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Scotland Yard Chief: Put CCTV In Every Home To Help Solve Crimes
schwit1 writes Homeowners should consider fitting CCTV to trap burglars, the country's most senior police officer declared yesterday. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said police forces needed more crime scene footage to match against their 12 million images of suspects and offenders. And he called on families and businesses to install cameras at eye level – to exploit advances in facial recognition technology.
I'm certain he'll lead the way and will soon post details of the system he installed in his own home and other relatives.
You want Kafka, not Orwell.
The problem with what he's suggesting isn't the cameras; it's the development of the biometric database based on any kind of casual contact with the police. The reason that's a problem is that we really don't know how unique our biometric id is.
Take fingerprints. Folk science claims that everyone's fingerprint is unique; in fact we use the word "fingerprint" for cryptographic hashes of data which are vanishingly unlikely to be duplicated. And using traditional police methods, we can for practical purposes act as if they are. But if you start amassing a vast collection of fingerprints of people you have nothing particular in common (as we did after 9/11), it turns out that some people do in fact share fingerprints with identical characteristics. In the 2004 Madrid bombings, an attorney named Brandon Mayfield was identified as a suspect because his fingerprint was a close match one found a bag of detonators at the crime scene. That, and the fact that he was a Muslim convert, was enough for the FBI to be confident enough to arrest him, and leak his name and the potential charges against him to the media. It turns out that one of Mayfield's fingerprints was nearly identical to that of a known terrorist Algerian. The ability to match some biometric to a sufficiently large database greatly increases the probability of a false positive match.
In the ordinary course of investigation there's a kind of implicit Bayesian process which gives us greater confidence in a fingerprint match than a fingerprint dragnet of everyone in the world would. We check the fingerprint of suspects who we have other reasons to think are involved in a crime, or who have in the past been arrested and convicted of a crime. This narrows down the pool of potential matchees from "everyone in the world" to "people who we have some shred of reason to think might be involved", and that's a much smaller pool.
So what are the chances that there are people walking around out there with the same facial recognition biometric id as you? Very likely higher than casual testing would suggest. And what if the system tags you as a match? Does that prejudice the rest of your chances with the justice system?
It's even possible that there are people out there who look enough like you to fool a family member. My brother once saw a man in a Philly restaurant who was a dead ringer for our father, who'd died surrounded by his family ten years earlier. It was creepy.
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Two issues.
Firstly, this scheme will only if the police are allowed to maintain their extensive facial recognition database that includes millions of innocent people. There has been some outrage over this database, that they were told to shut down, and which is unregulated. They are trying to generate some good PR for it by pointing out that people can benefit from it.
Secondly, the police will abuse your cameras if they possibly can. If your neighbour gets robbed expect the police to demand footage from your cameras, just in case it is helpful. You might not mind the first few times, but it will get boring quickly. Worse, you will realise that they are trying to continue the build out of their extensive CCTV network, which has been resisted by the public and even politicians. Unable to install more cameras of their own, partly due to budget cuts, they do everything to get others to do their dirty work for them. For example, when granting licences to sell alcohol there is almost always a condition that the shop installs extensive CCTV monitoring of the street outside it, with views up and down the road. I know, I installed some of it.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"That said, it's a short term fix. As burglars become more aware of the presence of cameras, they'll start wearing a mask just like folk robbing stores and banks where CCTV is expected already do."
In my area cameras are everywhere. Placing the camera is just as important as the camera you buy. Many try and think they out witted the camera just to find out they didn't and went to jail anyways. In my area alone which is a diverse neighborhood price wise etc, we have had many burglaries solved, and a home invasion because of a camera carefully placed.
"encourage an opportunistic thief to go next door if they can see cameras outside your house, but equally you might just be advertising that you have stuff worth stealing."
Not true ! Don't underestimate the stupidity of a thief. Advertise cameras regardless if you have them or not. Advertise live feed online also. It makes no difference around here. Born stupid is always stupid.
They showed footage of a burglar looking for a ADT system pad, and what the guy should of been doing is looking for the cameras. Another came to the front door in all their glory and knocked 30 minutes before a home invasion with his buddy's. After spraying two cameras out front which were wired he never thought there may be a camera or two that was not wired.
So here's my story. My next-door neighbor is in prison, and is renting his house out to ex-con buddies so he can pay the property tax. This is not good for the neighborhood. Anyway, last year our house got robbed. Lost a Macbook and a bunch of other pawnable electronics. In response, I bought a couple of wireless webcams, and set them up to detect motion and stream images to a fileserver which was hidden way in the back of the TV cabinet. Behind the old Gamecube, I figured nobody's gonna dig that deep.
Six months later, my house got broken into again. TV was stolen, an iPad, and the downstairs security camera. The thief stole the camera, but he didn't find the fileserver, which had some entertaining shots of him poking around the living room, spotting the camera, and rushing to unplug it. I printed off the frame that showed his face most clearly and gave it to the cops. The next day, the "Find My iPad" feature activated, pinpointing the iPad in my neighbor's house. I called the cops, they didn't really understand the tech and showed up three hours later and didn't find anything. But they did pass the security cam picture around the station, one of them recognized the guy (low-tech facial recognition), they hauled him in, and he had the iPad on him. He confessed to robbing our house twice, plus a half-dozen other houses around town. And he told the cops about the upstairs window high above the back stairs that we didn't notice was unlocked.
So to those of you who say that in-home surveillance won't work because criminals are too stupid to show their faces, you're underestimating just how stupid criminals can be when heroin withdrawal is making their decisions for them. And to those of you who say that this is one step from Big Brother, the big difference is that it's *my* security camera, I can choose what to show the cops. And yes, I erase the images periodically just in case someone seizes or steals the file server.
I installed an IP Webcam in my mothers family home which is in the remote Scottish Hebrides.
A local "entrepreneur" with "links" had been damaging boundary walls to try and get a through road to land he wanted to develop on.
I set the camera up, inside the house looking out over our property, for security and as a deterrent.
We had the police come round and demand that it be removed.
We refused and luckily their timing was unfortunate for them as my uncle was present in the house when they turned up.
He happened to be a court judge who, after identifying his profession, ended their demands with "Officer, I don't think so...".
Some time later someone, in the night, painted the window in front of the camera.
We also had a council notice served on us for re-errecting our wall.
Apparently we needed planning to repair it even though the wall had been there for a few hundred years.
That too got chucked out of court.
I've seen and experienced too much of corruption at government level to trust a single thing that comes out that claims to be in our interests.
Orwell was right and, sadly, will be proven so.
"I've got nothing to hide" is sticking your head in the sand.
"Security" is only being used to subvert us for the benefit of the hierarchy.
At least, a significant number appear so.
Most petty criminals are idiots. They commit high-stakes crimes for petty rewards.
As for the AC, I'm not saying that the camera can't be defeated. I'm saying that it adds 'expenses', IE makes committing a successful burglary more difficult/less rewarding. You have to remember to bring the masks. You have to make sure they fit. Rubber masks tend to be hot, restrict vision, and collect sweat. A T-shirt over the head may not defeat modern facial recognition. Covering your license plates is a cop magnet during the crime. Wearing cheap obvious masks tends to attract attention, while an expensive good one that looks like a real person other than you, at least at moderate distances, tends to be expensive enough that you don't want to dispose of it after 'every' job. Matter of fact, if you wear a mask enough, I'm sure they can pull DNA evidence off it today.
Currently burglars count on either not being caught on camera, or there being so many petty criminals that the police can't match their face with the camera footage.
I don't read AC A human right