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UK surveillance “worse than 1984” says new UN privacy chief

313 points by fukusa 11y ago

Paul_S 11y ago
Disclaimer: I am one of the most paranoid people I know and I know some pretty radical left-wing hippies. I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be. But if articles like this is what it will take to finally get mesh network projects off the ground then I'm happy to be outraged.
- rbehrends 11y ago
  It's a matter of scale; the power of surveillance scales non-linearly with the degree of coverage you have. What he is talking about is the case where CCTV cameras are pretty much everywhere. Quantity has a quality all of its own. Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different.
  - nacnud 11y ago
    > Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different. Thought experiment: what if we could?
    - rbehrends 11y ago
      Well, we could make a website for that. We could call it Facebook or something.
      - lfowles 11y ago
        What about Google Photos? ;) They're already explicitly categorizing my pictures (Dog, Flowers, Food, Chicago, etc)
    - unfamiliar 11y ago
      I was thinking the other day how great it would be to just go out for the day without my phone, and then at night just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went at the time I went and voila, complete set of holiday photos.
      - dTal 11y ago
        Would it be great if anyone could do that?
      - vidarh 11y ago
        In the UK you can submit a Subject Access Request and describe what you looked liked and when you were there (and provide ID) to anyone whose CCTV you believe you'd have gotten caught on, and pay a fee to have them attempt to retrieve the footage (the fee, though limited by statute, will quickly make it the most expensive set of low resolution horrible quality holiday photos ever) E.g. here's a form for Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council [1] but anyone holding personally identifiable information in the UK are required to handle subject access requests (and there are similar mechanism required in all EU countries to comply with the relevant EU directive) [1] http://www.stockport.gov.uk/2013/2976/66897/subjectaccessrequestformcctv http://www.stockport.gov.uk/2013/2976/66897/subjectaccessreq...
      - qntm 11y ago
        > just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went Or where someone else went...
    - jff 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    > Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different. That's more or less the situation with CCTV cameras though. Its not like there's some national control room where people sit and watch every camera in the country 24/7. Most CCTV cameras are being recorded to a hard disk or video in the premises their located, and for authorities to access it they'd have to turn up in person and ask to see the videos (assuming the storage hasn't been reused yet).
    - filoeleven 11y ago
      Your assertion contradicts this one made by anonymousDan above[0]: > what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies. Neither of you have offered evidence to back up the statements, and both are plausible. Does anyone have evidence pointing to which statement is more representative of reality? [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116097
      - joshuacc 11y ago
        It's not necessarily a contradiction. "Most" could mean 51% while "a significant portion" could mean 49%. Each person is emphasizing what they believe to be most important, but they might actually agree on the numbers.
    - stevejones 11y ago
      Those recordings are subject to the Data Protection Act. Most are blatantly not following the Data Protection Act, and as such are illegal.
- x5n1 11y ago
  A camera at a place is fine. Cameras that watch your every move when in public are very bad. Not a hard concept if you think about it and hardly hyperbole.
  - aninhumer 11y ago
    People can already watch your every move in public. Cameras don't change that, they just make it more efficient. If the only reason we're comfortable with the police having a particular power is that they don't have the resources to use it in a way we don't like, then maybe we should reconsider letting them have that power?
    - pjc50 11y ago
      There's a big difference between "for everything you do in public, at least one person witnesses it, but any one person only sees you for a short while" and "for everything you do in public, a specific person is aggregating that information".
      - aninhumer 11y ago
        The police can already do the latter by having officers follow you. As long as we're talking about individuals, I don't have a problem with letting them use cameras in the same way. The real thing we object to is dragnet surveillance, and we should think about how we limit police power accordingly. It might be the case that there's no effective way to prevent abuse of cameras in this way, and the only thing we can do is remove them. But if we reach that conclusion, it should be argued from principles, not kneejerk objection to cameras.
        vidarh 11y ago
        But they're not using cameras in the same way. The cameras are always there. If police followed you 24/7 without sufficient justification you could sue for harassment. You have no recourse against the cameras.
