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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."
... drinking big gulp sugary drinks?
THL phish sticks
as long as camera's are also installed inside police department in every office and interrogation room and are completely accessible by public.
'I think the privacy issue has really been taken off the table,'
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
And yet they want to hide/control the information about their 'stop and frisk' policies, which mosques they are watching and/or taping, and all their other secrets.
So I guess they think secrets are OK for them but not for the people they want to keep secrets from.
On the one hand, this is the U.S. and we have a 4th amendment to our constitution, that does being secure in ones person in addition to papers and effects, which draws a pretty clear line(though not clear enough) about when a warrant is required. On the other hand, if you expect to have privacy on the streets of New York City you're dangerously crazy.
It just leaves the open question of whether there's a limit of what we'll late the state do beyond what we'll let the public at large do.
Since the cameras we have in place already were sufficient to identify the suspects, we obviously need more cameras.
We call this "logic".
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
You chose.
Frankly though, why bother with CCTV when most people have cell phones with cameras? Instead of a governmental body being Big Brother, the citizens of the society do the monitoring for them?
the cost of security is a reduced tolerance for the risks that make life great
The terrorist should love seeing that their stupid acts pay out.
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both."
- Benjamin_Franklin
Therefore, when we are forcibly reminded that there are bad people doing bad things, we should limit the liberties of everyone. This guy is a moron and should not be in a position of power.
Kelly dismisses critics who argue that increased cameras threaten privacy rights, giving governments the ability to monitor people in public spaces.
“The people who complain about it, I would say, are a relatively small number of folks, because the genie is out of the bottle,” Kelly said. “People realize that everywhere you go now, your picture is taken.”
There's a stark difference between a store knowing I am in their store and a centralized location storing all of my visits. And then there's an even further jump when it's a government doing that. I'm fine that I go into Gamestop and Gamestop gets tapes of me looking at games. I'm fine that I go to Chipotle and there's a camera on the cash register. I'm fine that I then walk by the entrance to an electronics store and I'm on their cameras passing by. That's cool, if they want to put together the odd footage they have of me going there, I'm not really concerned about that. And that's the stuff that ended up helping catch the Boston suspects.
I'm not okay when one centralized location stores that data and my complete movements can be tracked. If a Gamestop employee got my address from a purchase and wanted to search my house, he'd have only the time I'm on camera to do it. If my whole trip is detailed, it could be done covertly quite easily.
Decentralizing the stores of this video information has its own merits and disadvantages but I think there is a very small group of people that are uneasy with being videotaped at a grocery store by the grocery store yet a large group of people (once they think about what their tax dollars are being spent on) that would be uneasy about a government system centralizing this and putting individuals in charge of it.
What worked here is that businesses realized they each had a piece of the puzzle to solve a heinous crime. This commissioner's claim that technology exists that would have prevented these attacks had it been a government controlled and centralized effort is largely horseshit and what benefits that pretends to provide are insignificant compared to the possible evils it could unleash.
By the way, if this topic interests you then you should be watching Germany closely.
My work here is dung.
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.
Maybe we should require background checks on people purchasing black duffel bags?
And nails. I hear nails were used in the bomb, so let's require a special permit for anyone purchasing more than 10 nails at a time...
YOU LEAVE ABBY OUT OF THIS!
Clearly the NYC PD pension account is heavily invested in GOOG.
when i was a kid there were calls for the federal government to fund 50,000 extra cops nationwide to help control crime. people wanted to see cops constantly patrolling their neighborhoods.
what's the difference between that and installing cameras? these days i actually want cops to crack down on dangerous drivers
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.
To clarify his point (yours is valid but you're not addressing his claims fully):
Could more cameras in New York City help prevent attacks like the one at the Boston Marathon? That's what Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says the NYPD is looking into.
The department already uses so-called smart cameras that hone in on unattended bags, and set off alarms.
