A lot of people are uncomfortable with mass surveillance but there seems to be an unstoppable wave to implement it. Same with climate change. A lot of people want to do “something” but there s no will to really change things so we will just deal with the consequences in the future.
Get ready for a mix between 1984 and Brave New World.
Not to be glib, but going to your job is what is measured, and taken implicitly as approval for it all.
In the end it underlies their motives for finding ways to normalize the public to the social march we’ve been tapping our toes to: shuffling along to their businesses, propping up their immense gains.
Stop giving deference to aristocratic rhetoric if you actually care.
Most Americans support security cameras in public places:
>The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 18% of American Adults oppose the use of surveillance and security cameras in public places. Seventy percent (70%) support the use of such cameras. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.
The flip side to the public being surveilled, is the police and other organs of the state being hidden.
Can I make a prediction? I predict that within 10 years, all police officers will carry with them a little transponder that transmits a signal that disables the camera of any cell phone within a certain radius.
Think of the difference between the Vietnam war and the iraq war; during the Vietnam war the press was allowed to take full color images of the whole conflict, from the inside, showing the burning monks and children and so forth. In the Iraq war, we got a few blurry pictures from Wikileaks and look what happened to Assange. From the point of view of the state, us seeing what they are doing is a problem to be corrected, nothing more. And likewise if they don’t have total surveillance of us, it’s a problem to be solved.
That's the thing: A few people in government and private companies will have full information about citizenry whilst at the same fiercely protecting their own secrets.
I believe that it's fundamentally impossible to "roll back" the degree of surveillance in our global society in an effective way. Our technology is already converging to a near-total degree of surveillance. And it's going to accelerate, for example, auto-autos (self-driving cars) and the road infrastructure to support them will be able to develop a near-real-time history of everyone walking down the street.
We can't (I believe) prevent total surveillance but we can certainly control how the data are used, and we can set up systems that allow the data to be used without being abused. The system must be recursive. Whatever form the system takes, it shall necessarily have to be able to detect and correct its own self-abuses.
Agreed. How we can create laws. Weh also can't roll back the capability of people to steal things or kill each other so we have laws. For example I strongly believe that face recognition in public spaces should be outlawed with maybe a few (!) exceptions for law enforcement.
I know the article is about the US use case, but cities like London (in Europe) and Beijing (in Asia) fit most of the criteria you mention and are incredibly closely surveiled. I suspect that if someone wants to deploy mass survillance they are going to find reasons no matter the on-the-ground reality.
Too much crime? You need 24/7 surveillance to cut that. No crime to speak of? Let’s put cameras all over the place to keep it that way.
Banning guns worked so great in Chicago and Baltimore that they're considering investing in mass-surveillance to top it off.
I agree with you about educational programs but anything that shifts the power balance away from people and to the government (or "society" as the proponents of these things will say) is not going to help, it will just create a rift that makes full time criminality more attractive to marginalized people (e.g. London) or a dystopian nightmare (e.g. Xinjiang) that may have low crime but is a terrible place to live your life.
Whenever people start proposing things like mass surveillance, banning guns, or other things that are completely incompatible with cultural ideals (which those things are in the US) in order to solve a problem that should be a tip-off that a metric has become a target.
> completely incompatible with cultural ideals (which those things are in the US)
If anything's gonna change that, it'll be the current crop of kids coming up seeing shootings on the news, then having scary-real shooter drills every year at school. With maybe a side of increased youth suicide rates meaning more of then know someone who shot themselves. It's even spooking the kids in fairly red areas, excepting pretty much exclusively the kids of, ah, very red parents with the gun-related bumper stickers to prove it.
FWIW I think the drills are doing a lot more (psychological) harm than they're worth, but one side-effect may be a sharp change in our national attitudes toward guns, over the next 30-50 years or so.
I feel that shift would be a mistake and be conflating things that are not related. Teen suicide rates have to do with teens feeling terrible about life and killing themselves. The gun is just the messenger in this case. A belt and a tall closet works too.
I have lived in parts of the country where there are extremely high rates of gun ownership and 0 problems with gun shootings. Then there are areas with much less gun ownership and very high shooting rates. Those areas, to be blunt, are generally low-income PoC neighborhoods. The leadership at the country/state/city level won't admit they don't give a shit about poor brown people. They want to blame the troubles of the neighborhoods on firearms and take those away.
I have a theory that mass shootings are a similar situation, that there is a shift in the mental health of people that is causing them to want to go kill a bunch of people just to kill a bunch of people. It's currently fashionable in certain (typically) young white disillusioned male communities to go buy a gun and go kill a bunch of people. If there were no guns, would that problem disappear? Or would they just use the kinetic energy of 4000 lbs traveling at 25-60 mph to accomplish the same thing, like in Paris? I don't know.