- aninhumer 11y ago
  While I used to think similarly about CCTV, I think facial recognition software changes the game. Without it, I don't see CCTV as significantly different from the targeted monitoring of individuals we're mostly comfortable with, other than its potential to be used retroactively. But it becomes a lot more sinister when software allows the same system to track everyone at once wherever they go in public.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- DanBC 11y ago
  > they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Except when they're pointing at your private property. And even when you're in public it's still unpleasant for them to be slurping this information, especially if they misuse it. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/michael-mcintyre-spy-cam-tweet-investigated-for-data-protection-breach http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/michael-mcintyr...
  - BuildTheRobots 11y ago
    >> they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. > Except when they're pointing at your private property. My understanding in the UK is that (apart from some "special buildings") if I'm on public land (eg a road) I can film anything visible from that spot, even if it is your private property. Edit: Have just realised that we're talking about CCTV cameras rather than me romping around taking photos with my camera. With regard to CCTV, I believe it has to be properly signposted with contact details, but I'd have to go read up again before I could properly comment.
    - lucaspiller 11y ago
      This is my understanding too. Before EU human rights were written into law in 1998 there wasn't even anything providing a "right to privacy" and it's still not completely clear. http://findlaw.co.uk/law/z_articles-for-carousel/500284.html http://findlaw.co.uk/law/z_articles-for-carousel/500284.html The libel laws on the other hand are quite strong, so filming someone privately in their own home and publishing it could land you in trouble with those.
- GordonS 11y ago
  I think the issue is the sheer scale of the CCTV network. When combined with facial recognition and the unsavoury characters at GCHC/Langley/Fort Meade, it means you can be tracked all over the country, and the complete history of everywhere you ever go can be archived. Nasty.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    There isn't really a "CCTV network". There's a lot of isolated CCTV systems, most of which aren't centrally controlled.
    - GordonS 11y ago
      It's true that many are isolated, particularly those ran privately by businesses for security purposes. But many are connected, such as those on the road network.
    - eloy 11y ago
      The infrastructure to connect them is widespread available. It is a relatively little step to connect them with each other. That might happen faster than you'd expect.
- a3n 11y ago
  It's about correlation, potential risk, and the relationship of the citizen and the state. Bottom line, we citizens should be able to tell the state, in theory our servant and not our master, to do or not do whatever we want. That does not seem to be the case with surveillance, to the extant that we don't even really know what they're doing, modulo Snowden and the like. The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use. And they can't arrest you for questioning or jail you, particularly if you point out to people that the correlation between the two cameras and the telecom companies has merely been done. It's different.
  - a3n 11y ago
    > The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use. I think I just described how tracking advertising works today, except for the cameras. How soon before businesses' cameras are money makers in advertising networks? Maybe we'll all have them in our cars. Maybe Google glass or whatever fills in that void. Glance at a Slim Jim and see ads for bulk purchases from Amazon for the next few days. "Get the Variety Pak! Beef. Pork. Llama. A surprise Mystery Meat in every Pak!"
- nly 11y ago
  "people who are not fully aware they are giving [permission]" haven't given you their permission.
- pjc50 11y ago
  > permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). That's not really permission - proper permission requires informed consent. We're back to the data protection principles here. There's also a big difference between a CCTV system which stores to a set of local VHS tapes which are generally overwritten after a short while, and a CCTV system which is online and capable of face recognition and tracking. The extent to which the CCTV system can be used against 'innocent' people is unclear and there aren't any clear abuses to point to. The Metropolitan Police "FIT" camera teams that go around filming protestors are another matter.
- anonymousDan 11y ago
  I don't have any citations to back this up, but I had an interesting discussion with someone from one of the defense research labs in the UK regarding the accessibility of private CCTV cameras to the security services (I collaborate with them as part of my work). He said that what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies. Gaining access to their systems is obviously a much easier proposition than having to negotiate with the actual owners of the properties. Whether this happens already I don't know, but I think it's a relatively plausible way for a government to build up a worrying monitoring capability.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    It's quite possible that a significant portion of the large scale CCTV installations are up for grabs, but they make up a relatively small portion of private CCTV overall. Most CCTV in the UK are non-networked installation in the local corner shop and the like. That said, it is excessive in the UK.
