Growing up in the UK and living in the US has given me the odd distinction of being strongly against online surveillance of private space, and strongly in favor of regulated visual surveillance of public space.
CCTV surveillance can protect the people I care about (especially women at night) from horrible violent crimes I'm actually scared of. It's surveillance of public space, so the privacy compromise seems kind of moot (though uses of the footage should be strongly regulated). It makes policing violent and petty crime extremely cheap and effective (ask anyone who's ever won or lost a fight outside a pub). CCTV makes me feel safe. It has utility.
On the Internet by contrast, the privacy trade-off (my thoughts, political opinions, contacts, location, in real-time) is extremely large, and the benefits largely hypothetical, and at least some part smoke and mirrors.
I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial.
I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me.
In the end, I am aware that this is a losing battle, and that people who feel as strongly as me about not being constantly under surveillance will have to move out of big cities. Big cities are becoming highly controlled environment, where one doesn't feel like a sovereign human being anymore. In a sense they are an externalisation of corporate culture.
Regarding automatic face recognition: I believe most US/European citizens, at least those who travel on airplanes, are in the facial recognition corpus of the intelligence services by now. What they do (I'm guessing) is use the cameras at passport checkpoints in airports. There they get many thousands of frames of your face from various angles, and due to the strict ordering in the queue they can match all those to your ID when your passport is scanned/entered into the computer.
Yes, I think modern airports are a good prototype for the sort of dystopian environments we can expect in the future. It will only get worse until the entire thing collapses, as it always does -- Stasi, McCarthyism, Gestapo, you name it. This time it's more scary because the technology is sci-fi compared to the previous iterations.
I am more and more convinced that the cyberpunk guys got it right in terms of predicting future trends :(
As a relatively new cyberpunk fan, let me give you a few points:
(1) Cyberpunk is very much about being realistic about human nature. Some of us (like me) assume malice by default. You might not believe me but I get saddened every time I am proven right. This is coming from a 36-year old programmer supporting his mother and girlfriend.
(2) We don't assume altruism by default because (2.1) history is [mostly] not on the side of this sentiment and (2.2) we are touched by ambition and greed ourselves and we realize that we could become just as bad (if not worse) given the same power as the current spy agencies / corporate hires / whatever else.
(3) We understand that "pure capitalism" and "corporatism" leads to the 0.5% having 95% of the capital, assets and anything else valuable. So when you see a dark art piece on DeviantArt showing people miserable on the streets while a high-tech shiny vehicle surrounded by police-men passes by, and a few huge adverts are glowing in the background, don't be quick to say "2edgy4me". ;)
(4) We also know technology is seen as a way of gaining an unfair advantage over everybody else -- and most of the time technology is not used to the majority's advantage. If somebody invents AI by themselves, do you think they'll just share it with the world? LOL no. The "Transcedence" movie script is the most likely scenario -- the AI becomes sentient, escapes to the internet to evade attackers, and then talks to you through a smartphone or a tablet.
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The general cyberpunk audience is wide and interesting but it mostly boils down to two types:
(1) Rebelious teenagers who would give everything just to prove the bad adults that if their thoughts and feelings are ignored, the world is gonna go to shit (and to be fair, they might have a point). Some of them are toxic, some are not -- but they're mostly an okay bunch. Still, I give them kudos for going outside the typical teenager boxes. Getting engaged in cyberpunk fandom consciously implies some level of critical thinking, IMO.
(2) A group of rather dark-souled adults who stopped believing in the "bright future" a long time ago. Again, we're touched by greed and ambition ourselves, we're very conscious about the balance of power around the world and we don't kid ourselves.
I hope this helps you understand the cyberpunk bunch a bit.
EDIT:
As mentioned by @Fnoord a few comments below, "Ghost in the Shell" is your absolute Bible of a starting place in the cyberpunk genre. The anime movies and the series touch on a plethora of problems that don't even exist yet but are extremely likely to exist pretty soon. And they are a masterpiece in exposing the corruption which all of us would be vulnerable to.
Not sure if manga qualifies as reading but for manga/anime cyberpunk I can recommend Ghost In The Shell. It deeply touches these subjects, from multiple angles.
Then, since you specifically said read, there's Philip K. Dick, who wrote loads of books on this genre. When people think of Blade Runner they don't even know its based on a novel by him [1]
If you're referring to a book which studies cyberpunk as a genre from a documentary PoV then I wouldn't know.
Apologies, not yet (correction: see my edit in the parent comment). It's a newfound "love" of mine only for 2-3 months now (and I am a busy guy). I am just getting immersed in the art and short comics aspect for now. I haven't gone to reading the Blade Runner fanfics just yet. ;)
FWIW, Tumblr and DeviantArt have a lot of art and fanfic work in the cyberpunk genre. Pinterest too, to a lesser extent. You should start there.
> Select travel procedures and biometrics to learn more about the Department of Homeland Security’s program at U.S. ports-of-entry, which verifies the identity of the traveler using the electronic fingerprint data and digital photographs.
I would love to know the rationale of greater scrutiny of PR's - I suspect it would be quite hard for someone to forge a "green card" (it has a lot of obvious security features built in) and it needs to match your passport anyway. It's not a big deal but it always stuck me as a waste of time.
Here's a terrific-terrible idea: let's create an open network of surveillance cameras with facial recognition. Permanent logs, free access to all, an easy search function, plot all events on a map with timestamps. Should kick up a storm.
That is a great idea, but it will not work. People will say that only the government and big corporations can be trusted with that data, because of reasons.
I think it's a terrible idea. If I decide to call in sick and go lamp shopping, there's a vast difference between the FBI or Google being able to track me, with some effort, and my boss being able to idly hit a web page and see where I am. At the end of the day most of us are hiding trivial, below-the-radar infidelities, not dragging dismembered bodies around in suitcases or plotting revolutions.
I entirely sympathize. Over time, I've gradually come to the same conclusion as Bruce Schneier in Data and Goliath: regulation and legislation are the only way to make sure that surveillance works in the interests of the people, not against them. It should be possible for a society to decide what its surveillance is and is not used for.
