OK, whatever gets you through the night. That is, unless the cops come and get you before you wake! ooh scary cops!
Seriously, cameras are not there solely to allow police to not do any work. They're there to gather evidence. It's that simple. If you have a problem with a police officer, then there are avenues to take to get it fixed. Saying cameras are bad because they can be misused is like saying the cops shouldn't have cars because they can be misused, or anything for that matter. Or even to have police in the first place.
And unless you lean into someone by cocking your fist back ready to deliver a knuckle-sandwich, her day in court will end very badly for her, and very well for you.
I think you'll find being an accessory to a crime has already been a crime for quite a while... If you know someone is a criminal, and you don't report them, you are an accessory, be it before or after the fact.
If the police are fair, there really is nothing wrong with it. You seem to be resigned to having to put up with a bad police force. It doesn't have to be that way, and in comparison to the rest of the world, the UK's police seem to be doing a fantastic job of being the best a police force can be.
You are not in the position to determine what's safe and what isn't. That's part of the conditions for driving on the road. You NEVER have the right to determine that it's ok to speed. I'm all in favour of the idea of speeders getting caught speeding no matter where they are, as it's fucking DANGEROUS. You only have to be wrong once, and it's not just you who's paid the price for your self-inflated sense of perception, but whoever else was in whatever you hit, or even the folks who have to scrape you off the road, or the firemen who might get hurt having to put out the flames on your car. Speeding is selfish behaviour. Don't like the speed limits? Then lobby to have them changed. Taking the law into your own hands is irresponsible and idiotic. The reason there are so many speed cameras is that the 8% of road accidents that ARE due to excessive speed were 100% completely avoidable if the driver wasn't speeding.
The constitution of the UK is about protecting people and ensuring they have safe and happy lives. CCTV is a great way to at least help, simply considering the evidence-gathering ability it offers. From your ridiculously selfish logic, I can see why you don't like that, and quite frankly I'm glad you're not in the UK any more. At least now the roads are a bit safer.
Apart from the misquotation, you clearly missed the point you yourself made. If this is the end effect, then fix why the authorities try to trample on the people, as opposed to attacking technology that has a genuine use. If we took the "ooh it can be abused so let's get rid of it", then there would be no police force at all, as they could become corrupt. The alarm bells ringing are ringing because the people (in your argument, Americans) put up with shitty governments, not because technology like this exists.
It is what us brits desire. We don't have the same feelings towards our police officers as many Americans do, and our officers don't have the same feelings towards the general population as many American cops do, so we're generally more trusting when it comes to police powers and their associated technology. Looking at this from an American (or indeed any other country's) perspective is pretty silly. Our officers truly are public servants, there for the public good. They actively don't want to carry guns so that distinction isn't smudged.
Democracy is actually two wolves and a lamb who can use their intelligence to realise that everyone deserves a chance to live, lamb or wolf, in a way that isn't negatively affected by the actions of others. Throwing guns into the mix just fucks it up, especially when the lamb gets paranoid he's going to be eaten, and shoots an innocent wolf.
Try thinking for yourself, and not just finding shitty, poorly-conceived quotes that sound about right. We are not wolves and sheep. We are intelligent people who can reach a consensus on what it takes to have a functioning society, and many of us have realised that an armed populace doesn't achieve squat, especially as we have armies that will either be on the side of the people or on the side of the government, and whether people are armed or not doesn't mean shit against thousands of main battle tanks and apache helicopters. Being armed just makes you *think* you can change things should they get too bad, when in fact you're already fucked should the army not be on your side.
A watched society isn't a safe society (no-one says it is), but couple the surveillance with efficient policing, and it sure as hell is a safer society. Any method of giving evidence against alleged criminals clearly makes society safer, as those criminals will not be free to commit offenses again when they're incarcerated.
They do make you safer. Pick-pockets are regularly caught by CCTV evidence, which means they are in prison and not able to pick-pocket you. They also allow people to recognise known criminals who have been banned from using the underground, and keep them out, also making you safer. The same goes for violent people, drunk people, and anything where someone does something illegal to someone else.
They can't catch that first offense, but they sure as hell can do a lot to stop that second one. It's the most basic of logic.
Really? We didn't have binoculars or telescopes back then? No idea of a disguise or of covert surveillance? That people back in the bad old days had signs on saying "MR SMITH I AM ACTIVELY OBSERVING YOU. YES YOU. THE GUY IN THE SUIT. I'M A COP. WATCHING YOU. RIGHT NOW. SO ARE THESE OTHER 15 OFFICERS AROUND YOU"? Please. Cops have been watching people under-cover for ages and ages. Instead of being scared of effective policing, why not make sure the cops are unable to act outside the law without punishment, with any and all charges they bring being dismissed from court? Oh, we do that already.
