Gazing Back at the Surveillance Cameras That Watch Us
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If just a few localities had regulations like this covering government and private cameras, and if they were reasonably well designed regulations, I'll bet it would be a huge privacy benefit that would give people more peace of mind and improve communities.
There will always be some exceptions for whatever Black Ops are going down in the desert, or whatever, but a lot of these needlessly anxiety-making camera-human-sensor-loop systems could probably be brought to an end quickly.
We have laws governing use of cameras (RIPA and DPA), a data protection regulator who requires people and companies to register if they use CCTV, and we have a surveillance commissioner who provides some scrutiny of the use of these powers.
Here's a jargon-heavy discussion about some of these powers: https://www.lateosurveillance.co.uk/idiots-guide-ripa-direct...
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-survei...
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/surveillance-cam...
All of this regulation doesn't seem to have stopped the proliferation of cameras. People say that London has more CCTV cameras than any other city.
If we assume that the primary purpose of a speed camera is to reduce speeding where its placed, then you want it to be as visible as physically possible. A hidden camera does absolutely nothing to slow someone down - they will get a ticket in the post few weeks later, but at the time when they drove past it, it didn't do anything to slow them down.
The purpose of the camera is to enforce the law. By painting them yellow we're allowing drivers to evade the law: slow down for this bit, keep driving at our usual unlawful too fast speed everywhere else.
Unless you have Orwellian enforcement this is basically not true. People go as fast as they feel comfortable in the conditions. You can't just slap a 50 sign on a highway and expect people to go 50. If you want people to go a particular speed you need to play visual tricks or screw with the traffic flow to make them feel like the desired speed is the speed they should be going. These approaches have their trade-offs but those trade-offs are generally considered to be less bad than the trade-offs from having speed limits that are irrelevant most of the time.
Of course getting these drivers off the road would be a case of funding police properly (so they can be around to witness these things happening) instead of the easy option of sticking speed cameras everywhere.
In the parallel universe where all speed limits were set by the highway engineers instead of the people who scream "think of the children" loudly enough you could at least make that argument.
In our universe I think claiming that doing 38 in a 30 with no consideration of context makes someone a shitty driver is pretty laughable and in the same category as "weed is bad because it's illegal."
>Of course getting these drivers off the road would be a case of funding police properly (so they can be around to witness these things happening) instead of the easy option of sticking speed cameras everywhere.
One of these costs money and is set up and administrated by the local government. One of this will be set up for the local government by a private company in exchange for a cut of the profits. Which do you think the government will do?
Of course, these cost savings are predicated on the relative effectiveness of non-visible cameras. The fact that they are used in some countries is evidence that they might be effective. This also seems to me to lend credence to the idea that having visible cameras is a concession to some other interest group, because, although I can understand why the "driving lobby" would want cameras to be visible (so they know when to obey the law), I am having trouble thinking of an interest group who would want cameras to be non-visible for some non safety-related objective - I am of course open to suggestions.
I hate to come off overly cynical, but that almost feels like lack of effort: wanting to repeatedly catch large number of unaware drivers to cause increase in ticket revenue seems like a painful obvious one?
Unless we are not considering the government an interest group in this context but that too seems erroneous...
There are signposts. I should always be aware of them. I am often not, many years of habit + very infrequent city driving these days tend towards mistakes. I am slightly more aware now - but I anticipate several years before i've internalised the new rules fully
The acceptance of the rule of law really seems to be central to this whole speed camera issue. If you accept that your actions are subject to the law then you will also accept the consequences of any transgressions you make, intentional or otherwise; the mechanism of enforcement is simply irrelevant. An individual may want to be excused from consequence for a particular law, on the basis that they disagree with them (e.g. speeding), but that isn't how the law works, and necessarily so.
Lived in a small town where non-visible cameras were used years ago - huge amount of fines were given, mostly to people out of town. Few years ago, all cameras had to be made visible - now the main road going through town has 3 cameras, no one speeds through the town again, but the revenue has dropped down significantly(it's probably costing the town money now).
Now the question is - which outcome is preferable to the citizens? One where people speed, but the town is getting a lot of money from the fines, or one where people don't speed, but it's actually costing the town money.