The problem that we currently have in the US and the UK is that there is a total breakdown of trust between the state and the citizenry. The government does not trust the people it obstensibly serves, and lies to them. Many people generally are apathetic and disorganized (proud individualists). It's the latter part that means that decisions are likely to go against the interests of the population, and this problem extends well beyond surveillance.
I should have originally mentioned, it's possible for CCTV -- without good legislation -- to have almost no utility for individuals. This is what the linked article demonstrates; corporate surveillance protects corporate interests.
All this said, I remain optimistic about the prospect for change. 2016 beat the political apathy out of me.
I've never understood this "UK is creepy cos of all the cameras they have". Yes, there are a lot of them in the built up cities, most are privately owned and a lot are probably directly controlled by the government (and related agencies as well).
The large paranoia towards the UK probably stems from "The UK has more CCTV cameras per person than anywhere else in the world" but no ones knows this to be true for certain[1][2].
It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country. Also worth noting that most of the statistics are based on "per person". There may well be countries with a much higher population and much higher CTTV camera count.
> It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country.
In Germany there are strong laws against CCTV proliferation. They exist mostly in public transportation, and their presence has to be clearly advertised. You can even order Google to blur your house on street view. Try it in a German city, and you will see how common it is.
And yet, Germany is one of the safest countries in the world.
I think Germany being safe is a result of culture, not anything with cameras. Many, many modern problems are fundamentally cultural issues and things like CCTV cameras are either masking or exhibiting their symptoms.
I agree with the parent r.e. safety concerns though. It's a cheap, easy way to provide a relatively sure record of truth for public spaces. It helps prosecute people who enact violent or other crimes, and reduces the number of those in the first place.
Do you disagree with that, or value being invisible in public higher?
I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before.
Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of having some police officers "keeping an eye on me" but in the new sense of using the full power of all of our current technology to track me.
I'll tell you what the cost is: spontaneity, randomness, street-level interaction, the right to be WEIRD. All this while crime rates have been naturally going down for decades. None of this stuff is about crime for the politicians, it's about control and business deals (I promise you someone sells all those cameras and related equipment to the cities, and it's not you or me).
I am not that old, but old enough to already see that historical lessons don't last long, and everything has to be learned over and over again :(
Lots of CCTV isn't government-run. Some is, like local parks or whatever, but most is run by businesses who want to be able to catch folks who have broken in. In order to get access to the footage, police generally need a warrant.
I guess I disagree that "camera == authoritarian", but I totally get your concerns. I'd be more worried about the secret courts(US) and super-injunctions(England) that mean we can't talk about things, than I would about being on camera.
I have no problem with businesses having CCTV inside their premises -- as long as this is clearly advertised, so that I can decide if I'm ok with it or not. But I don't think they have the right to point the camera to the public space outside and film me without my consent.
Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it. There is no way around it. Maybe you don't value what they destroy, but it is hard to deny that something is destroyed.
Imagine kids playing. Do you think they behave the same when no adults are watching? And do you think it is good for mental health to have zero "unsupervised" time?
And then, let's not be naive. After Snowden we know that the reach of the government knows no bounds. Every private camera is potentially public. Everything that is recorded is potentially recorded forever, and sifted through by increasingly powerful algorithms. In this realty, one less camera is always a little bit more freedom for everyone -- to do both good and bad things, of course, but I would rather live like a free adult than as a constantly supervised child, always submissive to Society with a big S.
>Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it.
Not really? I don't look for cameras and I legit don't see them pretty much anywhere. I know they're in all the tube stations, but it doesn't make me wary?
I'm sure cameras mean you're less likely to do things which are not allowed - but guess what, I actually would rather have less vandalism, less assault, etc etc. Now if you want to straw man and say "well they can make anything illegal and use the cameras against you" - well sure. Come back to me when they do that, until then I'll keep enjoying lower crime rates.
> Not really? I don't look for cameras and I legit don't see them pretty much anywhere. I know they're in all the tube stations, but it doesn't make me wary?
Are you saying or are you asking?
> I'm sure cameras mean you're less likely to do things which are not allowed - but guess what, I actually would rather have less vandalism, less assault, etc etc.
Yes, and you are also less likely to do things that are allowed, but that could still harm you depending on who's watching. Kiss your girlfriend. Do a silly dance. Participate in that protest. Use that t-shirt with the political message. Hold hands with your gay lover. The public space changes when you point a camera at it.
Don't worry too much about arguing with me -- I will lose this argument. Every day that passes, fewer people will remember what a world without constant monitoring looked like. You can't miss what you never experienced.
> Now if you want to straw man and say "well they can make anything illegal and use the cameras against you" - well sure.
A strawman is when you attack a claim that was not actually made by your opponent. Maybe the expression you are looking for is "slippery slope"?
> Come back to me when they do that,
"They" have already done that over and over in analogous historical situations. I can show them to you, but you will probably just say that I am exaggerating and that this is a different situation. Just as people did back then.
> until then I'll keep enjoying lower crime rates.
Crime rates have been going down for decades, long before all this new tech. The perception of crime rates has been going up, because of many things including the lowering standards of journalism. I live in a very safe big city where CCTV cameras are mostly illegal.
Which is precisely what proceeded to happen: "I don't believe any of your suggestions are true in a way that don't apply to public spaces in general. I wouldn't do "thing x" in case the wrong people saw, but that includes the possibility of a friend of my boss seeing me making out with his wife so I'm not going to do that where I might be seen."
I'm not asking, I'm telling but with a questioning inflection to reflect the absurdity of the statement.
I don't believe any of your suggestions are true in a way that don't apply to public spaces in general. I wouldn't do "thing x" in case the wrong people saw, but that includes the possibility of a friend of my boss seeing me making out with his wife so I'm not going to do that where I might be seen.
Claiming that surveillance is bad because oppression is bad is a Strawman. It's the process of taking any position (the GP stating public cameras are fine) and then introducing your own version of his claim (Cameras=Oppression) and then arguing against oppression.
>"They" have already done that over and over in analogous historical situations.
