Well, you may call it surveillance cams but it may not be a bad thing. But as a Chinese, I never feel stressful under these cams in China, but feel unsafe all the time walking down the street in SF in the night after moving to US.
There's kinda of an art to walking at night in San Francisco.
Walk with purpose. Don't look like an easy target. Don't park way out of the way to save a few dollars in parking. Don't just expect Cops are paid to protect you--in all reality, they do the bare minimum.
Is it really camera that made the difference?
I had a motorbike stolen in Beijing. Police's answer? "Sorry, the camera didn't work".
A friend forget his phone in a taxi (who run away, then turned it off when he tried to call it). He left the taxi at a precise crossing with cameras. He went to the police station a very soon after. Police answer? "We couldn't identify the taxi".
I have a few more stories like this (like wallet and phones stolen at the ATM). Yes all in China.
And I'm not talking about the multiple scams that are very specific to china.
Maybe public surveillance camera help preventing armed attacks (but it's never really been a thing in China anyway, and in serious decline in the world in general) and I doubt they can do much more. As you say, purpose matters.
I don't believe crime stops with surveillance, it changes.
Edit: one thing I forgot to mention, I feel the Chinese state media are doing a very good job at not talking too much about the different crime/problems happening. Western media are doing pretty much the opposite. I think on that precise point, if other method than censorship were used, it's actually a pretty good thing and do make people feel safer.
> I feel the Chinese state media are doing a very good job at not talking too much about the different crime/problems happening. Western media are doing pretty much the opposite.
They're not doing the really opposite thing... many western media outlets tend to focus on crimes committed by migrants or people with a migration background. No one cares if a German beats up his wife, but if a man of turkish descent beats up his wife, the tabloid frontpages are filled with "criminal scum beats up his wife". Crimes committed by foreigners generate clicks and buys, and this even more so given the massive right-wing swing in the western world.
In the UK, a shop that I ran was robbed. The police said the camera outside the ship was mobile, and happened to be pointing the other way at the time.
In China, I had a traffic altercation (between me, a pedestrian, and some people who were in a car at the time the altercation started). The police found the video footage and watched it within an hour after I reported it.
Are you non-east-Asian? Chinese police answers to foreigners so quickly that jokes about foreigner-aided-reporting-to-police-as-a-service are circulated.
The point about many of these privacy related issues is that purpose can change.
Almost nobody is arguing that it's not a good goal to feel safe on the streets. But there can be an argument made that cameras don't actually increase safety (though they can increase the illusion of safety) and the more important point: Increased safety is only one purpose of many of these cameras. Even if it is the only one right now, all it takes is a shift in political climate, and suddenly they can be used for many other things without, and this is the important bit, changing anything about the cameras themselves.
To take up your example of being feeling safe as a Chinese in China (but don't misunderstand me, this is exactly the same in any other country!) probably works because you are not interesting to the people controlling the cameras (and the other surveillance ). But once you aren't aligned with their interests anymore and you start making trouble, these cameras give your opponents tremendous power over you.
Privacy doesn't matter if you are aligned with those in power. The power imbalance it perpetuates only starts mattering as you move away from the center of society.
In Norway where surveillance cameras are still rare and strictly regulated, I can go anywhere and feel safe. That includes a park where drug addicts used to get and sell drugs. For few years I often passed it during the day and night. At worst somebody would ask if I wanted some substance.
So I suspect violence is affected much more by culture/policy than cameras. Surely cameras may help, but for them to work one already needs a functional society. For example, cameras do not work when one can bribe police/courts to remove/ignore video evidence, like it happens in Russia.
I mean... Honestly, if I were Chinese - given the governments past I'd feel safer in SF than China[1][2][3]. Basically, it's similar to Iran or other states where you have to praise the government publicly & constantly - or they will find you, capture you, and probably imprison or kill you.
I think one interesting thing I saw at GTC two years ago, was a Chinese firm was building software to watch / track where everyone went through a city. Including what they were doing. This is not a "safety tool" it's a surveillance tool. Sure it can be used to _maybe_ track down attackers after it happens. However, it can be used more effectively to track potential or known dissidents or track what the average person in the population is doing.
as long as it cannot be used in divorce court, or by you doctor to check if you haven't been to the donut shop and such private matters.
for crime it's great, but if you're a dissident they also know where you've been, or hackers can sell your schedule to unscrupulous people if it's not secure.
"Hikvision has been expanding in the Americas where it now has 8.5% of the market, putting it in the No.2 position. The Chinese government owns a 42% stake of Hikvision, according to a piece by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month on the security concerns of Chinese-made cameras being used in the US."
Surely their cameras and hence their operations are a prime target for the world´s intelligence services and organized crime. What is known about how the company deals with developing sensitive products in this very hostile environment?
Most of these cheap Chinese cams suffer from the usual IoT issues: Security is an afterthought/hardcoded admin credentials [0] if the user even bothered to properly set them up in the first place. Shodan.io has plenty unsecured cams, from baby cams to security cams in shops [1]. Interesting way to kill a couple of hours, if you disregard the creep factor.