I'm sure if you ask the folks at the local council, they would say they preferred non-visible cameras - their budget back then was huge, at(obviously) expense of public safety.
There is, of course, no reason why a local council should not decide to deploy visible cameras in such a situation, alongside a national network of non-visible cameras (you obviously don't need to have both visible and non-visible cameras at the same site). The cost-effectiveness argument still holds, under the assumptions previously mentioned.
That's assuming someone is willing/able to prosecute them. That is not always the case. Here's a recent example of that: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/ajit-pai-must-an...
As far as everyday crime goes, I suspect a social safety net would take care of most of it. Most people aren't bad, but they will do bad things when they need help but don't get it. Once you get past that point, the cost of crime is probably less than the cost of trying to get perfect enforcement.
1. Security is usually a knee jerk reaction to something that has happened and rarely correctly addresses the full problem scope, just one specific edge case that was experienced. This typically happens because people over weight the probability of such an event happening to them, due to the short nature of it and lack of control. In contrast to 9/11, you won't see nearly the funding or awareness of some of the largest killers, such as obesity, cancer, US-based violence, alcohol, opioids, etc.
2. Anybody correctly motivated can bypass said security, because it is never well thought out and doesn't cover all possible scenarios. With some time and some know-how, any individual could defeat TSA (or any other Countries) security. At the moment the only benefit is those who seek to terrorize Western society are usually desperate or ill funded.
3. Security tends to lure people into a false sense of security, so people in general are just as secure as they were, because they stop being aware of insecurities. There is a study showing that Countries with and without bicycle helmets have roughly the same number of deaths - the reason being that drivers recognize cyclists without helmets as being more vulnerable, hence going to greater lengths to avoid collision.
To the point, all of these cameras are unlikely to make us more secure. What they will do on the other hand is lend themselves to abuse by government or corporate entities to any extent they think they can get away with.
I'm not sure I'm for surveillance per se, but I do believe painting CCTV as useless and inefficient is wrong. It can be efficient in aiding high-level investigations if applied properly.
I couldn't possibly imagine a scenario where you just forget that you're carrying a gun...
For the record, I agree with you, but this isn't really an appropriate place to soapbox about it.
Also, the whole thing is just mind boggling. Forgetting a killing machine (please don't even start the automobile/edc knife comparisons, killing people is the sole purpose of a gun) on the bottom of a purse. There is something deeply flawed in the whole system if that can happen
This is just it. Carrying a gun is so normalised in the US that people are admitting that they forget that they are carrying a device which has the sole purpose of killing or injuring.
This is not ok in my opinion, but apparently everyone is ok with living in an environment where you all believe you need a gun for protection (which, if it's buried at the bottom of your bag, is going to be hopeless). I can't fathom that a person could be happy with this, but there you go.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/05/sports/switzer-arrested-o...
[edit] grammar
I have a friend who carries a pistol in a backpack. I'm sure he forgets about it at times as well.
A year or so ago when walking out of a big box home improvement store and guys says to me "you got a knife?", I slowed and turned and thought and said no.
As I thought about how I don't carry knives, they are sharp objects that cut things, possibly including me, and I can't afford the anti-hemophilia factor treatments, and I don't need a knife 364 days of the year or so, so no.
I looked around, seeing the guy holding the tie down string the store provided at the exit, and looking around for something to cut it with. I scanned and looked, and even tried to rub the string on a metal piece that was protruding from the string roll holder itself.
The metal did not cut it. As I rubbed it I noticed the keys in my hand. A key could probably cut it better, and even better than that - the multi-tool I added to my keychain a few years ago actually has a small knife in it.
So then I had to change my assertion, I did have a knife, I handed it over to the guy, he cut his string and all was well.
I forgot I had this weapon, and have before when going to places with metal detectors (which don't care if you take it off your keychain and hide it in the bushes next to the front door ). I forgot I had it a lot, even when asked about it, even when it was actually useful.
I hope it's not that hard to imagine, as we move throughout the days we get so much on our mind about past and future, we, or I at least, often forget what I have in the present, and I try not to be like that.
