George Orwell Was Right — Security Cameras Get an Upgrade 499
Jamie stopped to mention that Bloomberg is reporting on a recent addition of speakers to public security cameras in Middlesbrough, England. From the article: "`People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,' said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars."
V says... (Score:5, Interesting)
Next step (Score:4, Interesting)
pleaz (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It's quite simple really (Score:3, Interesting)
This is part of what scares me about all this; we seem to be creating these massively effective tools for behaviour enforcement, and not giving a thought to their misuse. What happens if in ten, twenty, fifty years time, the State goes bad?
Re:I don't think this is that bad (Score:3, Interesting)
My guess (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd explain in detail why this is such an obscenely bad thing, but I just don't have the energy. Seems like English-speaking countries in general are a bad place to live if you enjoy personal freedoms (and no, I'm not comforted by the fact that it's much worse in most Arabic speaking countries. This isn't a fucking playground; "they started it!" isn't a valid excuse.)
Big Brother, good. Little Brother, better! (Score:5, Interesting)
What about a slight change to the model... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personal "diary" cameras that log everything we do, from our point of view. Everything is written to a bio-encoded storage device. The data on that device is considered to be part of ones person, and can NOT be taken or used against the owner under ANY circumstances unless it is surrendered by someone of sound mind.
Now we all record everything. And it's up to us if OUR data is used against us or someone else. If no one will turn over their video, then you have no case.
An added benefit of this model is it removes the known bias of witnesses. Now you have digital data.
Re:I, For One (Score:2, Interesting)
A free society must tolerate some lawlessness or it is no longer free.
Uhh... actually, a free society should not tolerate lawlessness, since the law outlines actions that are prohibited - actions not to be tolerated.
Nope, it isn't right to litter or burgle or murder or rape. But it also isn't right to keep adding powers and new surveillance technology to police forces until they are as omniscient as God.
Talk about a straw man: this technology makes nothing as 'omniscient as God', and it's a bad 'slippery slope' line of thought to think that it's going to lead to that.
Lawlessness should never be tolerated. Or will you let someone kill one of your family members, since (as you say) "a free society must tolerate some lawnessness or it is no longer free"? Come on: sacrifice a loved one for the good of the nation, I dare you.
Re:The worst is yet to come (Score:5, Interesting)
I walk through the bar districts around Boston all the time, and that line just doesn't get crossed. Wish the same could be said of Britain.
Re:The bigger question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Blair's government knows this. It also knows what happened in the recession after the previous housing market crash under their predecessors. It is scared shitless of countrywide poll tax and "Camden" style riots organised via the Internet and mobile networks the way the fuel protesters organised themselves 6 years ago. So it is putting as much effort as it can into a massive surveilance effort to be able to squash these before they go out of control.
Genuinely stupid move which is bound to fail. Until the underlying economical conditions are fixed (even by shock therapy if necessary) the recession and the riots are bound to happen. Cameras can help in a policeable situation. They are useless when the whole population stops giving a flying fuck.
Re:I, For One (Score:5, Interesting)
The real question our philosophers and ethicists are yet to answer, is: Is 100% effective law-enforcement desirable?
The security cameras allow us to place a (virtual) police officer on every corner and between — a single real officer can have eyes and ears of 5 or 10, while working in a comfortable environment. That's a dramatic boom to law-enforcement. Whether or not that is a good thing depends on the answer to the above question...
And before you reach for the "Reply" link to type: "It depends on the laws," — yes, thank you, I know. It depends on a number of other things too, and even the obvious dependency on the laws is not as straightforward... For example, rogue law-makers would not exist either...
Re:What's the ethical problem exactly? (Score:4, Interesting)
We in the English speaking west have some fantasy going that ONLY Nazi Germany or ONLY Russia can invoke vast state abuse.
This is not so, any of us are capable of this.
First tell me how you are contraining this systems so that they are not open to abuse and then use. Not before.
Re:Speaking of tracking.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The source code of the page stays the same, your browser (depending on your settings) is taking care of tracing wich links you visited and changing the image accordingly, and the server never has to know about it.
Althought, now that you mention it, it would be possible to track visited links this way. Just use a different image for each link , then the server would see for which links which image gets loaded so the server could check whether you have visited some url before, even if that url was on another server.
So if slashdot were to include a link like
<a href="PORNLINK.xxx" style=":visited { background-image: url(empty.gif?habits=PORNFREAK}">
(not sure about the exact css syntax)
then slashdot could check which users visit porn sites and so on.
Interesting.
Re:next up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:pleaz (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The bigger question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Urban legends have a core of truth... (Score:3, Interesting)
To my knowledge there was no attempt at sales or publishing the segment, the word got around because the guard was showing to other guards and a female security dispatcher overheard and reported it to us...
I KNOW this to be fact, because at the time I was working as corporate security and was involved in the initial interviews of all three indiviuals.
Re:I, For One (Score:5, Interesting)
What class divisions are there here (uk) that you don't get in every other country? I'm honestly asking - it can be hard to view your own country from the inside.