The tits are covered by someone's property, which is their right to control whether they are covering the tits in question or otherwise, but nice point:)
The cameras can follow someone they don't know is a bad guy, doing something they don't know. There was the case of the nail-bomber in London in the late 1990s. They didn't know what he looked like, where he was going, or indeed anything other than he/she was a person in London. They had a description of one of the bombs, and looked for a person with a similar bag in the area, and then saw if that person showed up again without the bag. They found the person, and they were arrested. As for the London Bombers, yup - of course the cameras aren't omniscient, but they identified the bombers, which allowed the investigation to even start. Without any identification of the people in question, where they came from, what they were doing, how they were doing it, etc. would all be a mystery. CCTV is just one part of effective policing, just as police cars and helmets are. On its own it's pretty limited, but couple it with the rest of the police toolkit, and it suddenly becomes far more useful. Synergy, if you will.
As for the fear of tracking political opponents or any other abuse of CCTV power, why throw the baby out with the bath-water and ban something as useful as CCTV over fears it'll be misused, instead of making sure there are legal protections in place to stop such powers being abused? We've done it with entering people's houses (which is clearly a FAR more dangerous prospect than simply videoing someone in public, as that takes place in someone's PRIVATE home), arresting people, confiscation of private property, police violence, and searches in cars and of persons in the street, etc. They all continue, but we do everything we can to make sure they're done legally and in a way no-one would find offensive, as to simply ban them because they *could* be mis-used is clearly illogical and doomed to prevent law-enforcement from working.
It just seems like a very knee-jerk, superficial argument. CAMERAS! OH NO! IT'S 1984! yawn, seriously.
That's why we have the data protection act. You are legally allowed to request copies of any and all footage taken of you. As for who runs them, well in London (outside the square mile) it's the local authority (unless it's on private property, or the tube, in which case it's the owner of the property). In the square mile it's the City of London Police. And as for the quality of the footage, well it's getting better and better, and is regularly of suitable quality to gain a conviction on its own merits, obviously with someone pressing charges. Most of the newer equipment is broadcast-quality.
Do you find the number of cops on the street alarming and unsettling? If so maybe you should do some research into what they're up to, the laws they enforce, their powers and their motives. Allowing yourself to be freaked out, then refusing to actually get to the bottom of it, is quite frankly stupid.
Do you demand to see ID of anyone who looks at you in the street? Does the mere presence of other people on the street make you feel paranoid? If not, then you're scared of something other than being observed. You have no right to privacy in public (that's why there's a "private" and a "public").
It's about control of people fucking with other people. It's that simple. The millions of cameras aren't a big deal - they're not in your home, they're not watching you take a shit, or commenting on your sex life. The cameras do help a great deal - even these much-maligned talking cameras help. I saw a show on TV where some guys were beating the shit out of some guy, and the camera operator spoke to them telling them they're on CCTV, that the cops have been called, that their descriptions have been taken, that footage has been made available to cops on the ground, and that they can try to run away, but they'll be followed through the city on CCTV until the cops feel their collars. Fair enough, they ran away, and the operator just switched cameras, saying "I'm still here... the cops are still after you...". The cops turned up, did an instant identity parade on the street (having the guys stand near a camera while the operator confirmed they were the ones involved in the fight. The footage was provided as evidence in court. I don't know how people can have a problem with that. If someone was beating me up, I'd like the attackers to be caught. I saw another example where one guy was mis-identified from the description given to the cops by the victim (again, of a street brawl) - the CCTV operator quickly informed the cops they had the wrong guy, and to keep looking. Without CCTV, that very well could have ended the search for the attacker, and caused an innocent person to spend a night in jail. It makes the cops more effective, and as long as we know they're enforcing laws people want them to enforce, that can't be a bad thing.
The cops are required, by law, to do what they can to catch the bad guys. If we are all harbouring paranoid delusions about what the police could get up to if they were evil, then the cops wouldn't be allowed cop cars, radios, batons, the power of arrest, police stations, clothes, anything. If we're worried about the laws being changed or interpreted in such a way as to hurt normal, moral, law-abiding folks, then we should concentrate our efforts on preventing that, not having some knee-jerk reaction to technology that's effectively used in ways we like "just in case". It's such a fucking lazy attitude to take with something so important as the safety of the people.