As such I doubt worlds intelligence services, or organized crime, need to target any of these cheap webcam companies specifically.
Chinese firm learns how the foreign firm operates it and clones its technology and practices, including any patented tech. Then the Chinese government changes its laws/policy to restrict foreign companies' access to the country's market to privilege the Chinese firm.
Err, no. It started in the 1960s. There were massive city-wide programmes up and running well before Blair.
The IRA (or their reactionary counterparts) are who you should blame for the amount of CCTV in London, but it all comes from the same place. If it wasn't them, it would have been something else.
My first memory of surveillance in any kind of large-scale was in the early 1990s, well before Tony Blair. It was when the Met police put up the "Ring of Steel" around the centre of London to stop the volunteers blowing things up.
Anyway, too much surveillance bad. Unless they use it to find your phone, in which case too much surveillance good. One might think it's somewhat of a nuanced issue!
I just tried to search for how many surveillance cameras there already are in the UK, and by the time I got to "number of surveillance cameras", Safari popped up a Siri suggestion for the London Wikipedia article... http://mayoyo.tokyo/jK7.jpg
If anyone is curious "The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimates there are between 4-5.9 million cameras"
And yet, when I was the victim of a hit and run incident in central London we were unable to locate a single working camera that could provide any usable evidence.
The vast majority either do not work, or are privately owned and when enquired about (difficult in itself as there are so many parties to contact once the owner is identified, and they likely do not have direct access and need to speak to someone else) have extremely useless retention periods that meant no footage survived enough time to request it.
China and surveillance, these two words form a piece of a news, if you change it to other countries, then it's not news. Western media is very objective.
It'll be combined with recent substantial efforts toward facial and voice recognition systems in China. When a hit occurs, it'll be recorded for time and place etc.
Well if they're using the same 2013-compiled firmware as the millions of IP cameras China dumps on Amazon, eBay, etc, I imagine it'll be hackers monitoring them.
Looks like it's mostly private cameras? Those probably won't be monitored at all, in practice; most private security cameras aren't. Back when they used tapes, a surprising number weren't even actually hooked up to record.
They will usually take 3 years to figure out they can't and then it's time to junk the 625 million cams and upgrade to the next dumb solution. Your basic tech industry employment guarantee scheme.
Chinese government utilize some pretty good machine learning to analyze and monitor those cameras. Techniques include:
- Vehicle plates recognition. They are automatically captured and mapped. Chinese police can get the complete historical routes of any car around major cities in real time just buy entering the number.
- Activity detection. If something interesting is happening in front of a camera (e.g. two people running in front of a camera middle of the night), AI detects that and pops the view up in front of humans for further action. Because less than 1% of cameras contain any useful info at any moment, they don't need that many humans to watch those cameras live.
- Face recognition. For many cameras, Face capture and recognition is running live and report any criminals or targeted personnel to police.
- Footage markup. If police need to go through the camera footage manually, the recording playback can skip the uninteresting parts to save time.
Combining these with unrestricted real-time integration of other data sources, such as real time GPS from mobile apps, cell tower call history from telecoms, network traffic inspection and remote spying capabilities, Chinese police forces can pretty much find anybody very quickly. They are also known to have state of the art big data platforms developed in house.
One anecdote I read: Somebody killed a person in a small city middle of the night, removed battery of his phone, ran to his car parked on street, drove a couple of hundred miles to another middle sized city, only to be caught in a motel next morning. How? Complete camera footage covering his walking path, vehicle plate tracking all the way to his destination, and motel check-in system that is also integrated with police.
Somewhat related, be very careful buying IP cameras. A lot have been shown to have backdoors to different countries. Trying to find a good PTZ outdoor IP camera has been a mine field since I'll find one and then a reviewer will look at the traffic it's sending and see very very sketchy stuff. My friend bought a hidden camera for his house only to see it was sending video traffic to china.
This is why I keep a bunch of equipment by default on an isolated subnet where the router drops all packets to the outside world. Doesn't matter what the device is trying to do.
Connecting to these devices requires one level of indirect - where I connect first to an internal machine that can send packets to/from the hidden subnet.
48 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 97.3 ms ] threadPurpose matters.
Walk with purpose. Don't look like an easy target. Don't park way out of the way to save a few dollars in parking. Don't just expect Cops are paid to protect you--in all reality, they do the bare minimum.
Yea--it's not fair.
Maybe public surveillance camera help preventing armed attacks (but it's never really been a thing in China anyway, and in serious decline in the world in general) and I doubt they can do much more. As you say, purpose matters.
I don't believe crime stops with surveillance, it changes.
Edit: one thing I forgot to mention, I feel the Chinese state media are doing a very good job at not talking too much about the different crime/problems happening. Western media are doing pretty much the opposite. I think on that precise point, if other method than censorship were used, it's actually a pretty good thing and do make people feel safer.
