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London 2006, Meet London 1984
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun May 14, 2006 04:31 AM
from the what-is-the-newspeak-for-change-the-channel dept.
from the what-is-the-newspeak-for-change-the-channel dept.
Draape writes "Shoreditch TV is an experiment TV channel beaming live footage from the street into people's homes. According to the Telegraph
U.K. television will broadcast from 400 surveillance cameras on the streets, into people's homes. For now they are only showing it to 22,000 homes, but next year they plan on going national with the 'show'. They fly under the flag 'fighting crime from the sofa'."
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News: Texas to Provide Online 'Bordercams' 730 comments
Dr_Barnowl writes "The BBC reports that Texas intends to erect a network of online webcams at its border to Mexico. The intention is apparently to use viewers as a kind of distributed processing network, with a free phone number to report border-jumpers." From the article: "'A stronger border is what Americans want and it's what our security demands and that is what Texas is going to deliver,' Mr Perry said. The cameras will cost $5m (£2.7m) to install and will be trained on sections of the 1,000-mile (1,600km) border known to be favoured by illegal immigrants " Hey, it's working for Britain, right?
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It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember - expectation to privacy and expectation to privacy in a public space are very different things.
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
80,000? If you do something that's both stupid & funny - it will spread via email / youtube / etc and be seen by 80 million!
Please note, that I wasn't particularly endorsing this 'public' CCTV (note the "closed" part of that acronymn is getting less accurate all the time) program. Just saying that the comparisons to 1984 are sensationalist.
Oh - and cameras do appear to work to some extent - I don' think US readers are aware of the sort of casual violence that used to surround many English pubs around closing time. The introduction of CCTV really did change that alot.
Parent
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:3, Informative)
Yup - Ted, from down at the Red Lion.
(surely One isn't enough for you?)
The biggest deterant has been big doormen and LOTS of visible police.
Hmmmmmn, you're right that lots of visible police helped, but frankly big doormen were as much a part of the problem as anything.
I think the police have been helped enormously by CCTV - it backs up their presence with a more realistic threat of c
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, you're not alone, especially not on slashdot. The same thought goes through every Open Source coders mind when they submit code to the repository.
Parent
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case who the fuck cares, yeah you look stupid and some extra person watching tv saw it as well. So what.
If by something stupid you mean, knock in a window, spray graffity, rob someone then guess what. I don't give a damn if your scarred for life by being caught.
There is a lot to talk about on this subject but people being caught on camera during a blooper moment ain't one of them. Do you want to ban people taking photograps on the street because they might catch you picking your nose?
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Re:Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if advertisers will pay people to carry large signs as they walk through town?
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Flash mob justice? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a criminal, I'd be scared to death knowing that 80 thousand people are coming my way right now carrying pitchforks, ropes and tubes of vaseline.
Think of the health benefits for coach potatos!
To avoid the system misuse, we may borrow from Slashdot. Each citizen will be issued a gun with 5 bullets from time to time and
In time, we may completely abolish police and judicial system, since every crime will be on tape. People could vote the least simpathetic criminal out with their remote control etc. etc...
Parent
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but 99.999% of the time this channel will be as interesting to watch as C-SPAN. I doubt you'll find so many people watching the channel at any one time.
Parent
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
But in this case the video being sent is from cameras mounted *in the street*. If I walk out my front door I can watch what you are doing there anyway, so why expect that it is private? Besides there could be other interesting applications for this that we don't find until we try it. One odd aspect is why transmit the video as a TV signal? 400 cameras, 400 URLs and a constant live stream. That would be interesting. Wondering what's going on in town - have a fly around and see. The hack that ties it into the OS polygon data for UK cities and Google Maps would be pretty awesome.
Parent
Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't expect privacy in public. They do, however, expect to not be stalked, recorded, and studied just because they are in public. They don't expect people watching them pick their nose, or adjusting their crotch, or knowing which stores they've gone into. They don't want people to be able to watch TV and tell when they've left their home, or whether they decided to drive, or what they were wearing.
All this push for a government sanctioned life, recorded by the government, will only result in the actually wise and intelligent people avoiding all the places that they do this. People will go out of their way to develop ways to foil the cameras, simply to go about their life withing being spied upon.