This argument sits in the box with my father who was eternally upset because we didn't have the military to fight a war and we'd regret that because ~World War 3~. He may indeed end up being right, but to pretend that nuclear proliferation hasn't changed the face of war seems ludicrous to me.
It all depends on your model of who is on the other side of the camera. If you think the entity on the other side is on your side, you probably have fuzzy feeling about cameras. If you don't think that the watcher is someone like you, it feels creepy.
Again, historically, people who had comfortable positions in an oppressive regime tend to sincerely claim that the abuses being attributed to secret/political polices are an exaggeration. They are usually not lying, they had a nice position in society, so those that protect the status quo feel benevolent to them.
Most people on this site have a very nice situation in live compared to the remaining 99% (to be conservative) of the world. So I take any "doesn't bother me" uttered here with a grain of salt. Also, many here have a vested interest in the expansion of the global technocracy.
When I go to the UK I feel oppressed, even though I have no intention of breaking the law. You can argue that I am crazy and should take some meds, but this is how I actually feel. Judging from art that I see (for example from Banksy), I don't think I'm alone in feeling like that.
>When I go to the UK I feel oppressed, even though I have no intention of breaking the law. [..] Judging from art that I see (for example from Banksy), I don't think I'm alone in feeling like that.
I very much doubt you're alone, and I am more than happy to concede that my perceptions and your perceptions are both valid. When you start saying that the current UK government is oppressive though, i'm liable to get a bit fractious about the meaning of words. They are not, on any realistic measure, an oppressive regime.
Unless you live in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan, or Singapore, it's unlikely you'll have lower crime rates than Germany.
Yet, Germany has close to no surveillance of public spaces, at all, as private surveillance of public space is banned, and public surveillance of public space is very strictly regulated.
There's plenty of spontaneity, randomness and street-level interaction occurring in the cities of the UK. I see this every day. I don't think CCTV is stopping this.
There's no point arguing over something we can't measure. Instead let me give you a scenario:
Behaviour X is illegal. "No expectation of privacy in the public space" people argue that, well, stopping illegal behaviours is great, don't you think? There will always be an implicit shaming: surely you are not up to something questionable, right?
Time passes and now 75% of the population believes that behaviour X is fine and should be legal. Nobody will ever rebel and do X in public, because they could go to jail. Civil disobedience is over.
No, we have total order and we should go through the "proper channels" to change the law. Like Snowden should have done. Like homosexuals should have done, instead of throwing the reality of their existence in everyone's face, in the public space.
Don't you see how much power this apparatus of surveillance represents? Don't you read enough history to know how much power corrupts, and how no human being can be trusted with it?
How the fuck can anyone believe that politicians care about crime? Crime has been going DOWN, consistently, for decades. Do you ever see politicians pointing that out? No! They want to give you more "solutions" for a problem that appears to be solving itself. Why? What is in it for them? Ask yourself that.
Want to save people? Show them how to eat better. Improving nutrition would be orders of magnitude more effective in saving lives. Can't be done though, because it would interfere with too many corporate interests.
TLDR: The value and effects of CCTV cameras are very much context-dependent. Also, nearly half of the research in this are was deemed too unreliable by the authors.
> I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me.
I wouldn't mind.
My life is divided into public and private spheres. If you try to invade my private space (spy inside my home, ban encryption, etc.) then you will have rigorous pushback.
My public life is public and open to inspection. I'll gladly provide you with a list of everywhere I ever go if you like.
Probably mainly smoke and mirrors. I've lost count of the number of UK stories where some terrorist or criminal was known to authorities, or already on a watch list. They never manage to catch or prevent despite all these huge surveillance programmes. Then the news almost inevitably follows up that they've found out there were public exchanges of messages on Twitter 2 days before the incident or some such.
It would be comical were it not for people dying.
My take is it's utterly irrelevant. The chance, even with Daish and current events, of dying in a terrorist attack are less than by falling off a ladder. Something like 20 times less. It's firmly down there with the silly and odd causes of death. I see no war on ladders.
That is because CCTV does not directly decrease crime. Instead, it tries to increase the chance the alleged criminal gets seen, profiled, and caught later on which means the alleged criminal won't be able to commit crime for a while due to jail time.
Mass surveillance and CCTV are notoriously bad at avoiding crime or terrorism from happening on the short term though, and as long as there is incentive to either, they'll remain happening.
No idea why you're being downvoted, you're completely right [1]. CCTV does nothing to reduce crime, and can lull people into a false sense of security - as the GP illustrates. It perhaps increases convictions. To reduce we'd need Police near enough to react quickly. Visible Police on the beat again would probably have other societal benefits.
But they keep rolling out the security blanket. Someone is making a mint selling CCTV.
It would be better if we stopped letting the terrorists win repeatedly by completely changing our society in response.
Have you tried to buy a large ladder lately? They come covered in so many warning stickers you'd think you were buying pesticide. Snowmobiles come with fewer warnings.
Whilst one has had significantly more resources spent on it than the other, you do have to wonder - would spending the same on ladders make much difference? Is the ladder safety market saturated and the invading foreign nations not?
> CCTV surveillance can protect the people I care about (especially women at night) from horrible violent crimes I'm actually scared of.
One of the biggest problems with public surveillance isn't what you do in public, it's where you go. You don't have to see what's going on behind closed doors to get the picture when you see someone go into an oncologist's or psychiatrist's office, or an abortion clinic, or an AA meeting, or political party meeting etc. etc.
(Also FWIW males are the victims of violent crime significantly more often than females are.)
> strongly against online surveillance of private space, and strongly in favor of regulated visual surveillance of public space.
I share this view, largely because visual surveillance of public space is probably a technological inevitability, but under the condition that anyone is allowed to surveil public spaces and that the resulting data from government surveillance is made open source.
Not anymore, at least in the US: "Unlike in 2005 when a higher percentage of males than females were victims of one or more violent crimes, no significant difference was detected in the 2014 prevalence rates for males (1.2%) and females (1.1%) in 2014."
But perhaps not everything in the public space viewshed is public?
Are police allowed to stand on the street and look over your fence, or through your windows?
Are police allowed to leave a camera outside your house so they don't have to stand there while they look over your fence or through your windows?
