causing a petty vendetta. Cops have abused their power before, this would just expand the scope, if it wasn't properly set up with checks and balances.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
There are a few differences:
1. Cost. When surveillance is labor intensive, it is necessarily only used in exceptional circumstances(against specific high-profile enemies of the state). The only way to use it broadly is to consume an unsustainable portion of the available economic output(as in East Germany). In effect, the expense and inconvenience of low-tech surveillance function, for the vast majority of people, as a de-facto set of protections from state intrusion. Furthermore, since it is expensive and uncommon, people are much less likely to see it as normal, and more likely to question its use without clear justification.
2. Retention. Humans have fairly poor memories, on the whole. If you see me in public(and thousands of people have) you will have only the fuzziest recollection of me a short while later, unless I was doing something abnormal, interesting, or alarming at the time. Again, for anyone who isn't notable enough to have a team of feds submitting written reports, the limitations of low tech surveillance create a fairly short de-facto "document retention period" after which witness memories are useless or nonexistent.
3. Access. Recalling the results of manual surveillance is a gigantic pain in the ass. Best case scenario is well kept records. Worst case is having to plaster the town with notices, asking witnesses to come forward and be interviewed, and all the hassle that that entails. The larger the query, the worse the hassle. This creates a de-facto protection against fishing expeditions.
Increasingly, automated surveillance is free of these limitations and, to the degree that it is not, there are easily plausible projections of how it might become so. Cameras are cheap, and getting cheaper, and there are many, many more of them being put up for various individual and commercial purposes, which could be aggregated for intelligence purposes; but don't count as a direct cost the way cops do. Data storage and retrieval are getting ever cheaper, and search technology is getting ever better. As the cost of surveillance declines the threshold of "not that important" does as well.
The other factor is the symmetry of surveillance. Historically, even in the most heavily surveiled places(small towns and villages, for instance) surveillance was symmetric. If you can see me, I can see you seeing me. I might not actually do so 100% of the time, and a sufficiently skilled agent might be pretty good at infiltration and tailing; but, on the whole, you could see them just as easily as they could see you. With high tech, by contrast, you can generally infer that surveillance is possible in a given situation(and it almost always is); but whether or not it is happening, and who is conducting it, is almost entirely opaque. That changes the matter considerably.
If there were millions of cameras, how many analysts would be needed to go through the videos?
Not as many as you might think. You don't need to analyze every second of every video, just whenever something of interest occurs. And things like facial recognition further reduce that human requirement.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
-- Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
That was exactly my thinking.
"We LOVE our government surveillence. It's legitimate and good. Don't listen to those laughable studies showing that massive surveillence has absolutely no benefit in preventing crime, and no effect on crime rates, and only serves as a tool for Intelligence organizations to collect information about citizens, so as to quell dissent, and spy on any political opposition, with such an extreme opportunity for abuse, even beyond the invasion of privacy aspect, that such a crazy system should have no place in ANY civilized society. Your government loves you. They want to play catch with your children, and buy you a beer. If you don't have anything to hide, why is there a problem? We're just the friendly Government come to make your life better"
And as for the US. The reviewer obviously hasn't been paying attention in the last few decades, as the power has been centralized more and more, taking power from the states putting it into the Federal government's hands, consolidating agencies one after another directly beneath the executive branch, federalizing the police, integrating the military with police for domestic operations against citizens, and on and on and on.
As for the UK. I've always wanted to visit, but I wouldn't be caught dead in that "Brave New World". Sounds like the reviewer would have had a great time in Nazi Germany.
Let's asume that magically all of the sudden massive surveillance into the lives of every citizen did anything good for the population (and not for the Beurocrats keeping the population under their thumb of control). Even if having a chip implant up your anus and your own personal police officer to to follow you around and arrest you if your rectal temperature deviates to rapidly made the world crime free, is it really worth it? I'd rather live in the middle of a crime ridden cess pool, than in an Orwellian Surveilance State.