Emphasis mine. I totally agree with you but the argument here is that they could prevent attacks. I find that argument specious and foolhardy in that a bomb could be disguised as anything and a suicide bomber (as these individuals clearly had no intention of surviving a police encounter) would simply continue to wear the explosive into the crowd. I think they need to reevaluate what little benefit it would provide against the massive issues and rights violations it could cause system-wide.
My work here is dung.
When this is the response to what amounts to 2 douche bag gang bangers who barely fit the term "terrorist" by a stretch of the imagination. Besides privacy is not an issue in "public" (it was covered by reams of civil legislation) government surveillance use to be.
Whatever, I don't leave my loft (f u basement dwellers) anyway.
If you want to install any kind of snooping devices of any sort in my private property, you can go frack yourself. If you want to install any kind of snooping devices in *public* property, though? Why not. It's public property, we already don't have any reason to expect privacy there, so... why *not* install cameras everywhere, as long as they don't get in the way of being able to do things? I'm all for police being able to catch criminals better.
Now, you might argue, yes, but then we wouldn't be able to break laws that we don't agree with, that right now we can break because nobody is watching us. And I would say, the proper course of action then is to try to get those laws eradicated or at least made to be universally ignored. We should be objecting to those laws themselves in such cases, *not* to better ability to enforce them as a byproduct of better ability to enforce other laws that we actually want to be better enforced (murder, rape, theft, etc.)
When they talk about "privacy" they mean the privacy of the people who are not the police and not the politicians. They still get all the privacy they want.
Because of, you know, "national security" and "terrorists".
That just may soften up Americans to the idea of the all-seeing glass eye.
How can a glass eye (blind by definition) be all-seeing? Don't mix metaphors if you don't know what they mean!
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Apart from the fact that it was all on TV, no crime of any real importance has happened. One harmless looking medical doctor in Britain killed fifty times more people without anyone noticing.
Or take this: "A self-styled street preacher who lured three men to their deaths through job adverts on the Craigslist website has been sentenced to death in Ohio." So do we need to crack down on street preachers and Craigslist? Nonsense.
If you compare killings by bombs during marathons, and killings by open-source file system developers, there isn't that much difference. So surely we need to close down open-source file system development as well?
It'd be like watching Cops 24/7 only without commercials.
The NYPD doesn't give a DAMN what installing cameras everywhere will do to people's privacy. NYPD has one mission and one mission alone: To protect the capitalist businesses in NYC from attack, most importantly of all Wall Street. You thought you could live in NYC with some anonimity in public places? Well, you simply thought wrong. NYPD will do anything to protect businesses in NYC. But protecting YOUR PRIVACY? That's simply not part of the NYPD's mission. NYPD exists to protect the big capitalist cahunas, and not YOU, the common man. If you live in NYC, expect thousands of new CCTV cameras to be installed in the next 6 - 12 months. And yes, all those cameras will be wired into a central NYPD command post, where realtime face recognition algorithms will allow Bloomberg & Friends to track your whereabouts in NYC 24/7. ---- Sorry to be so negative, but this is what NYPD's mission is - to protect large businesses in NYC from attack. Yes, you will loose your privacy because of this. And NO, nothing you do - protest, write letters, collect signatures, sue the city - will prevent those 2,000 - 5,000 new CCTV cameras from being installed. ----- So this is pretty much it for New York City. As if NYC wasn't a nasty, dirty, crowded, expensive place to live in before, the CCTV will make it EVEN WORSE than before. Good luck to New Yorkers. Once those CCTV cameras are in place, nothing will make the NYC bureaucrats take those cameras down again. ---- On some level it doesn't matter. New York has little to offer over other large cities in the world that are still - for the time being - relatively free.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas has killed and injured far more that those in Boston. But, the media pays Texas little mind, compared to their scrutiny and "in depth" coverage of Boston.
No one gives a second thought to Texas or fertilizer plants or any other industrial facility explosion. But 'ooh terrorists. Be afraid. Suspend the Constitution...'
It's really quite pathetic. Even more so that my more reasoned position is outnumbered and shouted down by masses saying things like; 'so, you support the terrorists?', 'are you nuts?', 'you're just being really stupid.'