This is particularly pertinent because the FBI happen to believe that everything that can be seen from public space is public. (And airspace more than a few meters above your house is also public.)
What the FBI (executive) believes is legal and what the courts (judicial) believe is legal will occasionally differ.
Also, if you were to stand on a public right-of-way and photograph an FBI building, you would quickly find that the FBI's beliefs about photography are a bit more nuanced, and a lot more hypocritical.
Usually, the courts take into account the typical movements of actual people when determining the expectation of privacy. If you put up an 8-ft privacy fence around your backyard, and an aerial camera can still see into it from unrestricted public airspace, that doesn't really matter, because you have made the gesture of enclosing a private space. The fence is a request for the public to honor your desire for privacy. Genuine privacy is what you get when the government builds a classified facility. Fences, restricted airspace, guards with guns, and locked windowless rooms. No private person can afford that, so we pretend that a fig leaf is as good as a tuxedo.
Actually some countries demand that the genitals should be kept hidden even in public spaces, and even beyond that many encryption advocates believe you have a right to use encryption even in public spaces.
I think there's a bit of a miscommunication that happens when people discuss 'privacy' in this area.
With the advent of unprecedented recording and computational resources, comes a new type of privacy, which I would call here (and is used in other places) the 'right to be forgotten'.
I absolutely think that you shouldn't expect privacy in the sense of "no-one should be looking at me", but I think you should be able to be able to assume that information about what happens in public is not kept indefinitely, and only used to track people who have been suspected of a crime (and had authorisation given for surveillance).
While lots of things don't generally change 'on a computer', the scale of some things change, and when the scale of what's possible changes that can and should encourage debate.
I disagree with this sentiment. To give an example that is a bit more emotional, I would strongly object to some stranger taking pictures of a young child playing in a public park.
Apprehension after the fact does actually prevent the perpetrator from committing a substantially similar crime, as least for as long as they're in custody. In addition, things that increase the likelihood of getting caught serve as a deterrent for other potential criminals.
Which of course is not to say that on balance mass surveillance of public spaces is a net benefit. But it does have some benefits, and it does the debate disservice to deny them.
> In addition, things that increase the likelihood of getting caught serve as a deterrent for other potential criminals.
Heard studies that proves the opposite. The kind of crimes that substantially deterred by the chance of getting caught are crimes which the perpetrator has had time to consider for a length of time. Violence of the moment is generally not deterred by the chance of getting caught, and is practically unaffected by surveillance of public spaces.
Or to mention a few practical examples, road rage isn't effected by surveillance. A person being enraged at a bar isn't effected by surveillance, through a fight outside the bar could. Premeditated murder is deterred by the punishment/likelihood of getting caught, but other forms of murder isn't. Based on the theory, I would also guess that sexual harassment is decreased while rape isn't.
I absolutely agree that not all crimes are deterred by the likelihood or consequences of being caught. But the intersection of crimes that are committed in public and crimes that are committed dispassionately, where the likelihood of being caught can deter them, is non-zero; therefore public surveillance can deter crimes, and one cannot simply dismiss that possibility when considering the pros and cons of mass public surveillance
Wrong, and a news story this week proves it. I can't find the link but there was a known sex offender who had served his sentence. A woman was walking home alone late at night so someone monitoring public CCTV decided to follow her via the cameras. They then saw the sex offender approach and begin verbally harassing her. Police were called and got there before things got more serious.
I meant mental health, I didn't mean mentally ill. Mental health even includes being unhappy.
Not sure if violent acts are entirely random, I have not enough expertise on that. Currently I assume most acts of violence are not entirely random; and if they are, they are a mental/medical/neurological illness. And it might be perfectly normal to be dispositioned to be like this, but it would still be a problem.
It does not seem like a stretch to expand the definition of mental illness to include mental conditions which predispose to the commission of violent crimes. Certainly such conditions are maladaptive for the sufferer.
This is selective enforcement, not equality under the law.
I understand the load police tend to be under, but I really wish they would have some lottery enforcement style that grabbed one random instance of "common" crime like this at a time, and went whole-hog with it. They do it for speeding, so they can make a bit of money with fines, and have the hope of finding connected crimes; what's different about theft like this that they can't do the same?
But back to the all-seeing eyes, I'd far, FAR rather have surveillance footage in the hands of individually distributed private entities, than centralized and auto-analyzing anybody for behavioral pre-crime indicators. If your local McDonald's truly is just its own independent operator storing the footage, then IMO it can still be generally considered "lost in the crowd".
It's only when automatically aggregated and its contents cataloged that stuff like this truly becomes dangerous.
I had my car stolen a while ago in San Diego county. I was very low on fuel so I knew whoever did it would have had to fill up soon after the theft.
Fast forward two weeks and my car was found. When I got it back, a credit card receipt for fuel at a nearby gas station was sitting in a tray in the center console. The date and time were the same night as the theft, after I had parked for the night. I first rang the station to explain and they confirmed they had CCTV and would hold it for the police, then I rang the detective assigned to handle vehicle thefts locally. He seemed interested and said he'd send a uniformed police officer over to follow up.
While waiting, I checked the trunk and found some trash neatly tied up in plastic bags with more receipts. The officer showed up and could not have been more openly hostile and bored with the whole thing. Big sighs, complaining that he was wasting his time while he dusted for fingerprints and collected the receipts. I waited a few more days and rang the gas station to see if the police had followed up - nope.
Years later I was on a jury for a car thief and I was really impressed by the professionalism of the police in tracking down the thief, and the extra efforts they made. They were all over the CCTV footage and tracking the usage of a particular store's membership card that the victim had left in the car. Same county, different police department though.
I guess the point is that the tools are there for law enforcement when they need them. But there is still no technical solution for when someone is a lazy fuck and can't be bothered to do their job.
No one's career gets made by catching a car thief.
Perhaps by busting a car theft operation but no one is going to get promoted for one car thief.
I would suspect that the hostility you felt from the officer was because you got your car back and no one was injured so there was no glory to be had in arresting the thief.