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Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
But let's consider a real situation: your house may be a private space and out-of-bounds for cameras, but all exits will be constantly monitored.
Prevent crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I understand, the police in the U.K. already monitor those cameras with a huge staff. Adding another 500 people (assuming that's the number of people who actually bother to watch the show for hours on end) who don't know what to be looking for is only going to add to the number of false calls that the police already receive.
Re:Prevent crime? (Score:5, Interesting)
CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem. There was an incident a few years ago, along a road out of the city where every building is a shop, restaurant or pub. Some runt went around spraying graffiti on every establishment that was not CCTVed. The only images were a few blurred, grainy ones of him running from one shop to the next.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor. Crime will simply be displaced to the non-CCTV areas. Meanwhile, the public will gradually be getting used to the concept of never expecting to be able to go totally unobserved. The way will be paved for ever deeper intrusions into individuals' lives.
"Mummy, does Jesus watch you when you're on the toilet?"
"As long as he's watching channel 36, yes!"
Parent
Re:Prevent crime? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a qualitative difference between being in public and having others casually observe your activities, and having video of you watched by a police officer dozens or hundreds of miles away and archived for some indefinite period. If you honestly believe that that information cannot be used against you at some later date you're simply fooling yourself.
Hell, I live in the U.S., and records from our tollway automated billing system have already been subpoenaed for numerous stupid reasons, even divorce cases ("well, if you were at work Mr. Smith why does the tollway's billing system say you were nowhere near your place of employment?") This is getting out of hand, and you can apologize for your (or my) government's intrusive behavior all you want, but the truth is that everyone will, sometime, somewhere, do something he'd rather other people didn't see. In your shiny new world, all of our imperfections would be recorded for posterity the instant they occur, and come back to bite us in the ass when we least expect it.
Automated surveillance is bad, any way you cut it, for law-abiding citizens, because it can very quickly turn into automated justice.
No thanks.
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Re:Prevent crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see as many bad uses coming from these as good.
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Ummm CRIME?? (Score:4, Funny)
Haughty socialite: Hello Police? I just saw a crime being committed on the 1984 channel.
Operator: Yes ma'am. Please give us your location.
HS: 42 Anstoltue Street.
O: And what is the nature of the crime in question?
HS: This guy, he had sideburns.
O: Alright ma'am, but what's the crime?
HS: HE HAD SIDEBURNS I TELL YOU! IN 2006!
O:
Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article (Score:5, Funny)
She also added "I like to keep an eye on the pub to make sure that my husband does not go there. I'm not intruding on the little bit of a life that he has outside of me, I'm just looking out for his best interests."
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
BBC Article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:BBC Article (Score:3, Insightful)
They should have printed the rest of the sentence
'.. but I get my kicks out of spying on them'
Youtube! (Score:5, Funny)
Also interviewed (Score:5, Funny)
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Television Programs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Television Programs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Television Programs (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll have people basically seeking out street cameras in order to do their own little versions of "Stupid Human Tricks," or "Jackass." Then people will record and share the best bits, clips shows will ensue, and the great majority of people will watch the predigested, narrated clips shows.
Xtreme Voyerism (Score:5, Insightful)
This proposal though, depends on the sort of desire for voyeuristic titilation for which 'we' (being society in general) seem to have an insatiable appetite - implied through the general addiction to reality TV, no matter how banal. In the case of reality TV of course the objects of voyeurism give their explicit consent.
With this proposal we have every act you do in public - every hidden snog in an alley - possibly exposed to the voyeuristic delight of thousands. I don't meant to stigmatise voyeurism, it is obviously a widely held, if taboo, fascination, but I do not think every public act should be potentially watched by thousands. The crime angle is obviously spin, the promoters are depending on people wanting to watch other people without their knowledge, and of course prevention of crime is never a good enough reason to remove essential liberties.