  - sillygeese 11y ago
    You can rest assured that the cameras are being used by the government. All over the West, they're clearly showing us they don't want us to have any privacy. As for the article, it is, of course, some sort of propaganda. I guess they're just acclimating us to being aware that we're monitored all the time, everywhere. That way we're easier to lead down the slippery slope all the way to where ever we're headed. But it's not good. People need to wake up and start seeing that governments are obviously not working towards our interests. It's amazing how the masses still don't see it. Do we want surveillance? No. Are we going to be surveilled anyway? Yes, of course. It's not about what we want - it's about what our rulers want.
    - cryoshon 11y ago
      Yes, the propaganda is quite thick on this topic. They don't want us to have privacy because (duh) knowledge is power, and they want even more power. Maligning opting out is covered safely by the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" cliche (which is never challenged in the public channels) and allegations of surveillance are still shut down by the "conspiracy theory" smear. They're ready for widespread rebellion and attacks on government installations. Many of the people-tracking systems that they have in place were tested against guerrilla IED networks in Iraq, and they've armed every government agency to the teeth-- even the US Department of Education has a SWAT team [0]. [0]: http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2011/06/beware-the-us-education-department-swat-team http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2011/06/beware-t...
- ionised 11y ago
  How can you give permission if you are unaware that you are giving permission?
- sklogic 11y ago
  Someone filming you in a public place won't immediately commit the recording into a centralised storage accessible to dozens of (potentially corrupt) government agencies, alongside with the face recognition data.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Consider if everything you do in public is taped. Then consider that a team of 1.000 people monitors you and you alone, everywhere you go, everything you do. Then imagine what that says about you. About where you work, where you shop, what you buy, which friends you keep, who you bring home etc. Then think about whether you're cool with this 1.000 man team recording this in a database, to be potentially used by the government. Consider your familiarity with historical and current governments who have abused this for purposes ranging from ethnic cleansing to political oppression. And then consider that in the world of computers, that 1000 man team costs a few dollars of computing power at some point. Facial recognition combined with a whole range of data (from your cellphone being registered, to your financial accounts making transactions being registered, to your car being registered, obviously your home and workplace, and social media networks detailing your network, and your communications being monitored). The combination of this all is incredibly dangerous. Should we worry and fear? Well it depends on one question, which is 'do you think your government will ever shift so incredibly to actually abuse this'. If the answer is yes, then there's no escape and our lives in relation to tech as we know it today is incredibly dangerous. If the answer is no, and you also don't fear individual gov users illegally abusing their privileges, nor hackers abusing the gov systems, then you're good. But again that question has nothing to do with whether we should hate CCTV or not. The question is do you think it'll be abused. If the answer is yes, then CCTV is incredibly dangerous. Now about the question of the chance for abuse... Well I'm totally not paranoid, indeed I generally feel quite optimistic about these things. I live in the Netherlands and I don't think we'll make such a shift towards abuse on a large scale. At the same time I live in a city that commemorates the 'terrorist' attacks on the civil registry during WWII by the resistance movement, because jews were being processed for genocide with these records which detailed where ethnicities lived in Amsterdam, and the resistance sought to destroy the registry to prevent it. They succeeded but unfortunately they held a copy in another city. And that's relatively recent history, in my parents' lifetimes, in one of the otherwise freest societies on earth. It's largely because of this reason that many countries don't have a civil registry. For example here in the Netherlands we don't hold a census because you can simply pull the information from a database, it's like Facebook doing a census on the age of their users, it'd be silly. For the same reasons one may wonder whether CCTV cameras which can help track people in similar ways, combined with other information, makes sense. That doesn't mean I don't think the cameras' benefits outweigh the risks, but for me to say they're completely harmless would be myopic, too. The 'it's public space' I think is a weak argument against mass surveillance. Humans can't live without participating in public spaces, you can't remain in private space and live a full life, so we must ensure high levels of privacy in public spaces, too. Just because a space is open to the public doesn't mean your privacy is.
- sp332 11y ago
  I don't like being treated like a criminal every time I step outside.
- vidarh 11y ago
  They are in public spaces, substantial proportions of would be relatively secluded and private were it not for CCTV. That is what I dislike about CCTV cameras. Without them, there would substantial parts even of London where you could walk around and feel alone and be reasonably sure you're not being observed. It is an odd feeling, e.g. walking down a relatively secluded part of the riverside with nobody around with a date and suddenly being face to face with a camera pointed right at you. > 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it If people are not fully aware they are giving it, it may still legally be permission (though in that case the laws need to change), but it certainly isn't morally permission. There's also a vast difference between surveillance by private entities locked in silos and subject to the Data Protection Act, and secret government surveillance.