They're not doing the really opposite thing... many western media outlets tend to focus on crimes committed by migrants or people with a migration background. No one cares if a German beats up his wife, but if a man of turkish descent beats up his wife, the tabloid frontpages are filled with "criminal scum beats up his wife". Crimes committed by foreigners generate clicks and buys, and this even more so given the massive right-wing swing in the western world.
In China, I had a traffic altercation (between me, a pedestrian, and some people who were in a car at the time the altercation started). The police found the video footage and watched it within an hour after I reported it.
My point: the plural of anecdote is not data.
The point about many of these privacy related issues is that purpose can change.
Almost nobody is arguing that it's not a good goal to feel safe on the streets. But there can be an argument made that cameras don't actually increase safety (though they can increase the illusion of safety) and the more important point: Increased safety is only one purpose of many of these cameras. Even if it is the only one right now, all it takes is a shift in political climate, and suddenly they can be used for many other things without, and this is the important bit, changing anything about the cameras themselves.
To take up your example of being feeling safe as a Chinese in China (but don't misunderstand me, this is exactly the same in any other country!) probably works because you are not interesting to the people controlling the cameras (and the other surveillance ). But once you aren't aligned with their interests anymore and you start making trouble, these cameras give your opponents tremendous power over you.
Privacy doesn't matter if you are aligned with those in power. The power imbalance it perpetuates only starts mattering as you move away from the center of society.
So I suspect violence is affected much more by culture/policy than cameras. Surely cameras may help, but for them to work one already needs a functional society. For example, cameras do not work when one can bribe police/courts to remove/ignore video evidence, like it happens in Russia.
I think one interesting thing I saw at GTC two years ago, was a Chinese firm was building software to watch / track where everyone went through a city. Including what they were doing. This is not a "safety tool" it's a surveillance tool. Sure it can be used to _maybe_ track down attackers after it happens. However, it can be used more effectively to track potential or known dissidents or track what the average person in the population is doing.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/china-billio...
[2] https://thediplomat.com/2016/06/china-the-us-and-extrajudici...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/17/china-behaving...
for crime it's great, but if you're a dissident they also know where you've been, or hackers can sell your schedule to unscrupulous people if it's not secure.
"Hikvision has been expanding in the Americas where it now has 8.5% of the market, putting it in the No.2 position. The Chinese government owns a 42% stake of Hikvision, according to a piece by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month on the security concerns of Chinese-made cameras being used in the US."
Article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-ch...
As such I doubt worlds intelligence services, or organized crime, need to target any of these cheap webcam companies specifically.
[0] https://www.ispyconnect.com/userguide-default-passwords.aspx
[1] https://www.shodan.io/explore/tag/webcam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Early_years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Espionage_and_security_...
There are abundant parallels between the Huawei situation a few years ago and the Hikvision situation now.
The IRA (or their reactionary counterparts) are who you should blame for the amount of CCTV in London, but it all comes from the same place. If it wasn't them, it would have been something else.
My first memory of surveillance in any kind of large-scale was in the early 1990s, well before Tony Blair. It was when the Met police put up the "Ring of Steel" around the centre of London to stop the volunteers blowing things up.
Anyway, too much surveillance bad. Unless they use it to find your phone, in which case too much surveillance good. One might think it's somewhat of a nuanced issue!
If anyone is curious "The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimates there are between 4-5.9 million cameras"
Given the population, there are actually more cameras per UK citizen than there are per Chinese citizen.
The vast majority either do not work, or are privately owned and when enquired about (difficult in itself as there are so many parties to contact once the owner is identified, and they likely do not have direct access and need to speak to someone else) have extremely useless retention periods that meant no footage survived enough time to request it.
Will some AI monitor all the feeds and flag suspicious activities to the local authorities?
- Activity detection. If something interesting is happening in front of a camera (e.g. two people running in front of a camera middle of the night), AI detects that and pops the view up in front of humans for further action. Because less than 1% of cameras contain any useful info at any moment, they don't need that many humans to watch those cameras live.
- Face recognition. For many cameras, Face capture and recognition is running live and report any criminals or targeted personnel to police.
- Footage markup. If police need to go through the camera footage manually, the recording playback can skip the uninteresting parts to save time.
Combining these with unrestricted real-time integration of other data sources, such as real time GPS from mobile apps, cell tower call history from telecoms, network traffic inspection and remote spying capabilities, Chinese police forces can pretty much find anybody very quickly. They are also known to have state of the art big data platforms developed in house.
One anecdote I read: Somebody killed a person in a small city middle of the night, removed battery of his phone, ran to his car parked on street, drove a couple of hundred miles to another middle sized city, only to be caught in a motel next morning. How? Complete camera footage covering his walking path, vehicle plate tracking all the way to his destination, and motel check-in system that is also integrated with police.
Connecting to these devices requires one level of indirect - where I connect first to an internal machine that can send packets to/from the hidden subnet.