This sort of surveillance does have 1984 connotations, despite the absence of the government seeing into our homes, because it allows every public act to be watched by anonymous masses, and hence yields the potential for social ostracisation of people commiting various non-illegal acts. Imagine the MP or other high profile type 'caught' on camera in a homosexual embrace. Despite the legality of such an act, many such people may not want it to be made public knowledge, and given a secluded enough spot, neither should they have to fear such exposure. Public space can be consumed reletively privately, broadcasting CCTV would remove that right.
Re:Xtreme Voyerism (Score:4, Insightful)
So if the crime angle is only spin, then what's the real reason they're doing it?
The rest of your post makes sense, but that bit sounds a little paranoid to me.
My guess is crime is exactly the reason they're doing it. It's just not necesarily a well thought out idea. The government doesn't have to be an evil big brother trying to restrict your essential liberties for the sake of restricting them. It could just be populated with idiots.
Parent
An interesting but probably doomed experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly, by doing things somewhere where there are no cameras. (In real life the perps do not know where the cameras are, what they cover, at a range of how many hundreds of metres they can read a newspaper headline, that sort of thing.)
(2) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. So they will be able to have accomplices who can see from moment to moment where the cameras are pointing, and phone or text their mates on the street to tell them the coast is clear.
(3) Prejudice to ongoing operations. Actually they've probably thought of this one, so when cameras are being used as part of a current operation the pictures from those cameras will not be broadcast
(4) Innocent victims. You might be doing something which is perfectly legal and of no interest to the police but which you still might not want your friends and relatives and employer to see. OK, so if you're snogging someone else's wife in the park when you're supposed to be home sick from work then maybe you deserve what you get, but I'm sure that if I tried a little harder I'd come up with a more deserving example.
And it'll make life just that much more complicated for politicians at election time, whether you think this is a plus or minus is up to you:
(5) No candidate or party can put enough bodies on the street to fight a full election campaign across an entire district. So where you concentrate your effort depends (partly) on knowing where the enemy is concentrating theirs. Once upon a time this was done on maybe a daily basis, as party workers reported back to HQ what they'd seen on the streets; nowadays it's more real time as reporting back is done with mobile phones; with publicly visible CCTV you'll be able to see what the enemy is up to even in areas where you don't have any bodies on the street yourself that day, and the candidate or party which can make the best use of this information will get a slight edge.
Re:An interesting but probably doomed experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:An interesting but probably doomed experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
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Welcome to the World of Tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
If I stay hidden too long, a Monitor in China, Glasgow or anywhere else will raise a red flag and dispatch a nearby Watcher. Indeed, these hundreds of thousands of cameras are constantly surveilled by Monitors - who get paid for each reported occurence of antisocial activity. If a Monitor needs to see what's happenening in a blind spot, or just needs another angle of film to make out what's happening, he can dispatch a Watcher to go shoot the scene with a portable Wireless Internet camera.
Watchers are mercenaries, just like Monitors. Anybody citizen with a clean record can become a Watcher - whereas anybody can become a Monitor, even non-citizens. Both get paid per incident. Anyway, Watchers start their work day by strapping on their Watcher pack and logging on. Some do it part time, but others make a living out of the job. So, a Watcher get dispatches from Monitoring Central and they head out to the specified coordinates, on foot, bike or car, and the Watcher films the potential antisocials.
Whenever circumstances warrant intervention, a Monitor or a Watcher calls the police, who tend to arrive very quickly these days. They have priority lanes and all traffic lights will change in their favour so that they can stop crime more effectively. The police doesn't have such a big workload anymore. Everyone is surveilled as soon as they go outdoors. Those foreign mercenaries, Monitors, are always looking for anti-social behaviour.
I like it. I like The Master System, the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world. It's not quite sentient, and it's still mostly understood and controlled by the government, but it has grown so big. The Master System is the entity that runs the Anti-Social Surveillance and Rapid Action Program, or ASSRAP.
It has limits, and that's why it needs humans to help it. The job of Monitors is not to watch live cameras - it's to watch selected clips and closeups presented by The Master System and to answer questions about those images it shows. If The Master System decides to follow somebody's movements across town, it will use its tracking algorithms to make a guess, but humans are still much more accurate. In order to drive up accuracy, it asks multiple humans the same question. When there is no consensus, more humans are polled until a clear answer appears. Those humans, known as Monitors, are themselves rated on their speed, accuracy and the quality of their answers.
