Surveillance Cameras
Posted by richrobinson 7 years, 1 month ago to The Gulch: General
A few days ago a local news story had a local Police Chief bragging about how quickly a convenience store robber was captured. He showed the reporter one of the borough security cameras and bragged about how they had been placed all over the borough. He said there was no public place in the borough you could go without law enforcement being able to watch you. This should have caused outrage. Big Brother is here. The reporter clearly felt it was a positive story.What's happening???
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properly trained to think this is what is
necessary for their safety.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
George Orwell...
Regards,
OA
15 years ago I was working on a video conferencing system for Microsoft. One requirement was the camera had to have a mechanical shutter. Even though it was much more expensive than an indicator, they said people will be creeped out by a camera on them all the time, regardless of the indicator. Now most people have a camera on their computer aimed at them all day.
20 years ago on some message board, possibly on FidoNET or something, someone said something like, "I know how to stop crime. Just put cameras on every traffic light; that'll stop it cold." I ignored it assuming it was an absurd suggestion aimed at trolling civil libertarians or it was someone sarcastically pointing out how bad the slippery slope can be. Now we do have cameras at every stop-and-go light.
I remember a controversy around the same time about facial recognition software. Now everyone can use it to find photos of themselves on FB.
I don't think the technology itself is horrible, but it does open a risk. The East German secret police had half the country spying on the other half. But there was no way to manage all that data. Now, in a time when DDR stands for Double Data Rate memory, there is. So we need rules and procedures to prevent abuse. We can't make the technology disappear. We need to keep it from being abused as much as possible.