A few weeks after my car was stolen, another car appeared around the corner and looked to be abandoned (newer car, window left rolled down overnight for a few days) and I mentioned this to my mom. She's very community-minded and went and looked in the abandoned car. She found a letter inside the glove box with a name and looked the person up in the phone book. Nice old lady who confirmed it was her car and it had been stolen.
We learned from this lady that our neighbor's meth head twentysomething son had a girlfriend who lived in the same neighborhood as she did - where my stolen car was abandoned. A lazy cop would call that one hell of a coincidence. A motivated cop would have made the effort and rid the neighborhood of a pest who had graduated from petty crime to multiple felonies.
Just one example and honestly, what are the odds of all those pieces coming together, but it does show that selective enforcement isn't impressing anyone.
It's really the automatic aggregation and query-able database that is an issue, not the data itself. Like, it doesn't really matter if I'm seen walking into an adult store. It does matter if someone can look up the names, addresses, and employers of everyone who walked into an adult store. Or if someone could make a list of everywhere I've been photographed going in the last year and construct narratives based off of that.
Getting that sort of information about people and places needs to be expensive in order to protect people from casual violation of their privacy.
Would you consider the idea that if someone has murdered, they are more likely to murder again (compared to those who never have) an example of "pre-crime"?
Can you explain? I agree with the parent poster. I was curious what he considered pre-crime.
My original question was an honest one (as is this one). Yeah, maybe the question was ignorant or stupid... my bad, I suppose. I don't understand why I'd need to pretend to understand anything... that seems dishonest.
I do not understand why an honest question deserves your downvote.
I didn't down vote you, but I did ignore your original comment because it was hyperbolic (bringing up murder and pre-crime). It didn't have any direct bearing (or seem to) to its parent post or the article. If you (and you seem to be) are just genuinely curious about their opinion on pre-crime that's fair, but it didn't seem related, it really did feel like a hyperbolic non-sequitur.
I'm led to believe that all that surveillance isn't for thief-catching. Surveillance is valuable, otherwise so many cameras wouldn't watch streets all over. I counted 15 cameras between my bus stop and my office 3 blocks away last winter.
So what's the surveillance for? Probably preventing property damage, maybe keep hobos from whizzing in doorways and such. But please, let's stop pretending that the surveillance is for the benefit of those surveilled. It leads to pitiful narratives like this article.
To prove to insurance you had something stolen as well as to give you "warm and fuzzies". (On surveillance being there to protect property, note the comment in this thread about a surveilled garage being burgled [1].)
The difficulty of enforcing the law is actually a useful part of our overall system because it provides a check-and-balance against the overeager enforcement of bad laws. Imagine a world where ubiquitous automated cameras sent you a ticket every time you jaywalked, or if your car automatically reported you every time you exceeded the speed limit. Yes, it becomes annoying when criminals get away with things they really should not be able to get away with (like the theft in this article) but even in situations like that there are grey areas, like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family (not the case here, but it does happen). That the law does not get enforced with 100% efficiency can be a feature as long as you don't go too far towards the other extreme.
Imagine a world where ubiquitous automated cameras sent you a ticket every time you jaywalked, or if your car automatically reported you every time you exceeded the speed limit.
I'm probably being naive, but I think having rules that are universally enforced would be much better than our current approach of selective enforcement. I'd expect that as soon as those with power to change the law are negatively affected by poorly written laws, those laws would soon be changed.
Should jaywalking itself always be illegal? No, it should depend on whether there is an actual danger and the degree to which it impedes traffic. A more sane law would differentiate between calmly crossing at midnight on an empty street and causing an accident by darting into busy traffic.
Should it be illegal to exceed the posted speed limit? I think so, otherwise why not just have "advisory speeds"? Rather than making it illegal to exceed a speed that drivers are expected to exceed and then enforcing selectively, a firmly enforced limit seems much saner. If the goal is fuel efficiency, then legislate that directly. If the goal is safety, then "reasonable and prudent" seems sufficient.
like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family
I think this is better dealt with at the penalty phase than by selective prosecution. I feel the owner of the lost loaf of bread should have the right to prosecute or not prosecute entirely at their discretion, but once the police are involved I think they should be required enforce the law and leave the discretion to the judge. It it would seem terribly unfair to the property owner for the police on the scene to summarily decide that the theft was justified and the shop owner must absorb the loss.
I'd expect that as soon as those with power to change the law are negatively affected by poorly written laws, those laws would soon be changed.
Most certainly - to exclude those in power from being affected by poorly written laws. See the US Congress, and it's choice to not enforce things like insider trading rules, equal opportunity and ADA compliance on itself.
I'd be more comfortable with automated prosecutions if automated defense were already one generation more sophisticated.
So a camera catches you crossing a street outside of the designated times at a marked crosswalk. Ticketbot 1.0 automatically enters the complaint and mails you your summons, and you are immediately taxed some time or money to defend yourself.
Would it not be more fair for Publicdefenderbot 2.0 to review the video footage, and inform Ticketbot 2.0 that you did not create a hazard to traffic by crossing at that time? Ticketbot could concede the point, and dismiss its complaint before even mailing the summons. Hurrah for technology that does not produce a gratuitous waste of human effort! The human lawyers only have to take over in situations where the obvious defenses don't overwhelm the obvious evidence.
Or perhaps Speedcambot clocks your car going 60 mph in a 55 mph zone, transmits, "J'accuse! I gotcha, you bastard!", and your car replies, "Deepest apologies for the infraction, your majesty, but it's daytime, the pavement is dry, traffic is light, my tires and brakes are fine, and I can react in 15 ms." So Speedcambot says, "Fine. I'll allow it." and miraculously refrains from bothering the human.
When a victim gets involved, you just have to add an Accountantbot to the mix. If the baker has a loaf stolen, Accountantbot asks, "How much would it cost to buy your right to press charges?" So baker says, "10 bucks?" Accountantbot quickly crunches the numbers, determines that $10 is less than the cost of a prosecution multiplied by the likelihood of going to trial, pays off the victim, and now Prosecutorbot and Publicdefenderbot work out a non-prosecution agreement wherein the bread thief has to attend a paid job training program for 40 hours, at $10/hour, then spend a minimum of 80 hours servicing the air conditioning units in the county datacenter, at $25/hour. The human lawyers go play golf, or racquetball, or something else that is so uselessly human.