I'm not sure if those statistics matters for the gun control that is discussed in the US. A single-shot hunting rifle/old revolver can be used for suicide just as easily as an AR-15. The latter would be banned with many forms of proposed gun control, the former I do not see ever being banned/legislated-away in the US.
Or would they just use the kinetic energy of 4000 lbs traveling at 25-60 mph to accomplish the same thing, like in Paris? I don't know.
After you saying "conflating things that are not related" you hand-wavingly compare "young white disillusioned males" shooting up a school with .. a 37 year old French-Tunisian on a watch list of authorities, pledging allegiance to ISIS and driving a van filled with explosives into a crowd.
That is not "accomplishing the same thing" or in the same way or by the same people.
Find a "school shooting" equivalent - after all if that was equivalent it ought to be happening already in USA even with guns available, oughtn't it? More high schoolers have access to vehicles than guns right now. How can you say "I don't know" if it would happen when it .. is not happening?
Sorry, "are a similar situation" makes no sense at all and I have no idea why I said that. I think I meant to say something more like "I have a theory that our mass shooting epidemic originates from a shift in the general mental health of our population which causes some members of that pop. to want to go kill a bunch of people just to kill a bunch of people"
To respond to your comment, I'm talking about methods to go kill a bunch of people. One of those is using guns, and it seems to be the favored method in the US at the moment. However, it is not the only way, the Paris attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack), was more deadly than any mass shooting I'm aware of in the US and used a lorry.
Nearly everyone over 16 in the US has access to a tremendously deadly weapon in the form of their car. I'd argue it's easier to go run over a ton of people with your car than go buy a gun to shoot them up. My theory is that it is fashionable with the psychos of the moment to use a gun. If you take the guns away, what happens? Do they go to cars/trucks, do we have a return to fertilizer pickup bombings? I'm not sure, and that's what worries me about gun control measures -- no attempt to address root cause. Humans have been coming up with ways to kill each other forever. We legislate away one -- cool. What about the other ways? Haven't addressed the problem of people wanting to go kill a bunch of other humans for seemingly no reason at all beyond fame/notoriety (what seems to be many of the shooters' motives).
Gun fans like to point to the evidence that banning guns in one city does no good, as those cities are still plagued by gun violence. Guns are easily brought in from next door, of course.
This particular line of thinking is not very well thought-out as it naturally leads to “well, then we just have to ban them everywhere” which of course is the opposite of what those mocking gun bans want.
There are so many guns in the USA, I think an outright ban will take 100 years to clear out gun violence. By then, it will just be replaced with something else. The government probably want's no part of disarming a bunch of 2nd amendment country boys, it just won't happen regardless of how bad our gun problem is.
They need to start with not associating a 12 gauge with a 5 round magazine the same as an AR-15 with 30 rounds of hollow tips.
> Gun fans like to point to the evidence that banning guns in one city does no good, as those cities are still plagued by gun violence. Guns are easily brought in from next door, of course.
So how come the 'next door' with plentiful guns doesn't have a gun problem?
Getting guns out of the hands of every day police would indeed make policing safer, especially for police doing traffic stops. Very rarely do parking tickets end up with armed conflict.
There's this overriding myth that's been stoked by Hollywood et al that a "good guy" with a gun can just shoot everything up to save the day. There's no surprise what this narrative maps onto in the real world, where the results aren't predictably written to entertain.
I can list quite a few police shooting innocent people incidents from USA, and quite a few civilians shooting innocent people incidents from USA.
Can you reference any incidents of people with guns using them to stand up to the police or military in recent (~20 year) history, in USA - and winning (whatever that might mean)? Any armed political protests? Any hint of a serious suggestion that a group of armed civilians could take on the US military and military-weapons-armed police forces if it came to a fight?
Armed civilians don't mean civilians stand a chance against the police or military. They're outnumbered, outfunded, out-trained, out-equipped and whatever the out- equivalent of the state having sheerly more options, is.
> Armed civilians don't mean civilians stand a chance against the police or military. They're outnumbered, outfunded, out-trained, out-equipped and whatever the out- equivalent of the state having sheerly more options, is.
You're missing the point of an armed population and its ability to fight tyranny.
First of all, the military has almost nothing to do with any of this. Tyrannical regimes have to maintain order at a hyper local level, which means either by police or police-like forces.
Secondly, it has almost nothing to do with going "gun to gun" and shooting out a winner. Level of violent escalation and public support for the regime is the name of the game. When a population is disarmed a government can make political dissidents just disappear in the middle of the night without a sound. When there's even a possibility of an armed population it means if they want to take out opposition they're rolling up with armored vehicles, swat teams, choppers, the works. This sort of event gets noticed! It requires an explanation. It means live coverage, newspapers, choppers, etc.
How many bloody shootouts can a regime survive while retaining public support? How many Wacos could the US have had and still maintain social order?