- wcummings 11y ago
  I can take your picture in public, that's fine. If I follow you around every time you go in public and photograph you, I think you could make a strong case I'm stalking or harassing you.
- rawTruthHurts 11y ago
  Many of these CCTV services are outsourced, which means private entities are recording you, me, and everybody else in public places. I don't know how paranoid are those friends of you, but you'd better be concerned.
  - golergka 11y ago
    So? Private company may very well put a camera in a public space and record everyone for any reason whatsoever, that's why we call it "public". How is it conceptually different from you taking photo of Eiffel tower (and every tourist around it)?
    - vidarh 11y ago
      He isn't putting his camera up there 24/7, that's how it is conceptually different. Even up in the Eiffel Tower there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras, and on the ground around it you can be pretty much alone at times - even the hordes of tourists do not manage to reduce the level of relative privacy as much as the CCTV.
      - golergka 11y ago
        > there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras Yes, but I think it's strange to consider that as a necessary requirement. First of all, can you even formulate this requirement precisely? Because "in any public space, there should be up to 10 seconds a day where a person would find himself not observed by anybody" sounds a little bit ridiculous.
        nitrogen 11y ago
        I think you have it backward. The original claim is that there was never privacy in public. The next comment refuted that claim by giving counterexamples. Can you demonstrate that a lack of privacy is a requirement?
- chopman 11y ago
  The water is warming and the frog is not feeling it.
- Nursie 11y ago
  >> I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Until relatively recently there was no expectation of being filmed anywhere, ever. This idea that we're fair game for recording anywhere outside our own homes is a recent one. I just don't agree that being out in public means I'm fair game to be recorded and monitored constantly. >> 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission No, it's not. Implicit permission and default browser behaviour do not constitute permission.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    No expectations that you'd be filmed. But an expectation that you'd be seen. And in small towns that would destroy anonymity much worse than CCTV. Why should anything you do in public ever be private?
    - Nursie 11y ago
      There's a middle ground somewhere, between expecting privacy in public and total surveillance. It doesn't have to be black and white like that.
- agd 11y ago
  Just because somewhere is public does not mean that it is expected (or ok) to be under blanket surveillance there. People can film you in public places, but they can't follow you around all day filming constantly from multiple angles. That would be harassment and invasion of privacy. This is however, the real situation in large parts of the UK. It's now impossible in most of London to meet with political activists or journalists without being surveilled.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  I have mixed feelings towards blank CCTV in a public setting at least owned by the government. When it comes to private entities I know they're there to protect themselves from theft, property damage, and etc. But what business does the government have with constant surveillance? I know that some studies have indicated that even broken or disconnected CCTV cameras does curtail crime, but wouldn't adding police patrols to troubled areas be better (especially well trained and communicative officers in said patrols)? I feel that CCTV is just a lazy approach to a deeper problem when it comes to crime. If you want to prevent it then figure out the root cause. If you want to curtail it then hire more competent police officers. They both work and they're both easier to hold accountable (imo).
  - notahacker 11y ago
    I'm not sure I'd feel more liberated in a shopping precinct lined with police officers rather than cameras, even if I wasn't paying any more taxes for the increased police presence. (I'll concede I felt happier with armed guards outside every building in Quito, but the threat they were supposed to be combating was also a tad more obvious)
    - ralfd 11y ago
      This is totally offtopic, but one cannot reply to old comments on hacker news and you made me read HPMOR, so I have to went now: > Ironically, most of the better bits, and indeed the overarching plot thread of HPMOR are largely down to the huge gaps in various characters' rational thought. If Harry had made the obvious "let's not trust the sinister guy that's obviously manipulative and definitely more experienced at it than me" leap right at the beginning it might have been a much shorter series. Oh God, yes! After 2500 pages finishing, uff, I have to say it was not uninteresting, but is way overdone how singular awesome that Harry there is. I also disliked that he "solves" death. I get that transhumanists/futurists are pretty scared by it, but the story ending with everyone in the magical world getting virtually immortal and forever young? Apart from the wish fulfillment by the author, how would that even work with population growth? I am also a bit wary now about fanfiction in general, because after so much time invested reading such a long story, it does change your imagination/interpretation of the original story.
