Chicago's Camera Network Is Everywhere 327
DesScorp writes "Over the past few years, the City of Chicago has installed video cameras all over the city. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the city has not only installed its own cameras for law enforcement purposes, but with the aid of IBM, has built a network that possibly links thousands of video surveillance cameras all over Chicago. Possibly, because the city refuses to confirm just how many cameras are in the network. Critics say that Chicago is becoming the city of Big Brother. 'The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more—police won't say how many—that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools, subway stations, housing projects and elsewhere. Even home owners can contribute camera feeds. Rajiv Shah, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied the issue, estimates that 15,000 cameras have been connected in what the city calls Operation Virtual Shield, its fiber-optic video-network loop.' There are so many camera feeds coming in that police and officials can't monitor them all, but when alerted to a situation, can zoom in on the area affected. The ACLU has requested a total number of video feeds and cameras, but as of yet, this information has not been supplied."
city of big brother? (Score:3, Insightful)
London has been that way for years.
Use it or Lose it (Score:4, Insightful)
They're going to have to disclose them, sooner or later, if they want to use them as evidence.
With the cameras, wireless technology, and storage so cheap, I've got to think Chicago won't be the first. Some areas in Philly sure could use something like that.
The SBIR program issued several requests to do something similar in Bagdad, although I don't know if it ever got done.
They wanted the ability to see a car of bad-guys do something, and follow them in reverse-time back to their hideout.
A new stimulus program? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How does this compare to London? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:city of big brother? (Score:3, Insightful)
In that case... (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, let me mount a camera pointed at your house. I'll be able to watch you come and go, I'll know when you're at home and when you're away, I'll sometimes catch glimpses of what you're doing through the windows, I can watch you in your sweaty glory while you're mowing your lawn, I can watch your friends and family when they come over (yay, Uncle Bob is there!), I'll know whenever you get a package from Amazon, with good enough resolution, I can probably even see who some of your mail is from. For good measure, I'll even record it all in case I want to go back later and watch something interesting.
Wouldn't that be great? You'd be able to rest easy while I'm always watching, knowing that you don't have to worry about being robbed.
Scary if "The Man" does it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Smash em. (Score:5, Insightful)
You were at your finest when you told us (Brits) where to stick it. You seem to have lost your way a bit since, unfortunately. You should try and rediscover that spirit and turf out the current lot of people trying to control your lives. Don't be fooled into thinking because they say their your countrymen it makes a difference to whether or not they can tell you what to do. It all still comes down to what you're willing to stand for.
Re:In that case... (Score:4, Insightful)
...says the Anonymous Coward.
Re:In that case... (Score:4, Insightful)
I really wouldn't mind that. If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I don't have to worry about being arrested.
Yeah, because nobody innocent has ever been arrested.
Why would someone be AGAINST security cameras being pointed at their property, when other people pay hefty sums to set them up for security?
Maybe because they value their privacy more than the value the "security" of video recording?
What pray-tell, directly disadvantages the average citizen if they were to be watched at all times?
I guess that depends on how good looking your wife is and what sexual positions you use ;)
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Although if I lived in Chicago, I would probably welcome greater surveillance as a deterrent to violent crime.
Might prove cheaper and more effective to end their obnoxious and unconstitutional ban on private handgun ownership.
Just sayin'
Re:In that case... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if you want to do something illegal? What if something you do is made illegal? What if you want to do something that isn't illegal but is disliked or held against you by others, including those in power. What if the government starts doing things that you disapprove of and you want to discuss it with people but you know everywhere you go and everyone who comes round is monitored and recorded. What if you have an affair? What if your partner has an affair? What if a policeman has a grudge against you? What if the minimum wage lad paid to watch the cameras has a grudge against you? What about when all these things don't apply only to you, but to your neighbours and your friends and your family until everyone is living with the knowledge that they're being watched all the time or at any time? Do you think the climate of fear and of being judged the whole time wouldn't stifle life? Look at what has gone on in even such a blessed country as the USA just in the last half-decade and consider the use constant surveillance would make if the government wasn't your friend (or more precisely, if you didn't consider the government your friend).
You acknowledge that the cameras grant power to the authorities. Consider also that the abuse of authority proceeds to whatever extent it is able to get away with. Permit authority to establish increased power over yourself, and expect that power to be taken advantage of.
If you want to understand why many of us dislike the cameras, just realise that we (a) consider the removal of our privacy to be a threat to our lives and freedom, and (b) are the sort of people who are always looking over our shoulder at history and seeing what dark periods we have had to fight our way out of each time we allowed the steady encroachment of forces establishing power over ourselves.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Try the 2nd and 14th amendments of the United States Constitution.
The real infringement on your rights... (Score:4, Insightful)
... is not the cameras. In the US, wherever you go there are armed police who are allowed to shoot and kill you, for any reason they feel like. Fix that, then worry about CCTV cameras.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed! Private handgun ownership is a great deterrent to violence.
In Fairbanks we all own handguns. We even have the right to carry them concealed (no permit required) anywhere w/ exception of federal buildings such as the courthouse, banks, & schools.
Point being, we have very little violent crime. Fairbanks is pretty redneck w/ no gangs. I doubt if gang members would last long here. Thinking of robbing everyone's favorite liquor store? You won't even make it out the door ..
I seriously doubt handgun ownership will work in Chicago though. I would imagine the population would be reduced dramatically overnight if handguns were permitted, which would also solve most of your crime problem, after you clean up the spent carcasses.
Re:In that case... (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple. There are many things that are not illegal but are still problematic.
Your wife wants to know why you have been getting home so late every night. She checks the cameras at your office and sees you drive out at 5:00, then park in front of a pay-by-the-hour hotel and meet a woman who is old enough to be your daughter.
Your boss asks why you were late to work. You tell him or her that traffic was bad. Your boss looks at the traffic records and sees that you left home late because you overslept.
You have a car accident because someone pulls out in front of you. The accident is not caught on tape, but about half a minute earlier, you are caught on tape traveling over the speed limit. The person who pulled out in front of you manages to get you blamed for the wreck even though you were not speeding at the time.
You are a pizza delivery boy. You deliver a pizza to the house of a mob informant. The mob informant is later found dead. The only person seen on video approaching the house (from the front) is you. There are no cameras pointing to the back of the house and no signs of forced entry. Guess who gets charged.
Someone gets murdered in a neighborhood along your drive to work. The neighbors see a person who vaguely matches your description get into a white minivan of unknown make. You also drive a white minivan. You happen to drive past a security camera that puts you a block away from the scene of the crime shortly afterwards, traveling away from the location of the crime. You have no connection with the victim, so you would not have been a suspect otherwise, but now the witnesses pick out your car in a lineup and they arrest you under suspicion of murder.
Put simply, there's a reason that you have to have probable cause for searches and seizures. It is specifically to prevent people who are unlikely to have any association with the crime from being charged due to random circumstance. Cameras significantly increase the risk of random circumstantial evidence being available and being introduced.
Also, the temptation is too great to use these sorts of technologies to try to have perfect prosecution of every crime down to the smallest infraction, which invariably causes serious harm to society. For example, in Eureka, CA, you aren't allowed to kiss a woman if you are wearing a mustache. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of these silly laws on the books. Were it possible to record everybody doing everything, then everyone would have record of these pointless crimes. Make the wrong person mad and suddenly they can abuse that to fine you $150 for picking up litter in a national forest in New Hampshire... or worse, fine you for driving your car on a Sunday. (Apparently, operating machinery on a Sunday is illegal in New Hampshire.)
And surveillance doesn't generally prevent crime. It just shifts it to some other place that isn't being watched so carefully. It's just like burglar alarms. They don't prevent people from breaking into houses. They just cause people to break into other people's houses. Unless they are ubiquitous, they are useless, and if they are ubiquitous, they are also prone to abuse.
Finally, people tend to act in ways that mimic how they are expected to act. If you treat people like they are law-abiding citizens, most non-sociopaths will behave accordingly. If you treat people like criminals, a fair number of people without any natural criminal tendency will tend to act the part. Don't believe me? Check out the Stanford prison experiment. Thus, a surveillance society is likely to result in a higher crime rate in the long run, not a lower rate.
Re:Smash em. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your views are fine. Socialism can work well. Capitalism can also work well. But socialist, capitalist or anything else, we all agree that corruption is bad. What you have in the USA today is a debased form of capitalism. What's capitalist about giving enormous amounts of public money to the banks for example? Nothing. The manipulations the federal reserve engages in... You're better off with a low-corruption government that carries out socialist policies than you are with a corrupt "capitalist" one. Because the more it is corrupt, the less it is a model of a workable system (socialism or capitalism) and the more it is a model of redirecting wealth to the powerful. Whatever your preference for economic structuring, you need to clean house. It's true here in the UK and I think it's true in the USA also. And to do this, we need to first make sure we have the power to do so and by preventing the corrupt from having too much power over us.
Then you're free to build a capitalist utopia. (I recommend yoinking a socialist health care model, though. You're paying through the nose with your insurance based model).
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Smash em. (Score:3, Insightful)
Racist? How so?
Conservatives would like to know the answer to that, too.
Yes, unfortunately, questioning Bush got similar critiques. Seems the "my way is right, it's so obvious... you don' think it's right so you must be [insert something bad]!" sentiment is unfortunately rampant. Which makes it wrong no matter which group employs it. Including now. "Bush did it" and "Obama did it" aren't excuses, they're fingers.
Re:In that case... (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's okay for the government to watch us on the public street, then it's equally okay for us to watch THEM with our handycams.
That's not going far enough. If these are public areas, and the cameras are paid for with public money, we should be able to watch them, or whatever we want, on *their* cameras.
Re:In that case... (Score:4, Insightful)
I normally disagree with you vehemently on political issues, but I find it interesting that I'm pretty much in full agreement with you on this. I'm ok with every citizen being under surveillance - under one condition, and one condition only: those in power are subject to the same surveillance, and the surveillance is accessible by everyone, freely, with no restrictions.
The fact that some people seem to think that cops and politicians are somehow morally above the fray, never failing, and too important to be under constant scrutiny is astounding to me. Scratch that - it scares the living daylights out of me. These are the same people who have no problem imprisoning others based on hear say, and cops beating someone up because someone didn't look right.
Re:Smash em. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Smash em. (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect that may well be true. And this is speaking as someone who used to work in a socialist health care system and approves of the model. I think (though its hard to tell when the proposal is over a thousand pages long) that what is being pushed in this bill is not socialist health care, nor privatised health care, but public money being ploughed into privatised health care for whatever sense that means. And not in a simple sense of a government hiring private companies to fulfill needs, but in a byzantine "where did the money go" sort of subsidisation of private industry.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Point being, we have very little violent crime.
Yes, but you have man-eating grizzly bears, crazy maverick lipstick pigs, 10 months of winter and 2 months of cold weather. None of the criminals are desperate enough to live there.
Re:So (Score:3, Insightful)
So I'm curious how a city wide effort would work and what its results are.
Look at London - the effect appears to be that only a very small subset of crimes are affected, and those are primarily moved to 'blind-spots' between cameras. All the other sorts of crime continues on business as usual. Some will say that this happens because the criminals know that 99.99% of the time no-one is watching the cameras anyway. But, to me at least, that just seems like one more step down the slipperly slope. The same people were the ones saying that just having cameras would be a pancea itself - ultimately they will get to the point of arguing that the only way a bunch of cameras can make a significant difference is if we implement an extremely authoritarian regime to back them up and if that's the case they might as well just come clean and say big brother is the end game instead of boiling our frog.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:5, Insightful)
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. [archives.gov]
Yes, the 2nd Amendment does, in fact, state that a "well regulated militia" is the justification for this Amendment, but keep in mind that this was a radical concept when it was written. As well as stating the right they wanted to grant, they also included their justification for granting this right to the people. They then state that this militia is "necessary to the security of a free State." Consider for a moment what environment this amendment was written in: the framers of the Constitution were essentially planning treason against the Crown. Without the right to own firearms, there would have been no Revolutionary War because the only people that could possibly have fought would have been the British Army....makes for a very short Revolution, don't you think? To them, it was essential that free men have the right to keep and own weapons so that the people could replace the government when/if it became corrupt or oppressive, just like they did. Unfortunately, after 200 years, we have decided this only means that it is necessary to have a military force to protect the nation from foreign invaders, which is, of course, exactly what our politicians want.
The text of the 2nd Amendment continues, "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms..." Not "the Army" nor even "the Militia", but the people. This is about as clear as it can get: this right is explicitly granted to the people of the United States of America. Seems to me if Washington and Jefferson and Franklin, etc., had intended this only to apply to militia members, they would have said, "...the right of the MILITIA to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is so difficult for people to understand?!?!?!
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Get Elected?
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In that case... (Score:2, Insightful)
I really wouldn't mind that. If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I don't have to worry about being arrested.
As somebody who has been arrested while doing nothing wrong, fuck you. That's all I can/will say.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately. (Score:4, Insightful)
You were at your finest when you told us (Brits) where to stick it. You seem to have lost your way a bit since, unfortunately. You should try and rediscover that spirit and turf out the current lot of people trying to control your lives. Don't be fooled into thinking because they say their your countrymen it makes a difference to whether or not they can tell you what to do. It all still comes down to what you're willing to stand for.
Unfortunately, half the country hates corporations trying to control their lives, and the other half hates the government trying to control their lives, and so we've caught up into so much finger pointing that both corporations and the government control our lives.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does it have to be stated anywhere? Owning and even operating (responsibly) a handgun doesn't interfere with anyone else's rights on any front.
Therefore you must come up with a reason why the constitution allows the government to restrict ownership since nowhere in the constitution is the power to regulate firearms ownership explicitly stated, and the 10th amendment specifically forbids the government from any powers not listed.
Also, the 2nd amendment further explicitly forbids the government from restricting ownership AND use of firearms.
Also, the 10th amendment probably means that the 2nd amendment applies to the states as well, considering the wording. And if it doesn't, the 14th does.
So, you'd better have a pretty solid legal theory that allows the government to do such.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:1, Insightful)
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Obama was not part of what is known as "Chicago machine politics".
Yeah, right. That's why Obama bought land for his Chicago house from Antoin "Tony" Rezko, at a ridiculously low price, with below market financing. Rezko was later sent to jail for corruption, fraud & bribery.
Re:That's what you get with corrupt democrats... (Score:3, Insightful)
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is so difficult for people to understand?!?!?!
The part where their kid gets shot by someone bearing arms. (mods, please note, I'm not arguing a point about the constitution, I'm answering a question. Even though it was probably meant to be rhetorical, the question has real answers)
That's not a real answer. At least, it's not a very compelling one. The number of kids who are killed by firearms every year is very small. In 2006, for example (the most recent year for which the CDC's database [cdc.gov] has published data), 409 kids ages 0-14 were killed by firearms. That number includes deliberate homicides, suicides, accidents and deaths with undetermined intentions.
Of course, those 409 deaths are individually tragic, but compared to all of the other things that kill kids, firearms don't contribute significantly to child mortality. Heck, swimming pools kill nearly twice as many kids as firearms, and swimming pools are far, far behind automobiles. It should also be kept in mind that 3/4 of those deaths were homicides, mostly by adults, so even if there were no guns available many, perhaps most, of those children still would have died.
Weighed against the right of free people to defend themselves and their children, and their right to retain arms as a last-ditch defense against tyranny and invasion, those regrettable deaths simply don't measure up. Indeed it's not even unlikely that removing firearms from the hands of law-abiding citizens might increase the deaths of children whose parents are unable to defend them. Even the Brady Campaign acknowledges that approximately 100,000 Americans defend themselves with a firearm each year, and other studies put the number up to 25 times higher.
Re:In that case... (Score:1, Insightful)
> You'd be able to rest easy while I'm always watching, knowing that you don't have to worry about being robbed.
In fact, you would have to worry about being robbed.
The police being able to monitor everything via CCTV is a manna for organized crime. For example, for robber gangs.
One of the main problems that robber gangs face is knowing when a house is empty. Empty houses are easier and safer to rob. Once the police has a large enough surveillance system that can monitor all the houses, a robber gang only needs a man in the inside, with access to the surveillance system, to be able to monitor their target houses and make sure they only attack when the houses are empty. Effectively and efficient. From the surveillance system they can study your life patterns - when you're in or out, when your neighbours are in or out, and plan the best moment to get to your home and rob it with the least possible disruption. And since they know exactly how the surveillance system works, they'll make sure they won't be spotted during the act, can't be recognized on camera and can't be tracked back.
For serious organized crime, such as mafia families, police CCTV monitoring of an entire city is an absolute dream. With a couple of people in the inside, they can track, harass and threaten anyone in the city. They will know all about it - while you know nothing about them. They will be ideally placed to threaten you or your family or your pets or anything you love to force you to do what they want you to do. And you don't have much chances of fighting back, because they can monitor you and your family every single second of your life. Think a traditional godfather was powerful ? They were pussycats compared to the new godfathers that await us in the new no-privacy world.
Of course, once the monitoring infrastructure is in place, it goes without saying that is a great enabler for any sort of repressive regime. European dictatorships in the 1900s had to employ massive amounts of staff to monitor, control and threaten opposition. Controlling an opposition trouble-maker was hard; someone had to physically follow them, find out where they were going and who they were meeting, keep paper records, wade through massive amounts of paperworks to understand the grass-root opposition organizations. You probably needed a repressive police agent for every two or three potential freedom, opposition persons you wanted to control. With new technologies and monitoring infrastructure in place, the cost of repressive regimes is drastically diminished. A single repressive police agent can probably control hundreds of people. You can control and oppress an entire nation with a handful of policemen.
So, you don't want to put in place a surveillance society, because no matter how nicely it is presented, the entire system is just there waiting to be abused, and seriously abused.
Re:A new stimulus program? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your Walmart is a radically different place than any Walmart that I've ever had the misfortune of wandering into. Typically, a chick bending over in Walmart requires the use of safety harnesses, traffic cops, and hazmat gear.