Why do you perceive mass disarmament of non-police and non-military as an acceptable alternative to mass surveillance? They both present the same issues of:
-selective enforcement;
-persecution of minorities;
-suppression of political rivals;
-inherent asymmetrical concentration of power into the established elite;
-history of abuse by totalitarians;
I'm genuinely unable to wrap my head around taking a pro-liberty stance on one issue and a pro-authority stance on the other. Yes, criminals abuse our common freedoms, but governments have always had vastly greater ability to abuse their power. And crime is already marginal, and falling!
Even in your perfect society there will still be unhappy people that want to do harm to others, and there are many ways to do mass violence without guns.
Thinking of UK football 'hooligan' violence, after lots of surveillance being installed within stadiums, violence enthusiasts organized their confrontations at areas reconnaissance proved to be unmonitored. Nearby industrial parks etc...
If you are involved in a high risk activity you take steps to outwit any surveillance. A relative was recently mugged by Sheperds Bush tube/Westfield London UK in a busy area. She was rescued by an Uber driver but the incident was orchestrated by a hooded individual who knew where the cameras were so there is no footage.
> Thinking of UK football 'hooligan' violence, after lots of surveillance being installed within stadiums, violence enthusiasts organized their confrontations at areas reconnaissance proved to be unmonitored
At the risk of sounding like a heartless libertarian, sounds like in this case, the outcome was a net positive. People who want to and are willing to suffer violence are going to a specialized place to do so, rather than involving a bunch of football fans who just want to see some people play a sport.
Except for anyone who needs to make a living at the industrial park.
There is a difference though between surveillance at a massive event known for both violence and family entertainment and wide area, persistent surveillance. I'm OK with a lot of cameras at stadiums, when they follow you home that's a problem.
I doubt someone will have the time to follow you going home in the camera. When massive surveillance is deployed, there's such an enormous amount of data that police would only have time to review those related to crime.
Unworkable, my point was people with bad intentions circumvent these systems. It's also a mystery why media release of surveillance footage of high importance areas appear to have been shot on mediocre quality old technology when so much is spent on the equipment.
https://youtu.be/BR1s7az-f-k
I'm in general against mass surveillance (on privacy and potential for abuse grounds), but that a measure is not perfect and can be worked around with some skill and motivation is not a good argument against it on its own. It is possible for an imperfect system to increase minimum level of motivation sufficiently to reduce incidence significantly.
Same as in cyber security -- that you have no chance against a state level actor doesn't mean you shouldn't use good passwords and 2fa on your accounts. Because for some criminals effort becomes just not worth potential gain.
I wonder about the actual workability of this scheme. The cities mentioned cover a large area and have things like buildings and airports.
Due to the airports, you can't fly too high without air traffic clearance. You can't fly too low or the buildings are going to block large portions of your view. From a practical point of view, you are going to be limited to flying over specific segments of the city, which leaves your and the city that authorized your flights open to lawsuits claiming that you are profiling residents of that specific neighborhood.
I have friends and relatives in London but seriously wonder how long it will be before they are forced to leave - things just seem to go from bad to worse on all sorts of indicators of quality of life, and the authorities appear acquiescent in the decline. Whilst in the UK one admittedly can never get very far away from built up areas, my plan is to get as far away as possible.
Just theoretically if surveillance was good enough to catch every single crime in public, would this be "worth it"? I think maybe some cities/countries would opt for this such as Singapore and China. I can even imagine cities in the US would trade privacy for safety.
> Just theoretically if surveillance was good enough to catch every single crime in public, would this be "worth it"?
But you also have to remember that there are good crimes and bad laws, there are bad cops and bad use of force and general abuse of power. Would you want to give them more power, give up a possibility to organize and fight against anything in public?
To add to this, information is power. When you give away information about yourself, you are also giving others power over you. This power can be abused in all sorts of ways.
Furthermore, there's no guarantee that the information gathered with all of this surveillance will remain in the hands of "the good guys". In addition to abuse by corrupt or malicious police, administrators, and politicians who may legally get access to this data, the data can be leaked to or stolen by all sorts of criminals, stalkers, bullies, abusers, pedophiles, etc.
Just about every week there's a new story about a massive data leak. It seems unlikely that data collected through mass surveillance will stay out of the wrong hands forever.
How many parents would willingly broadcast to the world the path their child takes to school, their schedule, and photos of their kids. How many people would willingly allow live streaming of their family's bedrooms and bathrooms? All of this surveillance could potentially prevent or solve crime, but most people still have some sense of privacy left, and a concern about ways information about them and their loved ones could be misused -- even if they don't think about it deeply or very often.
Unless, of course, they or people they know have been victims of harassment, stalking, identity theft, and other abuses of data collected about them. In which case they probably think about it much more.
Possibly if everyone started getting arrested for the 'little illegalities' we all commit daily the law would quickly change. It might even result in a more fair system, especially if everyone could look up every recording not just the government.
I can also see a domino effect happening if one or a few cities start to use this. If a city/group of cities becomes drastically safer after implementing this, it could pressure those that don't have it to opt in as well.