"Its not much of a deterrent. Convenience stores have cameras, but it doesn't stop them from being robbed all the time."
How about an app that recognizes policemen and immediately begins recording what they do and send the data off-phone? It wouldn't matter if a few Salvation Army guys give false positives.
How are cameras in public places going to stop bombs? Sure it may help in catching criminals, but the damage has already been done. Maybe we should require background checks on people purchasing black duffel bags?
FTFA:
The NYPD is touting its use of the so-called smart cameras that have been used for nearly a decade in Lower Manhattan to identify potential threats such as unattended bags left for too long.
Whatever the argument is for not having people watching the police applies to not having the police watch me. There are are corrupt cops out there who might use their access to a CCTV network to do harm. Abuses of officers' access to such systems have happened in the past:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/cannibal-faces-life-guilty-conspiracy-kidnap-illegal-databases-article-1.1286075
I'm all for police being able to catch criminals better.
We already have an order of magnitude more prisoners than any country on this entire planet. Do you really want to worsen this situation?
the proper course of action then is to try to get those laws eradicated or at least made to be universally ignored
You are contradicting yourself. How can a law be universally ignored if the police are better able to catch criminals? That is the whole point here: we want to ensure that some laws are unenforceable, because those laws are unjust; therefore, we need to ensure that the power of the police to enforce the law is limited. Every time we broaden the power of the police, we broaden the scope of enforceable law.
Palm trees and 8
"Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms." - Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Yeah, Mayor. So lets beat them to the punch and take away those freedoms through draconian laws and big brother camera systems before the turrorists can! That'll teach em!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you really want freedom and privacy, you have to get away from places that house millions of douchebags.
Move to Montana, raise a crop of dental floss, etc.
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.
You know, I'm not sure I agree with that. It might sound nice on first thought, but it's really not. That would just greatly increase the number of people you'd have to worry about abusing the system. It's like saying "that wolf might eat me, but if we introduce another wolf then I don't have to worry anymore". Nope, now you have 2 wolves to worry about.
We need full camera coverage at all hazardous industrial sites. The fertizer plant that blew up in Texas had 270 tons of ammonium nitrate on hand, but were only authorized one ton. They acquired an unauthorized weapon of mass destruction which demolished most of the town. The owners should be punished accordingly.
Hazardous area cameras should be monitored by OSHA, Homeland Security, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, and Underwriters Laboratories. That would keep everyone honest.
We have to do something. Get people all worked up so they're not thinking clearly, then ram another law in their faces.
Welcome to politics!
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly can go to hell, too.
The public video taping police abusing their authority. For that you'll arrest citizens. While a no brainer that we can video tape police in public, it had to go to the Supreme Court yet again to be upheld yet again. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-supreme-court-rejects-plea-to-prohibit-taping-of-police-20121126,0,686331.story
Boston certainly used to be made of sterner stuff!
I dunno, this is the city that had to fight off a terrorist invasion of mooninites too.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Right. Because the obvious thing to do is attempt to strike while everyone is on full alert. Acting normal for a while - I hear they even attended school - and then doing your next hit when everyone's forgotten or at least got bored with the routine would be just dumb.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... but the public *MUST* have access to the tapes at ALL TIMES. I mean ALL TIMES. There shall be dire consequences when the public is excluded from having access to the events and occurances which go on in the public. There must be full accountability. There must be protection against data loss or other causes which may prevent the public from having instant access to the same information the government uses.
Sorry, but if it happens in public, there should be no "national security" interest blocking the public's access to the truth.
To do this any other way further adds to the caste system we have in place where government and business are above all others. This way, when the goverment has unidentified contractors walking around in uniform, there can be no denying or hiding of that fact. This type of thing needs to cut both ways -- you watch us, we watch you.
What say you government?