What do you mean by that the middle class are insufferable? You don't like their mannerisms?
Re:Big Brother, good. Little Brother, better! (Score:1, Interesting)
An open and transparent society can make the world both safe and free. The only thing wrong with traditional surveillance is the imbalence of power between the watchers and the watched.
I would say people who advocate this have never lived in a small town. The sort where my grandmother peered out the windows at everything that happened in the street, and told the parents and spouses of each and every person who passed exactly what she thought she was seeing.
Maybe it sounds harmless to you, but when a local teacher was suspected of being gay, he suffered a "terrible accident" with no witnesses. Other people found their lives destroyed over something as harmless as a peck on the cheek of a nice girl.
The open society advocated won't distribute power evenly. Those who can live the clean, above reproach, life of a nice, bible-fearing citizen will have power over those of us who want to live a little differently from the strict written rules of society. We will still end up in a world where most of the populace are criminals waiting for the shoe to drop, while a handful lord it over us. Only the rules deciding who has the power will change. Instead of the terrorist police, you'll have the morals police.
Re:The worst is yet to come (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, but in the UK everyone aged 13-25 is seen as a hooligan. I'm 14 and in Britain (and law abiding in case you were wondering) and many people about 40+yo will cross the road to avoid me, just in case I decide to pull a knife on them. I could see cameras like these telling me (and people like me) to clear off just for walking around and seeming menacing.
Also, to add to the growing list of stupid laws in Britan, in the town where I live you can be fined for caught with hood up in the high street. In all weathers.
Re:I, For One (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speaking of tracking.... (Score:3, Interesting)
https://www.indiana.edu/~phishing/browser-recon/ [indiana.edu]
Re:that's not all there is (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I, For One (Score:3, Interesting)
Talk about a straw man.
Actually, it's the escalation of the comment to killing that's the "straw man". The parent's point was that "lawlessness" includes not just murder and other awful crimes, but also such things as littering. A blanket statement that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated" isn't just saying that murderers shoult be punished to the extreme; it's also suggesting that litterers should receive an extreme punishment. And this is the crux of the problem.
For example, like 80-90% of American men (depending on which survey you've read), I currently have a small "Swiss Army" pocketknife in my pocket. In most of the US, this is illegal, since it's a "concealed weapon". I carry it because, well, I use it several times per day. It's light, it's no effort to carry, and it's useful. I've never used it to harm a person (not even myself
And this isn't at all a facetious or extreme example. A curious PR campaign that appeared here (Massachusetts) last year was about the installation of metal detectors in the doors of courthouses around the state. Since this was done, they have reported over 10,000 confiscated weapons per year from people entering the courthouses. This has been bandied about a lot to "educate" people to the lawlessness of the low-life parts of our population who end up in the courthouses.
But a few months ago, I heard an interest radio interview. The radio guy was talking to a few law-enforcement people about the problem, and started probing to find out just what sort of weapons all these people were trying to sneak into the courthouses. The law guys obviously didn't want to give the details, but the radio guy finally got it out of them: Almost all the "weapons" were pocket knives, "of the Swiss Army type".
So yes, the law-enforcement people in this supposedly liberal state are making a big fuss over people carrying 10,000 weapons per year into the courthouses, and they're talking about small pocketknives. They mean people like me, and they do consider my pocketknife a "weapon". When you say that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated", in this state you're not just talking about murderers. You are also saying that I'm a lawless criminal and my small pocketknife is a criminal weapon that should not be tolerated.
This is really what the UK cameras are all about, too, when it comes down to it. Yes, we like the idea of murderers, robbers and rapists being caught and punished. But we're not too comfortable with the idea that, if we whip out a Swiss Army knife to slice open one of those damned "clamshell" packages, we risk arrest and fines or imprisonment for carrying a concealed weapon.
(And the small 1-inch blade on my knife is a good tool for that sort of awful packaging. It's the safest portable tool I know to attack them with. I do wish it were legal, but until the law changes, I'll probably continue to be a concealed-weapon-carrying criminal, as will most American men and around half the women.
Re:I don't think this is that bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the two are probably quite related. Littering shows a deep disrespect for the outside world, and litterers probably have tendencies to other antisocial crimes. Also, have you seen thugs and violent criminals out in public? They are constantly littering - perhaps the worst litterers I have ever seen.
I think there's something to be said for the "broken windows-esque" idea that a society that does not permit littering and anti-social behaviour, will also not tolerate violence and other more extreme forms of anti-social behaviour. It's also amazing how many violent criminals get picked up because they break smaller laws - like speeding or fare evasion - where they otherwise would never have been caught.
Re:V says... (Score:3, Interesting)
No shit Sherlock. I'd love to watch you explaining to the founding fathers that a republic is in fact NOT a type of democracy. It would make for an amusing afternoon.
This coming from the idiot who managed not to realize that my sig states "I am not an American". Perhaps YOU should stay off these forums until you've surpassed the literacy standards of an 8 year old.