> Just theoretically if surveillance was good enough to catch every single crime in public, would this be "worth it"?
No.
Problem #1 is unfair and biased prosecution. If every time someone smokes a blunt, the police get alerted, but only minorities are actually arrested and prosecuted, that's bullshit.
Problem #2 is that not every crime should be punished, period. Nobody is harmed if I walk across a street without waiting for a green light.
Problem #3 is that every crime being captured means that literally every citizen has a backlog of blackmail material waiting for them that the government could use to pressure them for one reason or another. Commit a more serious crime, and you could be pressured into a plea bargain in exchange for not bringing the others to bear. Speak up against an unpopular policy the government is trying to push, and suddenly you're being arrested for something that happened three years ago.
However, just as a thought experiment, wouldn't total surveillance actually help stop #1?
If there existed video proof of illegal bias, it could be targeted and stopped, vs now, where you just have to imagine that all groups are committing crimes at the same rate and police are only focusing on minorities.
> However, just as a thought experiment, wouldn't total surveillance actually help stop #1?
How would it? Prosecutors decide who to prosecute based on available evidence. It's systematic societal bias (and obviously, personal bias, too.)
But it's not like video surveillance would show anything new - we already have statistics on which groups get sent to jail over minor crimes, and which ones get slaps on wrists.
> How would it? Prosecutors decide who to prosecute based on available evidence.
You answered your own question!
> we already have statistics on which groups get sent to jail over minor crimes, and which ones get slaps on wrists
I think you will find those statistics correlate almost exactly to income and only overlap race because there is also a correlation between income and race in the US.
So without video that is hard evidence of actual racism (eg. arresting blacks and ignoring whites committing the same crime) we have to do a two-step mental trick to get to the racism. Poor people that are arrested can't afford lawyers (or good lawyers) and have worse outcomes. Black people tend to be poorer than Whites, so the courts are racist!
I believe it would be a different case altogether if you had "actual" direct proof (ie. video that could be counted and compared to outcomes), not just correlational proof that involves a lot of other noise that may or may not be racism or that is a couple of steps removed.
> > How would it? Prosecutors decide who to prosecute based on available evidence.
> You answered your own question!
The point is that they don't have to prosecute everyone. It's hard to not see this as a willful misunderstanding of my point.
> a two-step mental trick
Just what I'm thinking, but mirrored, actually.
> I believe it would be a different case altogether if you had "actual" direct proof
I think some people will never be convinced. Also, I'm going to stop responding to this thread. Without direct video proof, there's no way to prove the two are related.
If you live in the US, I'd suggest you join your local NextDoor.com - especially a suburban one.
You'll quickly learn that people would vote for a totalitarian authoritarian fascist state with constant surveillance and instant death penalties if it meant eliminating the risk of their Amazon package being stolen from their porch, or their car being broken into.
If I recall correctly, there is some theoretical work on complex systems seem to imply that if you quickly introduce a large factor in just about any system, the behavior tends to result, almost certainly, in a completely divergent system. Usually with a more or less complete breakdown until the introduced factor is removed.
It's not entirely unlikely that these kind of system level effects, or something similar is why - well intended - efforts regularly end up "tyrannical" in nature after a while.
One argument goes roughly like this: If something exists, persistently, it is likely to have one or several strong driving forces. If you apply enough counter force in a single direction you get a "buckling" behavior as soon as you completely overwhelm the principal drivers. Now the opposing forces, known to be existing from previous behavior, will be almost entirely unopposed/undamped, and together with the introduced factor come to completely dominate the system.
Thus long term stability might only be achievable by small, relatively slow, iterative changes that slowly chane the often vast number of driving forces, and their opposing forces, in relative synchronicity.
A wholesale prevention of crime in public places would likely be such a factor, and while I can't predict the outcome, it's almost certainly going to be disastrous. Criminal activity is driven by extremely strong forces, some of them likely related almost purely to, potentially misdirected, survival instincts.
Yes it would. But you don't need to track people and use mass data to personalize adds to do that. It is totally possible to just have a lot of cameras and look at the recordings when a crime is reported and delete the video after half a year or something.
If one trust the government to have a monopoly on machine guns and tanks, video cameras is my least concern if they turn evil.
Public video surveillance without audio is not that bad compared to wire taping, risk profiling etc.
The nightmare would be Google, MasterCard, Amazon or what ever running those cameras.
Just theoretically if surveillance was good enough to catch every single crime in public, would this be "worth it"?
As noted elsewhere, when football hooligans had cameras installed to identify them, they scouted out locations where there was not surveillance. Criminals would learn to commit their crimes under the cover of a roof or awning. This would make people safer from criminals, while making them less safe from the authorities.