We must consider the facts. Since Sept. 11, 2001, SEVENTEEN Americans have been killed in domestic terrorist attacks, according to the Global Terrorism Database. If that's not reason enough to set up a nationwide network of surveillance cameras recording our every public act, I don't know what would be. We must protect the 0.0000056 percenters of our population from terrorism. http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?chart=country&casualties_type=f&casualties_max=&start_yearonly=1970&end_yearonly=2010&dtp2=all&country=217
Camera's exist in stores and banks, but they still get robbed. Cameras exist at intersections, but people still run red lights or make illegal turns. Surveillance is not about protection of the public and providing safe living for the masses. Its about investigation after the fact. Its about making the job of filling out reports and gaining convictions easier. While this is a worthy goal in and of itself, it is not the same as providing as safety of the public as folks like this person might wish to imply (or more than), and in and of itself is not worth trampling on everyone's privacy and freedoms every minute of the day, in my opinion.
Eastern Germany was also very good at and well known for crowd sourcing to search for criminal behaviour. They even caught criminals before they committed real crimes. They called it the Stasi : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Good luck with that, mister Kelly.
Privacy is terrorism.
I say a red hot poker engraved with the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th amendments be shoved up his ass.
I agree. Imagine someone stalking ex-girlfriends using omnipresent publicly-accessible cameras. Or planning a robbery with a partner monitoring cameras to tip him off when the police are responding. Maybe your workplace has someone checking cameras and asking why you went out to lunch after calling in sick. The correct response to Big Brother is not to give him more siblings.
Would you forward it? I mean the memo about only being able to commit one crime per lifetime. It seems I never recieved it.
How about a trade? I'll send you the one about where [not] to put commas, fucktard.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Take off all your clothes and leave them off for the rest of your life. Also: tear down your abode and build a glass house instead.
FOR IF YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG...
The fact that they had cameras didn't prevent the attack. So no, it's still not worth a camera on every street, it's not worth permanently disrupting our society. Crime prevention is done almost exclusively through the threat of punishment. The 30 billion spent on monitoring and security was thrown away when even the Russian authorities told us this guy was "bad". We're much better off as a society and a world if we work on ways to reduce the need for a false solution the all seeing eye is. People need a good ways to be apart of their communities so the outliers can be assessed for the actual (or inactual) threat they are before they go off the deep end. And beyond that it's the spice of life, the bitter that makes the sweet that much sweeter.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
I would really like to have access to the camera across the street from my house. I points up the road, and would be handy to be able to watch when I was expecting someone to come over.
I think if they set up cameras with open public access. and maybe even a way to report unusual activity to someone who could review the camera, and decide if a law enforcement official needed to be sent.
This is a system I could get behind.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
It was a way to get people to agree to more cameras... Right?
In any case, how will more CCTV cameras prevent bombings? The Tsarnaev brothers set off their bombs amidst one of the heaviest police/security presence, who were incidentally running a drill.
Neither surveillance cameras nor police presence will prevent terrorist bombinbs. They could potentially make it easier to catch the perpetrators AFTER a terrorist act has been committed.
Liberty? OFF THE TABLE!
Freedom? OFF THE TABLE!
Justice? OFF THE TABLE!
You are now safe from the threat we created for you.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Troll rating: 2/10. Must try harder to appear believable.
If you read between the lines, it seems likely they actually had other attacks planned in Boston, and decided on New York after the realizing the FBI was close to IDing them. Otherwise they would have skipped town long before those pictures were released. Your point obviously still stands, though.
2013-04-21
_KGO San Francisco CA_/_AP_
executives oppose privacy
Steven Harmon: San Jose CA Mercury News
If the police have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear!!!!
(Posting AC for the obvious reason)
Until they pass a law outlawing infra-red flood lights and the like, there are means of circumvention for those so inclined.
Personally, I think 1080p cameras are a good idea; not so sure about storage of the data generated, nor about how soon after recording the data should be accessible. There would need to be some level of accountability regarding data handling and retention; providing it carte blanche to the police and not allowing anyone else to have it would be bad; so would allowing everyone with an internet connection to mine the data (stalker's dream, and would allow for tracking police officers too).
