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Comment by soledades | Hacker News Reader

I just think it's a little bizarre to feel dystopia creep from checks on police rather than from police checks on civil liberties.

edit: or rather, to feel dystopia creep more from the idea of monitoring how police are taught to use surveillance technologies, than from the actual police use of surveillance technologies itself.

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> rather than

I think both are dystopian.

+ Recording a session where public servants vested with the authority of the state are taught how to conduct their job.

+ Police driving down the road with facial recognition devices scanning the faces of all the private individuals walking down the street and allowing them to pull up records on any of them.

One of these things is not like the other (and the second is a current reality!)

I'm not saying I consider them to be equal, and I will note that the specific thing I have a problem with is recording them with the intent of catching their private conversations and then reviewing it for comments you think might indicate poor behavior in the future. I know the second one is a reality and I am fairly vocal about being against that, but it's awfully hard to get rid of :(

Hmm, fair enough. My sense was that "off the cuff side commentary" meant perhaps things said by an instructor during the intermissions, and that the intent was more to prevent them from saying anything they wouldn't be comfortable saying to the general public, but I realize that's due to my not following the thread of the conversation closely enough :)

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