This is a bit of an opinion piece, but that said I disagree. We are already being surveilled by private companies, whether we like it or not, I don’t think it’s possible to really prevent the government from using that. I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t want the government to get that data to watch us all the time, but I don’t see any way to really stop at anytime soon. It will take major events and major public exposure before that, but it will only take one terrorist attack to take us all the way back to the beginning
> I don’t think it’s possible to really prevent the government from using that
Yes it is.
Private entities do stuff all the time that the government is expressly not allowed to get away with and we generally hold them to it. Free speech is the classic example that comes to mind.
Erm, the point is that with private companies performing the collection and then USG merely using the proceeds, it sidesteps direct constraints on the government like the Constitution.
And since use of that surveillance then becomes normalized in the commercial sphere, law enforcement feels definitively entitled to access the databases - imagine telling police they can't perform lookups in eg LexisNexis!
And then some major activism and those laws go away. We can't afford a fatalist attitude to this. It very much is not inevitable that airplanes with cameras with monitor everything we do. And even if the data is gathered there may be some ways to control or delay its use for nefarious activities.
It's a choice, and we have a voice in that choice. There is a broad range of possible outcomes here some much worse than others.
You're taking a global view of a very narrow position, and ignoring enforcement. I can take a photo of you every time you leave your house, or drive in your car, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. The government would have to overcome monumental constitutional issues to prevent me from taking your photo in public. On top of that, how do you enforce such a measure? I think as a thought experiment, tell us where you live and maybe someone will come and take a photo of you every day, and you try and stop them. Heck they might already be doing that now....
People are against surveillance because of 1984. But that's just one possible outcome of massive surveillance. In the end, surveillance is just a tool and it depends on who use it. Have been in China and Singapore, I think surveillance definitely improves the overall public safety. The city population there is very dense. People don't have guns to protect themselves. Having surveillance cameras around at least can help police catch thieves who steals you stuff and run away.
And I see some comments saying that we need surveillance to catch all sorts of crimes. I don't think that's the point of having surveillance, at least for now. Surveillance is to support police. Even if it doesn't catch any crime, only its appearance would somehow reduce crime rate because people would behave better when they know they are being recorded.
Could of just help by giving kids in that community loans to start businesses, jobs, and opportunity. But no let's not do that cause that seems like welfare.
I assume you mean grants. It's generally bad policy to load money to people who are unlikely to pay it back. Unless you mean the government should suppress the interest rate. And those would sort of be a form of welfare. It's ok to just admit that you like welfare.
I mean the same type of investment that an engineer in SV would get or a Kiva gives out. It bad policy only if theirs no turnkey solution, but if you look at immigrants have created hair stores, convenience stores, and such it would be easy to train and capitalize those Americans to do the same in their very own neighborhoods.
You don't need special permits and legislative buy-in to help people either, which isn't the case with mass surveillance. I think this billionaire isn't motivated by philanthropy, they are motivated by money. This is an opportunity to make it, and government officials have an opportunity to suppress undesirables.
Here's an idea that I wanted to get a grant to try in Detroit. Take a high crime neighborhood where the majority of its residents were working class poor. Give every house a ring doorbell and then sprinkle cameras where lots of assaults or drug transactions take place. Then have license plate readers on major streets but don't store the locals license plates in the database.
Would it allow the police to zero in on the criminals causing most of the pain? Would it make a meaningful difference in these peoples lives?
Bet it would be cheaper than flying over the neighborhood with a drone 24 by 7.
People calling the police can be targeted for retaliation. In your scheme, I'd expect anyone who agreed to install a doorbell cam to be targeted in a similar manner.
That would get wrecked right quick. First is the assumption that every house had internet for the doorbell. Next is that they wouldn't be broken or spray painted over. Third, how easy are they to steal? That is a high ticket item. Lastly, would the residents fear retaliation if they cooperated with police?
There must be some wrinkle of copyright law that offers a (legal) defense against this sort of unrestrained mass surveillance. It's my cynical take that courts will be far more respectful of property rights than privacy rights/civil liberties.
Something akin to the laws that (on paper at least) forbids people from taking photos of the eiffel tower at night or commercial photos of mount rushmore.
The article barely hints at blackmail as a method of getting around those laws. Near the end, it says:
>Did his company retain video of the Baltimore officials who could approve or thwart its return?
To me, I read that and think they probably began surveillance much earlier than they let on. After collecting dirt on people who could stop it, then they approached them and got their cooperation. I could be wrong of course, but that's my 2 cents.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadGet ready for a mix between 1984 and Brave New World.
This is exactly why the GDPR was written into law in the EU.
In the end it underlies their motives for finding ways to normalize the public to the social march we’ve been tapping our toes to: shuffling along to their businesses, propping up their immense gains.
Stop giving deference to aristocratic rhetoric if you actually care.
>The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 18% of American Adults oppose the use of surveillance and security cameras in public places. Seventy percent (70%) support the use of such cameras. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gene...
Can I make a prediction? I predict that within 10 years, all police officers will carry with them a little transponder that transmits a signal that disables the camera of any cell phone within a certain radius.