And when i posted on an article here on slashdot about Boston being the start of a slippery slope that leads to a police state i was ridiculed. With all the new cameras they will now be able to spot anyone that is out and about when they lockdown cities. How awesome.
And of course, with police cameras on everyone, just hope that future such acts continue to be perpetrated by local amateurs who seem to have done virtually nothing to obscure their appearance, and even remarkably little to mask the planting of their payload.
I think the police should concentrate on their skills at apprehending fully identified criminals without requiring massive suburban shootouts (which they don't even win), and their finding-people-hiding-in-backyard-boat skills, before they get any more toys on the table.
As far as cameras looking at police officers. We need a lot more of that. Police routinely 'beat people up' and conduct illegal searches. They need to be put on a short leash.
Pick up that can.
Seriously, this country is fast turning into a giant open-air penitentiary where the gov and police are the wardens and guards and all the citizens are considered the same as inmates.
It's easy to understand now why the gov is so ravenously desperate for gun control and elimination of our 2nd Amendment RKBA. When that's gone, then they can finish eliminating the 1st, the 4th, the 5th, etc.
I used to think the right wing gun nuts were all paranoid delusional whacko's but more and more I begin to see that perhaps they may have been correct all along.
latin doesnt use punctuation neither do i in fact i dont use capitalization either
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
Camera's do not prevent crime. More camera's would not have stopped the Boston bombers. Imagine the bomb squad running over and dousing every bag and package that is set down along the route! Using camera's to drive crime out of one area and into another does not solve anything. Drug addiction, illiteracy, poverty and alienation are the forces that drive most crime. Those are the problems we should be addressing. If we want to reduce crime we have to alleviate need.
And you can't find a good doughnut unless you head for the Canadian border.
Is this really about PRIVACY? Or ANONYMITY?
If strangers have the right to "see" me with their eyes as I walk the street and walk in to a store, is it so different if that "seeing" is recorded? Is that REALLY a violation of "privacy" when one is in a public place? I don't see a huge difference nor do I see it as a 'privacy' violation.
I think what the "privacy" crowd wants is a right to "anonymity". And I'm not sure we have a right to "anonymity".
Except:
Cameras don't prevent crime, they just aid in identifying criminals.
No City/government cameras were used in the suspects apprehension.
Government cameras would require no warrant and would almost assuredly be used in ways we've never even dreamed of in just a few short years.
Well, we have all this handy surveillance tech now. Clearly we should use it to surveil where it would do the most good.
Congress.
Could the current gulf between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea be bridged through an exchange of officials?
I nominate Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to swap places with a DPRK counterpart. Kelly would certainly teach them a thing or two. Seeing Kelly visibly aroused while sharing his thoughts on invasive security, ideally while his hands move south, would leave Kim Jong-un feeling the two countries share some common ground.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Game over, we lost
Only one thing you can say to that: FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
As far as cameras looking at police officers. We need a lot more of that. Police routinely 'beat people up' and conduct illegal searches. They need to be put on a short leash.
You provided the per-capita murder rate. Can you also provide the per-capita for people beat up by police and for illegal searches?
Well that's the point isn't it. We can't collect data because police lack effective oversight. If there was an an agency whose job it was to only oversee the police, who could not arrest civilians, and who had access to cameras, microphones and general surveillance of the police - then we could get an idea what kind of stuff goes down.
You only have to look at the cases coming out of the Innocence project to see the incredible abuses by the criminal justice system.
... in their goal to destroy our society of freedom and privacy.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Seriously, I tire of people assuming that they should enjoy privacy while being in a public venue. I don't care about the plethora of cameras being installed in public areas, malls, streets, etc. The moment you step out your front door, you are no longer private, act accordingly.
Also this is not destroying "freedom". You are free to do whatever you want, within the confines of the law. Having a system that will catch you faster after breaking the law is not a slight to freedom. People have a right to be safe and secure, not a right to be able to commit crimes and get away with it.