You can't control society by having society watch itself. You control it by enforcing the law, so control the law, and you control the people. The tools used to enforce the law are completely, 100% benign.
Yes! You're so right! The police should stop using radios and police cars immediately, just for starters! Think of the children! Etc., etc.
If you're scared the cops might be corrupt and use this technology against the people, then you should be scared of the cops and not the technology. Asking the police to be less efficient is simply stupid. And these technologies DO help the cops immensely. Getting eye-witness accounts of fights and vandalism on the streets is massively useful, as is being able to follow offenders around until cops show up to arrest them. Instant identity parades performed on the street also saves a lot of money and heart-ache for the wrongly-accused (or simply those in the wrong place at the wrong time). As is having evidence on film to be shown to a court of law. As is being able to find stolen cars within minutes of them being stolen. As does being able to identify criminals at large (such as that bomber in London in the late 90s who was identified from CCTV footage). It boggles my mind to think why people have such a knee-jerk reaction to this. We never had a right to privacy in public, and as long as the cameras stay out of our homes, this bullshit 1984 cliche is grossly inaccurate, and nothing more than emotional blackmail. The cops have a legal mandate to do whatever they can to uphold the law and to make society safer. In the UK the public DOES tell the cops what to do. There are bodies like the IPCC who regularly tell the cops they fuck up and need to change their policies, not to mention the fact the home secretary is an elected member of parliament, and the scores of advisory groups regularly breathing down the necks of the cops.
It's not a tax but a license. The money goes to the Licensing authority, which then passes it on to a company which then spends it to make more programming. It has nothing to do with copyright.
You *do* realise those are the bits of the drivers that interface with the hardware? The same bits that cost millions of dollars to produce, due to the sheer amount of raw performance needed to be squeezed out of them. I doubt the open-source community, regardless how talented (and I know there's some insane talent out there) could replicate those in a timely fashion. Remember - they're playing catch-up with AMD. AMD will keep bringing out new cards, and these guys will have to keep re-engineering these bits of missing code. It's not going to result in open-source drivers comparable to their closed-source counterparts.
I'm not being rude, but is the answer anything like the answer to "do you have any kind of idea just how much oil there is"? I mean, ants COULD destroy all the buildings in Manhattan if the buildings weren't repaired and the ants had long enough.
If it's even possible to open-source them. If there's proprietary licensed technology in them, it might be a non-starter. Not all closed-source is so because of ideology...
You can turn the LEDs off on those dells, btw (as well as changing their colours should you want). And the dells can come with better specs than the macs, so it'd be a trade-off on performance as well.
I was using AC as an example, as whole swathes of the south-western US wouldn't be able to survive without their AC, and indeed water supply. I was referring to us no longer being hunter-gatherers, that we've lost most (all?) of those skills, and replaced them with other skills more useful, as they work with the technology we've got. If we didn't, we'd just be like chimps with PCs. Still doing our ages-old thing, but with new technology. It's only when the technology matches the skills of the user that it gets useful.
Just as most of us can't survive without AC and a supermarket round the corner. Don't labour under the misconception that we're somehow self-sufficient at the moment and have lost none of our previous skills - it's called progress. We, as a species, will always be losing some skills and gaining new ones. Imagine the skills we can learn when we don't have to rely on flaky memories. Dropping standards in handwriting is a good example - it drops because we simply don't need it any more. It's a good thing:)
Because they prey on those in great, great need. That's disgusting. If you've ever been so low that you'll take anyone's help just to get through another day, you'd understand how appealing ANY help can be. Also, they keep the aliens stuff completely off the record until years in. The first stuff Scientologists encounter is basic therapy (stolen from actual psychiatry), and some basic communication skills (which are simply common sense to most people, but help those who don't know it already). It appears benign at worst and helpful at best, so why shouldn't they feel like continuing? Not everyone knows of "the incident", so there are no warning signs.
It's more of an issue of what they allege they are reporting and what they actually are reporting. The problem arises when people watch it, thinking they're getting an objective view of the military's activities, when in fact there's a massive conflict of interest that will in no doubt shape their output, thereby not being objective. That's how propaganda works - it's not labelled as such, as commercials sometimes are, but labelled as actual truth. It's the misrepresentation that's the issue, not the creator or the content.
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OK, whatever gets you through the night. That is, unless the cops come and get you before you wake! ooh scary cops!