Think of the difference between the Vietnam war and the iraq war; during the Vietnam war the press was allowed to take full color images of the whole conflict, from the inside, showing the burning monks and children and so forth. In the Iraq war, we got a few blurry pictures from Wikileaks and look what happened to Assange. From the point of view of the state, us seeing what they are doing is a problem to be corrected, nothing more. And likewise if they don’t have total surveillance of us, it’s a problem to be solved.
Edit: apple’s already got the patent: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/what-...
We can't (I believe) prevent total surveillance but we can certainly control how the data are used, and we can set up systems that allow the data to be used without being abused. The system must be recursive. Whatever form the system takes, it shall necessarily have to be able to detect and correct its own self-abuses.
Mass surveillance? That will not end well. There is historical precedent and plenty of speculative fiction to persuade us away from this path.
Too much crime? You need 24/7 surveillance to cut that. No crime to speak of? Let’s put cameras all over the place to keep it that way.
I agree with you about educational programs but anything that shifts the power balance away from people and to the government (or "society" as the proponents of these things will say) is not going to help, it will just create a rift that makes full time criminality more attractive to marginalized people (e.g. London) or a dystopian nightmare (e.g. Xinjiang) that may have low crime but is a terrible place to live your life.
Whenever people start proposing things like mass surveillance, banning guns, or other things that are completely incompatible with cultural ideals (which those things are in the US) in order to solve a problem that should be a tip-off that a metric has become a target.
If anything's gonna change that, it'll be the current crop of kids coming up seeing shootings on the news, then having scary-real shooter drills every year at school. With maybe a side of increased youth suicide rates meaning more of then know someone who shot themselves. It's even spooking the kids in fairly red areas, excepting pretty much exclusively the kids of, ah, very red parents with the gun-related bumper stickers to prove it.
FWIW I think the drills are doing a lot more (psychological) harm than they're worth, but one side-effect may be a sharp change in our national attitudes toward guns, over the next 30-50 years or so.
I have lived in parts of the country where there are extremely high rates of gun ownership and 0 problems with gun shootings. Then there are areas with much less gun ownership and very high shooting rates. Those areas, to be blunt, are generally low-income PoC neighborhoods. The leadership at the country/state/city level won't admit they don't give a shit about poor brown people. They want to blame the troubles of the neighborhoods on firearms and take those away.
I have a theory that mass shootings are a similar situation, that there is a shift in the mental health of people that is causing them to want to go kill a bunch of people just to kill a bunch of people. It's currently fashionable in certain (typically) young white disillusioned male communities to go buy a gun and go kill a bunch of people. If there were no guns, would that problem disappear? Or would they just use the kinetic energy of 4000 lbs traveling at 25-60 mph to accomplish the same thing, like in Paris? I don't know.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-...
Inherent deadliness, ease-of-use, availability, ability to abort mid-attempt. Guns score high(/low?) for all of these if you keep guns in your house.
I'm not sure if those statistics matters for the gun control that is discussed in the US. A single-shot hunting rifle/old revolver can be used for suicide just as easily as an AR-15. The latter would be banned with many forms of proposed gun control, the former I do not see ever being banned/legislated-away in the US.
After you saying "conflating things that are not related" you hand-wavingly compare "young white disillusioned males" shooting up a school with .. a 37 year old French-Tunisian on a watch list of authorities, pledging allegiance to ISIS and driving a van filled with explosives into a crowd.
That is not "accomplishing the same thing" or in the same way or by the same people.
Find a "school shooting" equivalent - after all if that was equivalent it ought to be happening already in USA even with guns available, oughtn't it? More high schoolers have access to vehicles than guns right now. How can you say "I don't know" if it would happen when it .. is not happening?
To respond to your comment, I'm talking about methods to go kill a bunch of people. One of those is using guns, and it seems to be the favored method in the US at the moment. However, it is not the only way, the Paris attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack), was more deadly than any mass shooting I'm aware of in the US and used a lorry.
Nearly everyone over 16 in the US has access to a tremendously deadly weapon in the form of their car. I'd argue it's easier to go run over a ton of people with your car than go buy a gun to shoot them up. My theory is that it is fashionable with the psychos of the moment to use a gun. If you take the guns away, what happens? Do they go to cars/trucks, do we have a return to fertilizer pickup bombings? I'm not sure, and that's what worries me about gun control measures -- no attempt to address root cause. Humans have been coming up with ways to kill each other forever. We legislate away one -- cool. What about the other ways? Haven't addressed the problem of people wanting to go kill a bunch of other humans for seemingly no reason at all beyond fame/notoriety (what seems to be many of the shooters' motives).
Did they ban guns in Chicago and Baltimore? What was the effect?
This particular line of thinking is not very well thought-out as it naturally leads to “well, then we just have to ban them everywhere” which of course is the opposite of what those mocking gun bans want.