The US and its individual states have a litany of laws on the books. There are so many that I can get sure every person breaks at least one law everyday, gay people in particular. It's sad but most laws do not get repealed.
Likely, although my belief is only that selective enforcement of a "litany of laws" is worse than universal enforcement of that same overreach, and I don't disagree that it's practically impossible to live life or run a business 100% legally. I'm not questioning that there is ridiculous overreach, only suggesting that universal enforcement might be a solution.
There are so many that I can get sure every person breaks at least one law everyday
My usual example when the topic comes up is asking people whether they have been properly self-reporting and paying in-state sales tax on their out-of-state purchases as required by law in most states. I was impressed by one friend (a law professor) who was surprised to learn this, and now strives to be legally compliant.
It's sad but most laws do not get repealed.
Yes, but I think this is because we are relying so heavily on selective enforcement. It's certainly true that universal enforcement would be very difficult, and may have significant downsides, but I'd bet that if our legislators start losing their driving licenses for speeding offenses (or as you point out, if they, their gay friends, or family members were jailed for sodomy), the congressional gridlock would be broken and a lot of laws would swiftly be changed or repealed.
If every law were properly enforced, then this situation would likely change. In the current situation with selective enforcement you're generally okay until someone in power has a problem with you. Then you're fucked. This is worse than enforcing the laws as they are written in the books, imho.
"I'd expect that as soon as those with power to change the law are negatively affected by poorly written laws, those laws would soon be changed."
1. We have way too many laws now, and they just keep piling up year, after year. I once heard in California, if you add up all new changes, and bylaws, we are enacting/changing 12,000 laws a year. (I don't have a citation. Just something I heard.)
2. I given up arguing over what laws are needed, and what just sound good.
I would like to see the punishment of all laws (criminal, federal, local, etc.) tied to income. Rich guy runs a stop sign, he gets a $5000 ticket. The poor man gets the current $500 ticket.
I heard Switzerland is trying this?
A poor man gets a $500 ticket; it might just be the last straw?
A rich man gets the same ticket; he mentions it over dinner.
In my world, high fees for Revenue, is not the way to tax. In many cases these fees seem unconstitutional, but who even cares about that old document anymore?
In Sweden many fines are defined in terms of wages instead of fixed amount. So the judge will just fine you (essentially) 45 days wages without having to worry about what that works out to be in in actual money.
A law should either be enforced close to 100% of the time (with exceptions at the discretion of a court), or 0% of the time (ie. the law should not exist).
If jay walking, pot smoking, or anti-sodemy laws are not really enforced, to me that's a sign that they should be taken off the books. In an over-legislated society, we should focus on having strong core legislations that everyone agrees with.
Crimes like murder and rape, on the other hand, should be enforced as close to 100% of the time as possible.
Sure, in theory. But I see two problems with that--although they're probably the same idea.
Judicial, executive, and legislative are decent abstractions. They're fairly slow to change. Executive is probably the easiest to react to public opinion--which isn't necessarily something you'd want in the other two branches. It can repurpose old laws for new problems and can focus on immediate, concerning issues--thankfully, with oversight.
Breaking a law is binary, but public opinion can move gradually (I know I just said it can move quickly, but it can also move very slowly). Anti-sodomy laws were enacted (I imagine) when there was a lot of support. There was a very long time between that and the public accepting homosexuality. Yes, in the interim we can have judicial leniency--but that clogs up the courts and we do have mandatory minimums in many laws.
There's also weird in between laws, like a Ft Lauderdale law saying horses need lights and a horn after sundown. Makes total sense because it's dangerous. At some point it likely was a huge problem and it was happening often. But it's nice to give officers leniency if I got lost on a trail or my horse got out without having to go to court.
> But it's nice to give officers leniency if I got lost on a trail or my horse got out without having to go to court.
I think the point [made elsewhere] is that it should not be up to the officer to give leniency for any law breaking. The court can do that (via a jury of your peers) but separation of powers means that the officer is not the judge.
This transparency is good because if the officer and you on a dark little back lane come to some private agreement about prosecuting you for a law you have broken, that does not serve the society that wanted the law in place. The court record is a public record for a reason?
In a perfect world I would agree with you. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where laws are made by fallible humans, and sometimes they get it wrong. Inefficiency is a useful mechanism to protect us from legislative foibles.
Let's say we get rid of speeding laws since they're not 100% enforced. Should we have unregulated driving? Move towards a law that simply says "no driving unsafely"?
IMO those are both poor ideas—they're either unsafe or vague and subjective. I don't see a way around having well-defined speeding laws, yet there are plenty of situations where it's silly to ticket an individual who's going 5+ MPH over the posted limit.
I'm fine with no speeding laws. It's not the speeding part that hurts people and causes damage, it's the crashing part. We, as a culture, love to make these second order laws that outlaw not the harmful action but the risky "derivative" of the harmful action. Because some people might crash when they speed, we outlaw speeding. Because some people might hijack planes, we confiscate nail cutters and toothpaste. Because some people might commit mass-murder we outlaw scary looking guns.
I'd be totally down to remove speed limits in some places (I drive cross-state every weekend, so I'd love it :-) but, in my opinion, speed limits can be useful in certain areas.
Off the top of my head:
- Residential areas (like actual suburbs or cities) would benefit from speed limits. I'm a bit of a libertarian, but I'd prefer we have intentionally slow things down in highly populated areas, particularly where there's dumb little kids running about and chasing balls into the road.
- Parts of unincorporated county where I live have no shoulder, so crashing takes you into somebody's house. (Actually, a local house at the end of a road that comes to a "T" had to install a concrete barrier after a couple cars plowed through their front door.) I can't speak to the math behind it, but IMO it'd be reasonable to limit cars to a speed that prevents them from skipping the little ditch and ending up in my living room.
- School zones. (See first bullet.)
- Hilly areas and curvy roads (or just roads with limited sight distance).
- "Kill zones" (you know, places where elk and deer play chicken with cars).
