NYC Police Comm'r: Privacy Is 'Off the Table' After Boston Bombs

An anonymous reader writes "New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly thinks that now is a great time to install even more surveillance cameras hither and yon around the Big Apple. After the Boston Marathon bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers were famously captured on security camera footage and thereby identified. That just may soften up Americans to the idea of the all-seeing glass eye. 'I think the privacy issue has really been taken off the table,' Kelly gloats."

Comments

Rights are off the table

[roman_mir]

Never mind privacy, all of your rights are off the table. I imagine that fighting this is a bit like fighting windmills, but all this oppression does is it creates more negativity and more negativity will cause more violence.

What we learned...

[Anonymous Coward]

What we learned from Boston was that there is no reason for centralized surveillance. Privately owned cameras (around businesses) provided enough coverage. And the police were then able to provide warrants to acquire the video. It worked perfectly from a privacy standpoint and in providing necessary information to law enforcement.

If public places are not to be considered private

[dmomo]

Then, any cameras being placed should be openly accessible to the public in real time. I won't like the presence of cameras, but at least this is consistent with the sentiment that public places are not to be considered private.

Re:no problem

[lgw]

You have no privacy in public spaces.

So pitting camera in PUBLIC space is, by definition NOT an invasion of privacy

Bullshit. I can expect plenty of privacy in public places. I can expect anything I do that's not too attention-getting to be ignored and forgotten. Only children think in terms of absolutes: "it's not absolutely private so it must be absolutely public".

There's a huge loss in privacy between having a searchable archive of ubiquitous surveillance, and what people normally see and remember. Privacy is valuable, because it's an important part of dignity. I'm not going to give up any privacy without getting a large and proven increase in security, and maybe not even then.

Re:Privacy?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I have read several different science fiction stories based on real technology, where face recognition tracks individuals and stores it in a database, along woth car tracking.

One story even did a Google Earth kind of things and tracked you inside buildings as well. Type in a name, boom! Exactly where you are, and were, is known and logged.

We do not want to give government this power.