Seriously, cameras are not there solely to allow police to not do any work. They're there to gather evidence. It's that simple. If you have a problem with a police officer, then there are avenues to take to get it fixed. Saying cameras are bad because they can be misused is like saying the cops shouldn't have cars because they can be misused, or anything for that matter. Or even to have police in the first place.
And unless you lean into someone by cocking your fist back ready to deliver a knuckle-sandwich, her day in court will end very badly for her, and very well for you.
I think you'll find being an accessory to a crime has already been a crime for quite a while... If you know someone is a criminal, and you don't report them, you are an accessory, be it before or after the fact.
If the police are fair, there really is nothing wrong with it. You seem to be resigned to having to put up with a bad police force. It doesn't have to be that way, and in comparison to the rest of the world, the UK's police seem to be doing a fantastic job of being the best a police force can be.
You are not in the position to determine what's safe and what isn't. That's part of the conditions for driving on the road. You NEVER have the right to determine that it's ok to speed. I'm all in favour of the idea of speeders getting caught speeding no matter where they are, as it's fucking DANGEROUS. You only have to be wrong once, and it's not just you who's paid the price for your self-inflated sense of perception, but whoever else was in whatever you hit, or even the folks who have to scrape you off the road, or the firemen who might get hurt having to put out the flames on your car. Speeding is selfish behaviour. Don't like the speed limits? Then lobby to have them changed. Taking the law into your own hands is irresponsible and idiotic. The reason there are so many speed cameras is that the 8% of road accidents that ARE due to excessive speed were 100% completely avoidable if the driver wasn't speeding.
The constitution of the UK is about protecting people and ensuring they have safe and happy lives. CCTV is a great way to at least help, simply considering the evidence-gathering ability it offers. From your ridiculously selfish logic, I can see why you don't like that, and quite frankly I'm glad you're not in the UK any more. At least now the roads are a bit safer.
Apart from the misquotation, you clearly missed the point you yourself made. If this is the end effect, then fix why the authorities try to trample on the people, as opposed to attacking technology that has a genuine use. If we took the "ooh it can be abused so let's get rid of it", then there would be no police force at all, as they could become corrupt. The alarm bells ringing are ringing because the people (in your argument, Americans) put up with shitty governments, not because technology like this exists.
It is what us brits desire. We don't have the same feelings towards our police officers as many Americans do, and our officers don't have the same feelings towards the general population as many American cops do, so we're generally more trusting when it comes to police powers and their associated technology. Looking at this from an American (or indeed any other country's) perspective is pretty silly. Our officers truly are public servants, there for the public good. They actively don't want to carry guns so that distinction isn't smudged.
You should read what a police state is, then you'll realise just how naive your post sounds...
Democracy is actually two wolves and a lamb who can use their intelligence to realise that everyone deserves a chance to live, lamb or wolf, in a way that isn't negatively affected by the actions of others. Throwing guns into the mix just fucks it up, especially when the lamb gets paranoid he's going to be eaten, and shoots an innocent wolf.
Try thinking for yourself, and not just finding shitty, poorly-conceived quotes that sound about right. We are not wolves and sheep. We are intelligent people who can reach a consensus on what it takes to have a functioning society, and many of us have realised that an armed populace doesn't achieve squat, especially as we have armies that will either be on the side of the people or on the side of the government, and whether people are armed or not doesn't mean shit against thousands of main battle tanks and apache helicopters. Being armed just makes you *think* you can change things should they get too bad, when in fact you're already fucked should the army not be on your side.
A watched society isn't a safe society (no-one says it is), but couple the surveillance with efficient policing, and it sure as hell is a safer society. Any method of giving evidence against alleged criminals clearly makes society safer, as those criminals will not be free to commit offenses again when they're incarcerated.
They do make you safer. Pick-pockets are regularly caught by CCTV evidence, which means they are in prison and not able to pick-pocket you. They also allow people to recognise known criminals who have been banned from using the underground, and keep them out, also making you safer. The same goes for violent people, drunk people, and anything where someone does something illegal to someone else.
They can't catch that first offense, but they sure as hell can do a lot to stop that second one. It's the most basic of logic.
Score: +5, Amnesiac
Really? We didn't have binoculars or telescopes back then? No idea of a disguise or of covert surveillance? That people back in the bad old days had signs on saying "MR SMITH I AM ACTIVELY OBSERVING YOU. YES YOU. THE GUY IN THE SUIT. I'M A COP. WATCHING YOU. RIGHT NOW. SO ARE THESE OTHER 15 OFFICERS AROUND YOU"? Please. Cops have been watching people under-cover for ages and ages. Instead of being scared of effective policing, why not make sure the cops are unable to act outside the law without punishment, with any and all charges they bring being dismissed from court? Oh, we do that already.