- Frequently icy/wet/slick areas. (A friend of mine managed to slide his truck off the side of a hill he'd lived near his entire life somehow after forgetting it usually ices over.)
IMO a lot of it has to do with preventing new or infrequent drivers (to the area) from driving too fast for conditions. Sometimes having a "chilling effect" (of sorts) can be a good thing.
I also think that speeding laws are good. However I think it would be better if we designed our streets so that drivers don't drive at dangerous speeds. Have frequent speed bumps, narrow lanes, cobblestones, etc on residential streets.
This can have the unintended side-effect of reducing access for emergency vehicles. I lived in a neighborhood once with a traffic circle at the entrance, initially with a tree and shrubbery. That was gone within a year after the ambulances had driven over/through the shrubs a few times. The traffic circle remained, but the physical barrier became, essentially, a 15mph speed bump.
Narrow lanes, frequent speed bumps have to be considered carefully. With regard to speed bumps, they need to be the gradual sort (where you can actually pass over them at 15-25mph depending on the slope) rather than the ones that effectively force a stop (a curb in the road). Narrow lanes only work if streetside parking is illegal. And so on.
Otherwise, I entirely agree with your point. Design roads so that certain speeds are unattainable, then speed limits barely matter anymore.
Posting a "SPEED LIMIT 25 MPH" sign is not nearly as effective for keeping cars out of your living room as a few stout concrete posts extending 4 ft above ground level and 8 ft under it.
The sign does not prevent someone from driving like an ass.
More or less. While I usually speed, the speed limits do regulate my speed since I dislike tickets. So, I'm willing to drive a speed that: I feel is safe and is close enough to the posted limit so I don't get a ticket.
IIRC Montana didn't have speed limits in a lot of places until the national speed limit came around and the federal government threatened to take away federal highway money if they didn't step in line.
IIRC some part of Australia got rid of speed limits and nothing happened. It wasn't the end of the world like the concerned mothers association predicted
If the speed limit is 65 but in practice driving 70 is still safe enough, we should raise the speed limit to 70.
Going further, there is some evidence that getting rid of the speed limit actually reduces accident rates (eg. German autobahns, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety:_international...). You can look at these sort of stats in the context of the broader idea of removing explicit rules in order to increase personal responsibility and encourage safer behavior (eg. replacing stop signs and traffic lights with roundabouts, https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Safety/roundabouts/benefits.htm).
True, as things currently stand, but this is a misfeature of the system rather than an advantage. The combination of unreasonable nuisance laws with the lack of enforcement means the nuisance caused by the laws is largely mitigated, but it still leaves them open to abuse through selective enforcement.
If "laws that everybody breaks" were ubiquitously enforced then their true detriment would be brought to light and they'd have to be properly fixed.
> then their true detriment would be brought to light and they'd have to be properly fixed.
I wish that were so. But even if it were there will be immense misery before it happens. In Victorian England one could be transported to Australia for trivial offences; eventually juries refused to convict and the law was changed. A lot of people suffered immense hardship and many died because of strict enforcement of the rules before they were fixed.
If they always caught people speeding, they could lower the fine so it became more like a tax. The penalties for some crimes could be lowered as well if perpetrators were usually caught.
Why not just make it a tax directly and let those that drive faster than normal buy a plate to let them use the left most normal lane of travel? (Implicitly, restricting everyone NOT using that plate).
In fact, lets make robot drivers that go as fast and close as conditions safely allow... I think we're already on track for this actually.
An Uber driver told me about the time he picked up a credit-card thief. The guy just asked to be driven around (in his SUV) from one side of New York to the other. As the fare ended, he'd hail the driver with a new credit card and start a new one. At one point, he stopped at a house and walked out with a new stack of cards.
The driver [EDIT: said he] was prohibited, by law, from kicking the passenger out mid-trip. Right afterwards, he went to the police station and tried to report the crime. He was told he was free to report it, but it was a low-priority crime that was unlikely to get investigated.
Indeed, that doesn't make sense. You're witnessing probable criminal activity, and aiding it by providing the ride which could make you an accomplice once you were aware of the activity.
What law could possibly prohibit you from reporting this or leaving the passenger behind?
EDIT: Looking it up I'm not finding anything except stories of Uber drivers kicking people out mid-ride. Perhaps a particular municipality has a more specific regulation? There are lots of reasons to kick passengers out, and criminal activity is #1 (perhaps tied with "they're about to puke/piss in my car because they're so wasted").
Because by the time "law" enters into the picture, the driver will have been booted by Uber, the thief will have been released from jail and already started on his next stack of credit cards and being driven by another Uber driver.
There is still no law that mandates you must be an accomplice to a criminal or that you cannot boot passengers out. Reading Uber driver stories, it seems kicking out passengers isn't too uncommon. Yeah, it's a hit, but most of them said you need to contact Uber immediately to explain the situation (with mixed results). Personally, I'd rather do that than drive a criminal around to commit crimes (including defrauding my employer).
An accomplice is somebody who participates knowingly in a criminal activity. Minding one's business and not making baseless assumptions about whether an uncanny stack of credit cards implies a crook doesn't rise anywhere near being "an accomplice".
Well, yes but as long as people don't boycott one of the most evil of companies what does that matter to the driver? You have a company which builds its entire business on ignoring some legislation (namely, taxi legislation) in every market it enters and yet y'all are supporting it with money. What would remain of society if every company would just pick which laws they don't like? Not to mention Uber pushing for indentured servitude. Just how evil a company needs to be before people stop supporting it with their money? And, with all this destruction wrought they are not profitable, not even close.
I had over $5,000 worth of stuff stolen from my garage (also in SF) a few weeks ago. The police were not concerned in the least. I had cameras, documenting the entire thing with clear faces; it doesn't matter.
Unless you're caught red handed or something, you can basically steal whatever you want in SF. It almost makes me want to turn into a thief myself (if I know I can get away with it), except there's that little thing that my parents saddled me with called morality.
I'd feel too bad afterwards, although sometimes I wish I wouldn't. There's something to be said about just taking whatever the hell you want in this life.