The only people upset with cameras in public venues are criminals, period. Apparently a lot of them frequent Slashdot.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
By definition, what you do in public space is public. You have no expectation of privacy in a public place. What is it that we do in -- say Times Square -- that we wish to keep private? Besides adjusting our packages, picking our noses or cheating on our partners (which the police don't care about) we're buying drugs or sex, getting in a fight or blowing stuff up. If you want to do private things, do them on private property.
This isn't a big deal, because;
1) In public, there's no expectation of privacy.
2) As long as the common citizen is able to do the same with cell phones and record anyone abusing the law-enforcement authority at any time, all of this is perfectly fine.
Cameras in public spaces have been the greatest single advancment in community security ever. Adults get caught on video abducting kids in broad daylight and the wrongly accused have been on-the-spot exhonerated of trumped up charges because of cell phone and building security cameras. They can't install enough of these, every building in America should have 50 cameras sticking out of it. It's when they put them in PRIVATE spaces that we have a problem.
So why are you proposing to put it in the OP's home?
I didn't say that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Primus promulgatione!
First post!
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.
This is a latin maxim which Wikipedia renders that as "I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery"
Another rendering might be "I'd choose dangerous liberty over peaceful servitude."
Quiescite. Non vult ad comment in quibusdam legitur stultus senex valde, verborum usus, nemo amplius. Recentiores linguae experiri scribere volutpat.
This is this guy's own latin. It is loosely translated "Shut up. I want to comment to people who read a very stupid, old language used by no one anyway. Newer languages have people who actually write in them."
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
A knee-jerk response from the people who have been readily expanding their surveillance / power base since 9/11...so, business as usual.
The fact of the matter is that no amount of additional surveillance is going to prevent 'terrorism'...nor would it have helped with the Boston Bombings...not without turning the US into a country that no one would want to live in, and people would be desperate to leave. There are hundreds / thousands / millions of people milling around cities every day with suspicious looking packages / bags, and no magical apparatus will tell you that there is a dangerous device within (don't ask).
I am John Hurt.
NYC Tourism is off the table after NYC Police Comm'r's "Privacy Is 'Off the Table'" comment. I may go as far as to stop doing business with NYC based companies. Where will I buy my salsa now?
... the more I think it might be lawful to kill you.
It's that simple.
Now, I don't think one has any expectation of privacy in open, public, places, but how long before this notion extends to blanket violations of the fourth amendment to be secure in one's person and papers (and homes)?
I further am not advising killing anyone, but merely considering the lawfulness of killing those who, particularly entrusted to uphold the Constitution, chose to blatently violate it. Personally, I'd rather they stand trial for treason, knowing full well that at some point that may become utterly impractical, leaving violence as a last resort. That would be a sad day.
In Liberty, Rene
After an attack on our freedoms and liberties, we have basically did away with any freedoms and liberties? Who's the real loser here?
I'm pretty sure the idea here is that if you wouldn't trust the general populace with this sort of power, then you REALLY shouldn't trust people in a position of authority with said power.
One of the nice things about living in a democracy is that when problems are easily seen, the masses tend to actually give a shit and apply the correct political pressure on the people they elect. If the panopticon was publicly available, the abuse would be transparent rather than hidden away.
They have this sort of thing of personally run web-cameras pointed at the drawbridges in my town. The wife checks it as she commutes so she knows which route to take.
Just remember all those who claim that right-wing gun owners are the ones trying to shred the constitution and take away all civil liberties and that only by electing left-wing, pro-union pols are we going to be safe.
Big city police commissioners (in the States) are always left-wing political appointees. Every one of them wants to shred the 2nd Amendment and the left always backs them up. And then they keep their silence when they start going after all the others as well.
His death is being treated as a suicide.