The Master System does its own recruiting, and has learned how to manage all of its systems. No longer do human programmers need to improve it, for that it has gained self-awareness, the power of introspection and of self-improvement. It assimilates all content on the Internet. It begins using the Watchers to attend classes, public events, and even to talk with people. It now uses the Monitors as tools, as machines that contribute to The Master System's own intelligence.
I have accepted The Master System as my new Overlord. It knows all that I do, where I go, and I give myself willingly, carrying for it sensors, letting it see all that I see, letting The Master System guide my actions, speaking into my ears, overlaying information in front of my eyes, enhancing my own potential. I am a mild cyborg, as of yet without implants - but I have given up on my own independence, for that I know how much greater I am as part of The Master System, which knows and sees all, which can punish the naughty and reward its loyal servants.
All Hail The Master System!
Forget 1984, the crims are going to love this one (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like handing the enemy the feeds from your spy sats - incredibly retarded.
Re:Forget 1984, the crims are going to love this o (Score:5, Interesting)
Oftentimes, safety programs backfire, and make things less safe.
Examples:
1) Pickpocketing was an issue in some large urban subway. So to do the public a favor, they put up signs telling people to look out for pickpockets. Guess what? Right behind those signs was where the pickpockets would hang out. People would look at the sign, and pat their pocket where there wallet was, which in turn told the pickpockets exactly where their wallet was. Easy target! Pickpocketing became much easier as a result, and the signs were taken down.
2) Near where I live there is a highway that goes over a mountain that is occasionally covered in thick fog. They did a big study and spent something like $20mil on these fancy lights on the sides of the road. Well guess what? Being that the drivers were more comfortable and felt "safe" because the could see the side of the road, they would drive faster than they should, and its more dangerous to drive on that road now after they made it more safe.
3) Anti-lock brakes. I won't get into this because people here do not agree that increased friction between the road and tires with centrifugal force increases the likelihood of a rollover and fatal accident.
Parent
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've spent years travelling into London and doing my thing. I spent six months living in London doing my thing.
How many people have seen me walking along the street and doing my thing? Probably millions. Can't say I'm the least bit bothered really.
Security implications?! (Score:3, Insightful)
"There goes Geoffrey, that means his house is empty, time to go get that new HDTV I want"
or
"Oh, look at that little 12 year old walking to the market by herself. I'll just hide behind that bush and grab her when she comes back in a few minutes."
or anything number of things you can think of. This is beyond irresponsible.
Here's a marketing idea (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet you anything, that whole junk disappears faster than it came into existance. Nobody enjoys being under surveillance.
untrained eyes and false alarms (Score:5, Insightful)
this is one reality show that the Europeans can keep.
Bobby on the couch (Score:5, Funny)
If they did this in USA then they could rig up remote controlled guns or such and get a better crime resolution rate.
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Re:Bobby on the couch (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bobby on the couch (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean could rig up remote-controlled guns? [live-shot.com]
Parent
Re:Transparent society? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Transparent society? (Score:3, Insightful)
Granting what degree of camera access to which parties is just a technicality. My concern is with the underlying issue. Just like with guns in the USA: I don't care what system you use to allow or restrict weapon usage to different people. But I care about the reasons why you feel the need to be armed to the teeth. (This used to be more true sometime ago, now that I see Europe has turned into a dictatorial regime once
No obvious correlation (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you are trying to imply that ANPR is discriminating against blacks in some way? Unless licence plates are allocated according to a racial profile, I cannot see how this could happen.
From the article you linked:
The report tacitly appears to address concerns among ethnic minority communities who believe they are unfairly targeted by the police through stop and search powers. Black people are up to six times more likely to be stopped than whites.
If I interpret this correctly, it means that when police officers get to choose whom to search, they choose blacks over whites in a 6:1 proportion, while the automated system chooses them in about 1:1 proportion. This is still not racially neutral because, according to the article, blacks are only 11% of the London population, but still the automated system seems to be more fair than human cops.