It's fair to say an individual would want both security and privacy (for example, as with your home). Like many things, it's about finding the right balance. I'm sure if you look to the extremes of security and privacy you could find a bunch of crazy examples.
The wildcard is the who. That is what throws off the scales, as the security/privacy relationship moves from a micro to a macro level, and suddenly a person's real autonomy comes into question.
What has severely muddied the water is the term "security" has been bandied about by governments (and other large centralized entities) to refer to their own security, often at at the expense of our security. In order to sell the lie, we're encouraged to think that their security implies our security, which is obviously bullshit when you look at the positions their various security measures actually put us in - eg bunched up, undressed, split up, and disassembled in the airport groping line.
The real problem, and why drawing the distinction is important even there, is that the government is choosing to do things that may or may not make government/group security slightly better because they/it cannot see a downside. When in reality it/they is hurting all the individuals' ability to take care of ourselves (eg my above description), even with respect to utterly banal threats like theft.
Violent crime is certainly down in general, but is that because of increased surveillance? Terror and postal episodes are more frequent, so the surveillance certainly didn’t prevent that. Some surveillance is arguably helping prevent terror without us knowing, but we’re not even having a debate on what works and what doesn’t.
Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context.
Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing.
Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off?
The only way to win is not to play.
In short, you can pretty much avoid or conceal all the activities you posted above, not a CCTV installation though. If it is near your home or work, you can definitely forget even trying to avoid it, except for reconstructive surgery.
>> Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI.
Well, I heard lots of claims to this, but never seen a reasonable POC. Most of these claims turn out to be mere geospatial statistics and analysis. Interesting to do, but it won't give you more information, than your local police precinct already knows (where are the 'troubled' neighbourhoods). Given time, more people (even bureucrats) will develop a bit of scrutiny against "AI solves everything" approaches. At least I hope they do...
Surveillance of society as a whole has increased on a very sharp exponential scale, yet there's been no clear causal connection to a decline in crime. If surveillance was useful, let alone necessary, to a society being made as safe as it could we would have expected to see a proportional decline in crime with some reasonably decent evidence of a causal link. But that is not present, at all. So we're really just submitting to surveillance and sacrificing ever greater swaths of personal privacy for no real gains.
- there are strict laws about what surveillance video can be used for
- surveillance video is rarely abused
- people with video cameras are a whole lot more likely to upload me to youtube and facebook (where I'll stay forever, possibly with nasty comments both by the uploader and commenters)
- while surveillance video will most likely be deleted within 14 days or 3 months or something
I'll happily
- take 10 surveillance cameras
- over one random person pointing filming me
- today
That said, I think there might be too much surveillance. And it might be dangerous in the future.
The person who wants to make a funny video with me is however a more imminent threat.
What makes you believe this? I am cynical and suspect it happens all the time, but I doubt either of us knows.
It is okay if you refuse to believe this because I know it's very difficult to accept. I didn't believe it myself until I saw everything in front of my own eyes. Just keep this thought in the back of your head as a possibility, one day you'll see the truth comes out.
Since when are guests required to sign surveillance equipment NDAs to get a hotel room?
Are we talking about smoke detectors, meters for water/electricity usage, or do you mean things like audio/video capture of your activities throughout the room? I definitely expect there to be equipment to determine if you've been smoking in your room (how else would they know) or doing something to destroy the room.
Who has access to this sort of thing? I imagine there'd be leaks if the regular security guards had access to this, so I'm guessing it must go to some LEO HQ.
One's nose also works for this.
It's not that every single shadow in existence contains a Vashta Nerada, it's that any particular shadow in existence COULD contain a Vashta Nerada.
Likewise, not every phone on the planet is silently listening to your conversations and recording them for the benefit of the Secret Service (or NSA, or other such organization). The problem is that ANY phone in the hotel COULD be silently recording your conversations. And the probability that any phone might be used for such purposes is definitely non-zero.
Many hotel rooms now have Smart TVs installed, and many smart TVs from companies like Vizio and LG come with built-in cameras. Rinse and repeat the above concerns.
You don't have to go far beyond the recent problems at DefCon to see what will be happening next.