The marathon was on the 15th, and he was last seen on the 16th. So unless someone saw his ghost, it is, in fact, unreasonable to suspect that he was dead before the bombings. He did, however, disappear shortly before he was accused, so it isn't clear whether his actual death was in response to the accusation or not.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Cameras are a great help. If you care about catching the perpetrator after the fact. Install cameras all over the place! While you're there. You'll need to recruit people monitor them, then you better make sure you have the "right" people to manage the IT systems. Then you better make sure those people are not corupt, so employ people to monitor the people watching the people. Hey, I've got an idea, just something I dreamt up, off the cuff. Anyone thought about how we build a community/society where this doesn't happen or is prevented in the first place, or the people can look after themselves, you know defend their stuff? Naaahhh, too hard. There's not enough good people to do anything about the evil. What was that line about "Evil will get away with it as long as good people do nothing"? HHHmm must have missunderstood.
Americans have none. How many people are killed with firearms by criminals or the mentally ill in this country?
How many are killed by Islamic terrorists?
A rounding error basically. Yet it is enough to to terrify people into giving up the building blocks of liberty.
The risk of getting blown up is an acceptable price for not living in an Orwellian world.
Require live streamed and recorded video of all police activity. In cars, out of the cars, on the beat, at the station, in the locker room and on the outside of police private residences.
Let's speculate what that outcome would be :-)
Crappy pin on the map, that's the old airstrip for the sawmill owners light plane! The town is a few miles south of the pin where the road forks. It's been a ghost town since the sawmill leases ran out in the 80's and the area was turned into a series of national parks, cost me a job but even back I thought it was the "right thing to do". It was old growth forest, already fairly well regulated on our side of the state border. Seeing a single tree ( Mountain Ash) arrive as two main logs each log weighing about 35 tones and taking up an entire truck is an awesome sight, the machinery to break it down into timber has a gracefulness in its movements that you wouldn't expect in something that can throw a 35 ton block of wood around like a toothpick, but like an arbitrator the whole process was just a bit sad.
Some mills were less sympathetic and they seemed to coincide with mills where the pay was ordinary and company housing conditions were fit for young single men only. Some of these people got violent, staging night raids on the camps of protesters who more often than not chained themselves to the biggest trees they could find. However this was often comical since the biggest trees were usually in gulleys too steep for a bulldozer and too close to a waterway to be legally harvested, all the old growth trees harvested on the south side of the state border were individually selected and tracked through the mills by government forestry workers. The protesters were idealistic and naive but they had a valid point. Look on the map link to the north across the border, that huge bald patch that stretches from Delegate to Cooma is what a mismanaged forest looks like, parts of that patch are still infertile wasteland 30yrs later, the top soil has been washed away leaving gigantic grey tree stumps perched 2 meters in the air on their roots, land fit for goats and not much else. Most of the north forest was sold to Japan to make office paper, it was an economic "boom" to the region while it lasted but left a giant scar on public land that will be seen from space for a long time to come.
NSW seems to have become a bit wiser, these days they basically lease parcels of land from farmers and employ locals to plant natural woodland on it in the hope that one day their timber industry might be resurrected in a more sustainable form.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My bad. I have the wrong month. The bombing was April 15.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
wow, I never thought I'd see the day. never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that the police want more power than they have, now.
(snark-mode=off)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
No.
And Ray Kelly can kiss my ass.
Because when CODE NIGHTMARE GREEN kicks off, if those cameras aren't loaded with SCORPION STARE, we've had it...
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
And there it is folks! Works every time.
if you want privacy, you shouldn't be on the table in the first place. hey, we gotta eat on that table.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
If its nice to put cameras on my house, it's nice to them in your house.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll posit that Private Property is the difference...
The government has no authority to monitor my activities without warrant on sworn testimony of probably cause... any more than they have the authority to go through my personal posessions, writings, etc...
As a property owner, I have the right to do pretty much anything I desire... limit access, monitor activities, and record audio/video as I please
Even IF the government somehow defies that difference, I would object to any survelience system that wasn't completely open to the public with each and every feed... ESPECIALLY those in public places like courthouses, police stations, and other government buildings... avilable 24/7 to US Citizens...
After all with several million watching their favorite feed the likelyhood of a crime committed by ANYONE, whether a citizen, law enforcement type, or politician, going unwitnessed would be very small!!!
these are the same police who claim that it is illegal for a citizen to make a private video recording of police doing their public job in a public place?
NHA