The tits are covered by someone's property, which is their right to control whether they are covering the tits in question or otherwise, but nice point :)
The cameras can follow someone they don't know is a bad guy, doing something they don't know. There was the case of the nail-bomber in London in the late 1990s. They didn't know what he looked like, where he was going, or indeed anything other than he/she was a person in London. They had a description of one of the bombs, and looked for a person with a similar bag in the area, and then saw if that person showed up again without the bag. They found the person, and they were arrested. As for the London Bombers, yup - of course the cameras aren't omniscient, but they identified the bombers, which allowed the investigation to even start. Without any identification of the people in question, where they came from, what they were doing, how they were doing it, etc. would all be a mystery. CCTV is just one part of effective policing, just as police cars and helmets are. On its own it's pretty limited, but couple it with the rest of the police toolkit, and it suddenly becomes far more useful. Synergy, if you will.
As for the fear of tracking political opponents or any other abuse of CCTV power, why throw the baby out with the bath-water and ban something as useful as CCTV over fears it'll be misused, instead of making sure there are legal protections in place to stop such powers being abused? We've done it with entering people's houses (which is clearly a FAR more dangerous prospect than simply videoing someone in public, as that takes place in someone's PRIVATE home), arresting people, confiscation of private property, police violence, and searches in cars and of persons in the street, etc. They all continue, but we do everything we can to make sure they're done legally and in a way no-one would find offensive, as to simply ban them because they *could* be mis-used is clearly illogical and doomed to prevent law-enforcement from working.
It just seems like a very knee-jerk, superficial argument. CAMERAS! OH NO! IT'S 1984! yawn, seriously.
That's why we have the data protection act. You are legally allowed to request copies of any and all footage taken of you. As for who runs them, well in London (outside the square mile) it's the local authority (unless it's on private property, or the tube, in which case it's the owner of the property). In the square mile it's the City of London Police. And as for the quality of the footage, well it's getting better and better, and is regularly of suitable quality to gain a conviction on its own merits, obviously with someone pressing charges. Most of the newer equipment is broadcast-quality.
Do you find the number of cops on the street alarming and unsettling? If so maybe you should do some research into what they're up to, the laws they enforce, their powers and their motives. Allowing yourself to be freaked out, then refusing to actually get to the bottom of it, is quite frankly stupid.
Do you demand to see ID of anyone who looks at you in the street? Does the mere presence of other people on the street make you feel paranoid? If not, then you're scared of something other than being observed. You have no right to privacy in public (that's why there's a "private" and a "public").
It's about control of people fucking with other people. It's that simple. The millions of cameras aren't a big deal - they're not in your home, they're not watching you take a shit, or commenting on your sex life. The cameras do help a great deal - even these much-maligned talking cameras help. I saw a show on TV where some guys were beating the shit out of some guy, and the camera operator spoke to them telling them they're on CCTV, that the cops have been called, that their descriptions have been taken, that footage has been made available to cops on the ground, and that they can try to run away, but they'll be followed through the city on CCTV until the cops feel their collars. Fair enough, they ran away, and the operator just switched cameras, saying "I'm still here... the cops are still after you...". The cops turned up, did an instant identity parade on the street (having the guys stand near a camera while the operator confirmed they were the ones involved in the fight. The footage was provided as evidence in court. I don't know how people can have a problem with that. If someone was beating me up, I'd like the attackers to be caught. I saw another example where one guy was mis-identified from the description given to the cops by the victim (again, of a street brawl) - the CCTV operator quickly informed the cops they had the wrong guy, and to keep looking. Without CCTV, that very well could have ended the search for the attacker, and caused an innocent person to spend a night in jail. It makes the cops more effective, and as long as we know they're enforcing laws people want them to enforce, that can't be a bad thing.
The cops are required, by law, to do what they can to catch the bad guys. If we are all harbouring paranoid delusions about what the police could get up to if they were evil, then the cops wouldn't be allowed cop cars, radios, batons, the power of arrest, police stations, clothes, anything. If we're worried about the laws being changed or interpreted in such a way as to hurt normal, moral, law-abiding folks, then we should concentrate our efforts on preventing that, not having some knee-jerk reaction to technology that's effectively used in ways we like "just in case". It's such a fucking lazy attitude to take with something so important as the safety of the people.
You can't control society by having society watch itself. You control it by enforcing the law, so control the law, and you control the people. The tools used to enforce the law are completely, 100% benign.
Yes! You're so right! The police should stop using radios and police cars immediately, just for starters! Think of the children! Etc., etc. If you're scared the cops might be corrupt and use this technology against the people, then you should be scared of the cops and not the technology. Asking the police to be less efficient is simply stupid. And these technologies DO help the cops immensely. Getting eye-witness accounts of fights and vandalism on the streets is massively useful, as is being able to follow offenders around until cops show up to arrest them. Instant identity parades performed on the street also saves a lot of money and heart-ache for the wrongly-accused (or simply those in the wrong place at the wrong time). As is having evidence on film to be shown to a court of law. As is being able to find stolen cars within minutes of them being stolen. As does being able to identify criminals at large (such as that bomber in London in the late 90s who was identified from CCTV footage). It boggles my mind to think why people have such a knee-jerk reaction to this. We never had a right to privacy in public, and as long as the cameras stay out of our homes, this bullshit 1984 cliche is grossly inaccurate, and nothing more than emotional blackmail. The cops have a legal mandate to do whatever they can to uphold the law and to make society safer. In the UK the public DOES tell the cops what to do. There are bodies like the IPCC who regularly tell the cops they fuck up and need to change their policies, not to mention the fact the home secretary is an elected member of parliament, and the scores of advisory groups regularly breathing down the necks of the cops.
It's not a tax but a license. The money goes to the Licensing authority, which then passes it on to a company which then spends it to make more programming. It has nothing to do with copyright.
and don't even think about "mano-a-mono"...
You *do* realise those are the bits of the drivers that interface with the hardware? The same bits that cost millions of dollars to produce, due to the sheer amount of raw performance needed to be squeezed out of them. I doubt the open-source community, regardless how talented (and I know there's some insane talent out there) could replicate those in a timely fashion. Remember - they're playing catch-up with AMD. AMD will keep bringing out new cards, and these guys will have to keep re-engineering these bits of missing code. It's not going to result in open-source drivers comparable to their closed-source counterparts.
I'm not being rude, but is the answer anything like the answer to "do you have any kind of idea just how much oil there is"? I mean, ants COULD destroy all the buildings in Manhattan if the buildings weren't repaired and the ants had long enough.
If it's even possible to open-source them. If there's proprietary licensed technology in them, it might be a non-starter. Not all closed-source is so because of ideology...
You can turn the LEDs off on those dells, btw (as well as changing their colours should you want). And the dells can come with better specs than the macs, so it'd be a trade-off on performance as well.
I was using AC as an example, as whole swathes of the south-western US wouldn't be able to survive without their AC, and indeed water supply. I was referring to us no longer being hunter-gatherers, that we've lost most (all?) of those skills, and replaced them with other skills more useful, as they work with the technology we've got. If we didn't, we'd just be like chimps with PCs. Still doing our ages-old thing, but with new technology. It's only when the technology matches the skills of the user that it gets useful.
Just as most of us can't survive without AC and a supermarket round the corner. Don't labour under the misconception that we're somehow self-sufficient at the moment and have lost none of our previous skills - it's called progress. We, as a species, will always be losing some skills and gaining new ones. Imagine the skills we can learn when we don't have to rely on flaky memories. Dropping standards in handwriting is a good example - it drops because we simply don't need it any more. It's a good thing :)
And some of us are resitant to HIV and AIDS. Does that mean we should stop researching cures for those less fortunate?
Because they prey on those in great, great need. That's disgusting. If you've ever been so low that you'll take anyone's help just to get through another day, you'd understand how appealing ANY help can be. Also, they keep the aliens stuff completely off the record until years in. The first stuff Scientologists encounter is basic therapy (stolen from actual psychiatry), and some basic communication skills (which are simply common sense to most people, but help those who don't know it already). It appears benign at worst and helpful at best, so why shouldn't they feel like continuing? Not everyone knows of "the incident", so there are no warning signs.
It's more of an issue of what they allege they are reporting and what they actually are reporting. The problem arises when people watch it, thinking they're getting an objective view of the military's activities, when in fact there's a massive conflict of interest that will in no doubt shape their output, thereby not being objective. That's how propaganda works - it's not labelled as such, as commercials sometimes are, but labelled as actual truth. It's the misrepresentation that's the issue, not the creator or the content.