The government should get back to what it's supposed to do, and micromanaging the lives of it's citizens is NOT one of those purposes.
Brothke: People like you piss me off. Go move to China. I much prefer that whole "freedom" model, even if though it's hard to come by in the suposed "free world". At least the criminals on the street don't have massive amounts of power, infastructure and resources behind them. The government criminals certainly do.
Seriously, it's not a review at all--it's an op/ed piece, and a badly written one at that.
How about reviewing the book as given, and leaving your attitude for your OWN book?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
the pillars of these western liberal notions and the rights and freedoms they support are not impervious to damage, not in the least. but they are a lot stronger than you suppose, and to destroy them to the extent that you and others suggest would take a lot more concerted effort and a lot more societal changes than some stupid transit cameras
And you think that the effort is not there? Or that rights can only be infringed upon given sweeping societal change? All that is needed for them to be negated is complacency.
Those "western liberal" governments have subverted these rights and freedoms before and will do so again. Where was due process for the Japanese-Americans during WWII, or for Muslims post-9/11? Where was free speech for those in "free speech zones" at recent major political events/conventions? Where was the right against unreasonable searches when the NSA conducted warrantless wiretaps? Where was the right to bear arms in Washington, DC until recently?
Our freedoms do not need to be abolished to be compromised. You call him hysterical, I call you naive. Society doesn't need to transform itself for these rights to be lost; it merely needs to stand out of the way.
"Benign" like a cantaloupe-sized tumor hanging off the side of your head. You know sometimes, when nobody is looking, I like to scratch my damn balls. Now I have to wait all day until I get home and shut the blinds before I can scratch. Once "gait analyzing" software is in place I'll set off all sorts of alarms, and rightly so, since unrelenting scrotal irritation is ample inspiration to become a suicide bomber.
You do know that the CCTV cameras have been used to prosecute a handful of criminals in britain, all of them being guilty of not scooping up their dog's shit while in a public area, right?
>>I was mugged in daylight in an upper middle class neighborhood getting home from school when I was nine years old.
And CCTV isn't going to prevent you from being mugged. It *may* aid in a conviction, but does not stop a bullet, knife, nor a thug who is willing to mug a 9 y/o kid.
It might help catch the thief, which might prevent future crimes. I had the TV on while I was cooking this evening, and there was a program showing police doing their jobs (there are several programmes like this in the UK, they're awful, but hey). A teenager ran to one of the on-duty police saying he'd been mugged, and gave a description. The police radioed that to the CCTV people, who said someone matching the description was a couple of streets away. The teenager and the police drove round, the teenager identified the guy, and he was arrested.
The CCTV certainly helps here, but only when there are police on the streets able to use it.
Take a look at where CCTV is mostly deployed, e.g. Great Britain, and what you find are left-wing control freaks.
One of the more entertaining features of Slashdot is the self-delusional lefties who blame anything they don't like, even perfectly typical lefty behaviour, on "right wing ..."
It's modern urban liberals that are the first to insist that the government "do something" whenever reality bites. Modern liberal governments are only too happy to oblige. Ubiquitous CCTV is "doing something."
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
The techniques of the state control are the same. You can argue seating arrangements defined after the French Revolution, all you want to - it is how corpro-statist control maintains and strengthens its grip, while the peons bicker over ideological alignment.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Lefty behavior is synonymous psychological projection.
You can quote me on that :)
Life is not for the lazy.
You are calling the current Labour government liberal?
The UK government is right wing. Their policies are mostly right wing. Remember the upset caused when they announced a higher top rate of tax a couple of weeks back? Anything remotely left wing is a big deal for them.
Mass surveillance is classic right wing conservative policy. Forget civil liberties, freedom and privacy, all they want to do is "crack down" on criminal scum. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Kettle the tree hugging hippy protesters whenever they threaten to disrupt business in the capital.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC