Houston Expands Downtown Surveillance, Unsure If It Helps 60
SpaceGhost writes "The Associated Press reports that the Houston (Texas) Police will be adding 180 surveillance cameras in the downtown area, bringing the total to close to 1000. While most cover public areas (stadiums, theater district) the police suggest that Houston also has more 'critical infrastructure' (energy companies) than other cities. Interestingly AP points out that 'Officials say data is not kept to determine if the cameras are driving down crime.' Didn't London face the same issue?"
Might be for interesting research (Score:4, Insightful)
But I'm sure they'd never tie the data in to the "voluntary" DNA swabbing [nbcdfw.com] done last month.
Re:Houston, We Have a Problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is to sell surveillance equipment; have you been asleep for a decade?
The invested parties - police, politicians, journalists, arms dealers and church leaders all have a problem: Crime is on a long decreasing trend, and nobody knows why!
The police, to justify monstrous budgets, love surveillance gear. On the odd occasion it is useful for something other than catching shady cops, it makes for great TV. Great TV makes for proud citizens; and easy budget cycles. Journalists love great footage, so they can collect paycheques without working for it.
Politicians love police (from a certain distance) since they lend a sheen of goodness to their creepy incompetence.
This makes for easy pickings for the surveillance industry to sell boatloads of worthless crap to incompetents who have been trusted with your money. The last thing they need is some bearded hippy pointing out that it is all a scam.
Re:Who watches them (Score:2, Insightful)
While some folks are terrified/paranoid about NSA monitoring, the real story is there are two types of monitoring.
One is the real-time monitoring that google does. That's all keyword based so when I type in an e-mail about guitars, I get served up ads for guitars or music shops or something. That's the _evidence_ that people use to say the NSA is watching our every move. Except google isn't watching anybody in particular, they are just serving up ads based on typed words
The other type of monitoring occurs _after_ a crime happens, That's when the cops grab all the video evidence they can. The Steubenville rape case investigation occurred _after_ the crime. And here's the key point. It takes 10 to 100 investigators to examines all the texts and e-mails (or videos) gathered.
The paranoid conflate those two into this all-seeing, all-encompassing "They're watching everybody all the time."
They aren't. They can't.
Economics still rules. I can serve up specific ads without paying attention to everything the same way a therapist can pinpoint key phrases and say "Tell me more" without actually listening 100% of the time. When I do want to follow someone in real-time full-time, it takes an entire squad.
DHS reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Same as the justification for TSA. The bin Laden operation was a one shot deal. After it happened, no one would be able to hijack a fully-loaded (public) airplane and use it as a flying bomb. In fact, only 3 of the 4 planes hijacked on 9/11 were successful. Once we knew this wasn't your regular hijacking to Cuba, passengers responded.
But since we set up all these security lines and prevent people from bringing on shampoo and dangerous trinkets, then TSA is obviously the reason for our success.
Frankly, if we had door locks on airplane cabins, I suspect no one could take over an airplane even with box cutters now.
Re:Who watches them (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is that that criminals will see the cameras and decide not to commit the crime because there is too much risk of being caught.
What happens in the UK is that hooded tops, baseball caps and scarves became a very popular fashion choice, so that the cameras can't see who you are.
A common misconception (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who watches them (Score:4, Insightful)
The paranoid conflate those two into this all-seeing, all-encompassing "They're watching everybody all the time."
The realists know that because of the inexorable march of technology the two are converging. For example, automatic license plate readers which didn't exist when license plates were made a legal requirement are now so widespread that nearly every repoman has one on his dashboard feeding a centralized and permanent database. [nytimes.com]