It really depends on where you are. In some smaller cities near SF such as Campbell or Los Gatos the police absolutely take residential burglaries seriously. They have closed a number of cases recently based partially on surveillance camera footage.
I'm surprised that SF residents are willing to put up with this crap. Why don't they stand up and demand better service from their city government? Perhaps it's an example of learned helplessness.
>I'm surprised that SF residents are willing to put up with this crap. Why don't they stand up and demand better service from their city government? Perhaps it's an example of learned helplessness.
It's politically fashionable to coddle those who commit property crime. It's a form of virtue signalling, since it suggests altruism for the lower class. You see the same thing in Vancouver. There's very little political will to stop the rampant property crime that occurs here.
Why do you feel that the police were not concerned? And what did you expect them to do?
To be fair, there is not much they can do for individual cases but burglary rings are broken all the time by police. They usually consist of several addicts orchestrated by a stolen-goods broker selling to one or more pawn shops or craigslist.
You images may be used in the future to snatch the perpetrator(s).
> After two visits and three calls to the Mission district station, and three calls and two emails with San Francisco Police Department public affairs (a route not open to most civilians), the police assigned someone to my case. That was well over a month after the theft. Walgreens gave them some video, which has been circulated, but Target had already junked its footage.
OK, it sounds like someone did some substantial work. They got video from one source, and queried another, and then did something with the video.
> Uber, which over its four rides obtained route information and the person’s address, was not contacted.
And yet, the investigator didn't request data from Uber, which apparently learned the suspect's address. I wonder what's up with that? Do they consider it too unreliable? Something akin to hearsay? Or maybe they don't want to violate the suspect's privacy? Very strange.
Perhaps you've seen The Big Lebowski. "Leads? Leads?"
The odds of the SFPD "investigating" a mere wallet theft are even lower than the Malibu PD trying to figure out who stole Jeff Bridges' car.
For one thing, after Prop 47, stealing anything under $950 is a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor is basically a traffic ticket for anyone already involved with the criminal justice system. Misdemeanors basically do not result in any kind of custodial sentence in CA today.
Only a reporter could get them to care at all. ("Journalist privilege" is real.) Even then, they can only care so much.
And yet, while "journalist privilege" got them to do something, it was a harder thing, and would have taken tons of work to yield anything. But not the easy thing, contacting Uber. It's odd. Maybe they were just messing with him.
I once had a bank card fall out of my pocket at a movie theater. My mistake, should've put it in the wallet but was in a hurrry.
Most likely someone on the cleaning crew stole it. Same pattern, tiny fast food purchases followed by lots of several hundred dollar purchases. My bank (Huntington), did not catch it at all. They drained the entire checking account.
They mostly went to Meijer, three times spending over $300 each time, all on the same night. And every time, they paid with credit and no cashier there asked for ID. (Yeah, I didn't have a lot of money back then, this was around 2008? or so, I believe.)
Filed a police report, went to the bank. Took about two weeks to get the money back, barely made rent that month as a result. A detective called me one time, asked me to call him back. I called him back probably five times leaving messages for him, he was never there, and he never called me again. I never heard anything more on it.
They can easily catch these guys if they want to, they just apparently don't give a shit, as there's nothing really in it for them. Better to go after revenue-generating pursuits like civil forfeiture, I guess. Maybe they just have too many cases, but by not resolving them, all that does is embolden thieves to keep doing this shit because they know they'll get away with it.
Moral of the story: keep separate checking and savings accounts, don't ever carry around cards that can ring up more than you're comfortable losing. Nowadays I keep less than $1,000 in my checking account (which isn't as much for me anymore), the rest in savings. If I want to make a big purchase, I'll bring my credit card along with me that one time only. I wanted to do a debit-only card to require a PIN#, but those are far too restrictive. Way too many places are credit only (fast food, restaurants, parking lot ticket machines, etc.)
Also, wallet chains. They look tacky as hell, but they've saved me more than once. If you wear khakis, they're essential.
We are not many years away from facial recognition cameras tracking everyone in public spaces in real time with updates to a centralized database system.
Anyone hiding their face, or not being recognized by the system would be flagged for investigation by on-the-ground units.
At this point, almost all non white-collar crime would be prevented, or the culprits quickly caught - which leads to prevention.
>At this point, almost all non white-collar crime would be prevented, or the culprits quickly caught - which leads to prevention.
As others have stated, it depends entirely on how seriously the police takes these crimes. If the police actually get the footage and investigate, sure, crime can be stopped. But, at this point, the limiting factor isn't collecting the footage. It's getting police resources to find the crime, and publicize the various film and video footage.
I assume everyone understands a large portion of mass survellience boomed under Bush after 9/11 starting with FISA [0] and continuing under Bush......and will continue to grow under every future president considering there is very little push against it except a minority of people who value their privacy (my opinion), blaming either side is a bit silly.
I am a millenial and I consistently observe many of my peers who do not work in IT having the attitude "I have nothing to hide they can collect whatever they want on me" an attitude spawning from Zuckerberg pointing out people will not care about their privacy in the future[1]...turns out he is mostly right
I absolutely agree, its not a "my side versus your side" issue, i.e. Left -vs- Right, it should be universal but somehow people (not just millenials) don't realized how potent the power of surveillance is in the wrong hands. It will attract sociopaths.
Nowhere in the article is it even implied that "mass surveillance wasn't such a good idea". The author mostly seems bemused that despite a large number of video (and other data) recording systems being available, no one in the local police department was interested in seriously pursuing the case.
Yeah, an article in the NYT was only about the author's bemusement. I find that as incredible to believe as the idea that mass surveillance is for the local police.
CCTV surveillance can protect the people I care about (especially women at night) from horrible violent crimes I'm actually scared of. It's surveillance of public space, so the privacy compromise seems kind of moot (though uses of the footage should be strongly regulated). It makes policing violent and petty crime extremely cheap and effective (ask anyone who's ever won or lost a fight outside a pub). CCTV makes me feel safe. It has utility.
On the Internet by contrast, the privacy trade-off (my thoughts, political opinions, contacts, location, in real-time) is extremely large, and the benefits largely hypothetical, and at least some part smoke and mirrors.