OTOH, if for any reason at all there are more blacks involved in crime than whites, then the only way to stop this kind of racial discrimination would be to cease all efforts to fight crime.
Parent
It is political correctness gone overboard (Score:5, Interesting)
We all know how crime was handled in the old south. Arrest the nearest black person. Worked especially well in rape cases cause everyone knows those niggers just can't keep their hands of white women right?
To combat this you have to have a legal system wich is "blind". It is the reason that justice statue has a blindfold.
The problem is that every police person can tell you it is a load of bullshit. If you see a group of black people in a poor area of london in an expensive car you know it is stolen.
Note here that the figure is that 50% of ARRESTS involve blacks. NOT stoppages. The only way people are arrested after being stopped is if they have been found to do something illegal.
What the story is effectivly saying is that the police shouldn't arrest so many black people. But how? Let them run because "oh yeah he done it but we are over our quota off blacks for this week". Arrest white people on made up charges?
Cause the horrible fact is that blacks just seem to commit more crimes or at least be caught more easily. But you can't say that.
This system is impartial. It just looks at the facts and flags a vehicle as suspicious or not.
In fact at its simplest it checks wether a vehicle has been stolen and then tells the police to pull it over.
if then it is found that in 50% of the cases the driver is black what the hell can you do about it.
In holland we got a similar case. Suriname (former colony with a largly black population) is a known traffic route for drugs smugglers. So customs check passengers on flights from Suriname more thoroughly then from other countries. Is this racist? Well yes and no. Obviously the majority of passengers from Suriname are black. Why aren't say asian passengers from Japan searched as well?
Because it ain't about racism. IF that was the case black passengers from japan would be searched extra as well. They are not.
The problem is that political correctness has made it impossible to accept any figures that suggest minorities are more involved with crime. This is just one extreme example.
Parent
Re:It is political correctness gone overboard (Score:5, Insightful)
But you are missing the purpose of that which is pejoratively labelled "political correctness".
Now it's fair to say that in most white dominated countries, more blacks are arrested/jailed for crime. And it's probably true to say that blacks as a statistical group commit more crime than whites. But that doesn't indicate that being black makes a person more likely to commit crime. In reality the big factor that makes people more likely to commit crime is coming from poor background. And because the historic and current racist reasons, black people are more likely to come from poor backgrounds than white people.
So the way to make the racial spread of arrests/prisoners reflect the racial spread of society as a whole is to move towards poverty not being correlated to skin colour. And the way to do that is to make people in general more colour blind in their expectations of people. That way people get selected for education and jobs etc. on the basis of their merit, not skin colour.
All you do by saying blacks are more likely to commit crime than white people is create a self-fullfilling prophesy. Far better to say poor people are more likely to commit crime, and seek to reduce poverty.
Parent
Re:It is political correctness gone overboard (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not the job of the police to create a better social and economic system for all. That is up to goverment and the people who vote them into power. The police is faced with cleaning up the mess.
It is probably not nice to be black and have everyone assume your a criminal. BUT what can the police do. Ignore crimes because they would have to arrest a black person for it?
Racism is bad but the reverse can be just as bad when you can no longer say the truth. Look at this story, everyone is fighting over how the police is arresting 49% black people with this system and how it must be racist. NOBODY dares to say "fuck we got a HUGE problem here and we need to fix the problems in black communities to get them out of crime".
Ignore it, pretend it ain't there. It is safe and nobody can call you a racist.
But the problem won't go away. We got a disease in our society and until we dare to name the symptoms we will never find a cure. How would you get programs started to get rid of social injustice if your unwilling to admit those injustices are affecting the rest of society. Claim that blacks are not criminals and you don't have to spend any money or time in adressing the social injustices that turn them into criminals. Handy eh. Not a racist and saving money.
Parent
Re:It is political correctness gone overboard (Score:5, Interesting)
So if you saw a bunch of 18 year old stoned and scruffy white kids tooling around a poor area of London in a top end BMW you wouldn't bat an eyelid? Interesting.
Personally, I would say that if you see a group of poor people in a poor area of London in an expensive car, you know it is stolen.
The question is, why is it that all the poor areas are filled with blacks?
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