They need to start with not associating a 12 gauge with a 5 round magazine the same as an AR-15 with 30 rounds of hollow tips.
Common sense is what is needed.
Common sense has no place in outrage culture!
So how come the 'next door' with plentiful guns doesn't have a gun problem?
Who says they don't?
Gary, Indiana isn't exactly paradise.
Wouldn't it make law enforcement a lot more difficult and dangerous if the police didn't have guns?
Unless you didn't mean ban guns, but rather to give them exclusively to the police and military. Is that what you're suggesting?
There's this overriding myth that's been stoked by Hollywood et al that a "good guy" with a gun can just shoot everything up to save the day. There's no surprise what this narrative maps onto in the real world, where the results aren't predictably written to entertain.
Can you reference any incidents of people with guns using them to stand up to the police or military in recent (~20 year) history, in USA - and winning (whatever that might mean)? Any armed political protests? Any hint of a serious suggestion that a group of armed civilians could take on the US military and military-weapons-armed police forces if it came to a fight?
Armed civilians don't mean civilians stand a chance against the police or military. They're outnumbered, outfunded, out-trained, out-equipped and whatever the out- equivalent of the state having sheerly more options, is.
You're missing the point of an armed population and its ability to fight tyranny.
First of all, the military has almost nothing to do with any of this. Tyrannical regimes have to maintain order at a hyper local level, which means either by police or police-like forces.
Secondly, it has almost nothing to do with going "gun to gun" and shooting out a winner. Level of violent escalation and public support for the regime is the name of the game. When a population is disarmed a government can make political dissidents just disappear in the middle of the night without a sound. When there's even a possibility of an armed population it means if they want to take out opposition they're rolling up with armored vehicles, swat teams, choppers, the works. This sort of event gets noticed! It requires an explanation. It means live coverage, newspapers, choppers, etc.
How many bloody shootouts can a regime survive while retaining public support? How many Wacos could the US have had and still maintain social order?
-selective enforcement;
-persecution of minorities;
-suppression of political rivals;
-inherent asymmetrical concentration of power into the established elite;
-history of abuse by totalitarians;
I'm genuinely unable to wrap my head around taking a pro-liberty stance on one issue and a pro-authority stance on the other. Yes, criminals abuse our common freedoms, but governments have always had vastly greater ability to abuse their power. And crime is already marginal, and falling!
It already illegal to use weapons to commit crimes, and in the vast majority of cases the guns used in these crimes were obtained illegally.
At the risk of sounding like a heartless libertarian, sounds like in this case, the outcome was a net positive. People who want to and are willing to suffer violence are going to a specialized place to do so, rather than involving a bunch of football fans who just want to see some people play a sport.
There is a difference though between surveillance at a massive event known for both violence and family entertainment and wide area, persistent surveillance. I'm OK with a lot of cameras at stadiums, when they follow you home that's a problem.
Same as in cyber security -- that you have no chance against a state level actor doesn't mean you shouldn't use good passwords and 2fa on your accounts. Because for some criminals effort becomes just not worth potential gain.
Due to the airports, you can't fly too high without air traffic clearance. You can't fly too low or the buildings are going to block large portions of your view. From a practical point of view, you are going to be limited to flying over specific segments of the city, which leaves your and the city that authorized your flights open to lawsuits claiming that you are profiling residents of that specific neighborhood.
Several already have, working with Palantir and Amazons Rekognition. LA, Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, Tampa and probably more.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2019/05/amazons-...
But you also have to remember that there are good crimes and bad laws, there are bad cops and bad use of force and general abuse of power. Would you want to give them more power, give up a possibility to organize and fight against anything in public?
Furthermore, there's no guarantee that the information gathered with all of this surveillance will remain in the hands of "the good guys". In addition to abuse by corrupt or malicious police, administrators, and politicians who may legally get access to this data, the data can be leaked to or stolen by all sorts of criminals, stalkers, bullies, abusers, pedophiles, etc.
Just about every week there's a new story about a massive data leak. It seems unlikely that data collected through mass surveillance will stay out of the wrong hands forever.
How many parents would willingly broadcast to the world the path their child takes to school, their schedule, and photos of their kids. How many people would willingly allow live streaming of their family's bedrooms and bathrooms? All of this surveillance could potentially prevent or solve crime, but most people still have some sense of privacy left, and a concern about ways information about them and their loved ones could be misused -- even if they don't think about it deeply or very often.
Unless, of course, they or people they know have been victims of harassment, stalking, identity theft, and other abuses of data collected about them. In which case they probably think about it much more.
No.
Problem #1 is unfair and biased prosecution. If every time someone smokes a blunt, the police get alerted, but only minorities are actually arrested and prosecuted, that's bullshit.
Problem #2 is that not every crime should be punished, period. Nobody is harmed if I walk across a street without waiting for a green light.
Problem #3 is that every crime being captured means that literally every citizen has a backlog of blackmail material waiting for them that the government could use to pressure them for one reason or another. Commit a more serious crime, and you could be pressured into a plea bargain in exchange for not bringing the others to bear. Speak up against an unpopular policy the government is trying to push, and suddenly you're being arrested for something that happened three years ago.
No thanks. This would be a nightmare world.
However, just as a thought experiment, wouldn't total surveillance actually help stop #1?
If there existed video proof of illegal bias, it could be targeted and stopped, vs now, where you just have to imagine that all groups are committing crimes at the same rate and police are only focusing on minorities.
How would it? Prosecutors decide who to prosecute based on available evidence. It's systematic societal bias (and obviously, personal bias, too.)
But it's not like video surveillance would show anything new - we already have statistics on which groups get sent to jail over minor crimes, and which ones get slaps on wrists.
You answered your own question!
> we already have statistics on which groups get sent to jail over minor crimes, and which ones get slaps on wrists
I think you will find those statistics correlate almost exactly to income and only overlap race because there is also a correlation between income and race in the US.
So without video that is hard evidence of actual racism (eg. arresting blacks and ignoring whites committing the same crime) we have to do a two-step mental trick to get to the racism. Poor people that are arrested can't afford lawyers (or good lawyers) and have worse outcomes. Black people tend to be poorer than Whites, so the courts are racist!
I believe it would be a different case altogether if you had "actual" direct proof (ie. video that could be counted and compared to outcomes), not just correlational proof that involves a lot of other noise that may or may not be racism or that is a couple of steps removed.
> You answered your own question!
The point is that they don't have to prosecute everyone. It's hard to not see this as a willful misunderstanding of my point.
> a two-step mental trick
Just what I'm thinking, but mirrored, actually.
> I believe it would be a different case altogether if you had "actual" direct proof
I think some people will never be convinced. Also, I'm going to stop responding to this thread. Without direct video proof, there's no way to prove the two are related.
You'll quickly learn that people would vote for a totalitarian authoritarian fascist state with constant surveillance and instant death penalties if it meant eliminating the risk of their Amazon package being stolen from their porch, or their car being broken into.
It would be completely unethical and punish countless law abiding citizens, but it would undoubtedly be popular. Pretty much everywhere.
It's not entirely unlikely that these kind of system level effects, or something similar is why - well intended - efforts regularly end up "tyrannical" in nature after a while.
One argument goes roughly like this: If something exists, persistently, it is likely to have one or several strong driving forces. If you apply enough counter force in a single direction you get a "buckling" behavior as soon as you completely overwhelm the principal drivers. Now the opposing forces, known to be existing from previous behavior, will be almost entirely unopposed/undamped, and together with the introduced factor come to completely dominate the system.
Thus long term stability might only be achievable by small, relatively slow, iterative changes that slowly chane the often vast number of driving forces, and their opposing forces, in relative synchronicity.
A wholesale prevention of crime in public places would likely be such a factor, and while I can't predict the outcome, it's almost certainly going to be disastrous. Criminal activity is driven by extremely strong forces, some of them likely related almost purely to, potentially misdirected, survival instincts.
If one trust the government to have a monopoly on machine guns and tanks, video cameras is my least concern if they turn evil.
Public video surveillance without audio is not that bad compared to wire taping, risk profiling etc.
The nightmare would be Google, MasterCard, Amazon or what ever running those cameras.
As noted elsewhere, when football hooligans had cameras installed to identify them, they scouted out locations where there was not surveillance. Criminals would learn to commit their crimes under the cover of a roof or awning. This would make people safer from criminals, while making them less safe from the authorities.
Yes it is.
Private entities do stuff all the time that the government is expressly not allowed to get away with and we generally hold them to it. Free speech is the classic example that comes to mind.
And since use of that surveillance then becomes normalized in the commercial sphere, law enforcement feels definitively entitled to access the databases - imagine telling police they can't perform lookups in eg LexisNexis!
It's a choice, and we have a voice in that choice. There is a broad range of possible outcomes here some much worse than others.
And I see some comments saying that we need surveillance to catch all sorts of crimes. I don't think that's the point of having surveillance, at least for now. Surveillance is to support police. Even if it doesn't catch any crime, only its appearance would somehow reduce crime rate because people would behave better when they know they are being recorded.
I don't feel at home in this world anymore.
Would it allow the police to zero in on the criminals causing most of the pain? Would it make a meaningful difference in these peoples lives?
Bet it would be cheaper than flying over the neighborhood with a drone 24 by 7.
Something akin to the laws that (on paper at least) forbids people from taking photos of the eiffel tower at night or commercial photos of mount rushmore.
>Did his company retain video of the Baltimore officials who could approve or thwart its return?
To me, I read that and think they probably began surveillance much earlier than they let on. After collecting dirt on people who could stop it, then they approached them and got their cooperation. I could be wrong of course, but that's my 2 cents.