- otis_inf 11y ago
  > Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be. No it isn't. Please read up on GCHQ and their pals NSA and what they do, e.g. 'dragnets' and other mass surveillance which absolutely isn't 'by permission' but is happening at a massive scale. Also, you can claim you're one of the most paranoid people you know, but your whole post sounds like a post written by one of the 'I have nothing to hide so nothing to fear' group. If you'd be even a little bit paranoid, you wouldn't be ok with whatever surveillance, CCTV cameras etc.
  - caskance 11y ago
    So don't be even a little bit paranoid. If you'd be even a little bit racist, you wouldn't be OK with miscegenation. Only someone starting from the premise that miscegenation is bad would conclude that this statement means that everyone should be at least a little bit racist.
- kirsebaer 11y ago
  > I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. If the police found out about a meeting to discuss police corruption, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting. There is a long history of harassment of activists and whistleblowers.
  - caskance 11y ago
    If the police found out about a meeting to discuss a bank robbery, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting. There is a long history of arresting bank robbers.
    - ocb 11y ago
      Because bank robberies are something that happens often enough and affects enough people that we should allow people in power (who are never, ever corrupt!) to have the capability to do something where the potential for abuse is incredibly easy to imagine. East Germany and the Stasi are a pretty good example of what happens when mass surveillance goes wrong. That wasn't very long ago.
      - caskance 11y ago
        People in power by definition have that capability. That's what it means to be in power.
        ocb 11y ago
        I see now that you're trolling, but being in power does not necessarily imply mass surveillance capabilities ;)
        caskance 11y ago
        Since when is that the only item in the set of "things where the potential for abuse is incredibly easy to imagine"?
- TimJRobinson 11y ago
  I agree with you. When balancing risk vs reward I'm happy for their to be surveillance cameras everywhere in public. I might think differently if I was a high profile person as then there's the possibility the government could be watching your moves to use as blackmail or for nefarious purposes. But as an every day citizen I believe it's much more likely that I'm going to get mugged in an alleyway than have big brother mess with my life. I'd rather have that increased safety from everyday criminals than worry about the government. On the internet I believe the opposite, because there is such a low chance of intelligence services catching anyone trying to harm me. I feel like gathering peoples public unencrypted information will do almost nothing to stop online criminals.
- worklogin 11y ago
  I have several issues with your post. 1) Public places /used/ to be private! In practice, anyway, because CCTV wasn't ubiquitous, and constant recording by every passerby wasn't the norm. It's a public space, but 24/7 recording by a dozen private parties at a time is NOT the norm historically. 2) If most of our surveillance online is "by consent" but no one reads the EULA or signs anything, is it really consent? Just because people are ignorant to the problems, or do not feel immediate impact of online surveillance, doesn't make it right or consensual.
- xorcist 11y ago
  The division between private and public space is very much political, just as perhaps more famously free contra paid time is. Public space is not owned by the watchers (in most jurisdictions). Even if it was, ownership does not translate well to physical space. There are lots of things you're not allowed to do with a place you "own", including building there. Regarding permissions for surveillance, it's far from clear how such a contract works and what you even can be said to agree to. In some places, both parties in the conversation need to agree to recording a telephone conversation for example, and the same principle should hold true for email.
AndrewOMartin 11y ago
UN privacy chief "sensationally cites 1984" says commenter on Hacker News.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  All he needed was a reference to Gun Control, Hitler and Bob Heinlein and he would have a full house :-)
PlzSnow 11y ago
Perhaps the UN privacy chief should actually read 1984, then he would realise how silly he sounds.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  It's perfectly reasonable: in 1984 they didn't have cell phones or internet histories. No chances for Big Brother to snoop on what kind of information you're seeking or what kinds of comments you'll make when you think you are anonymous. No physical tracking device on people at all times. No network construction of who each individual talks to and when; no harvesting of metadata. 1984 had a bunch of CCTVs without enough people to monitor all of them, no recording capacity, and an extreme political indoctrination regime to help make up the difference by having informants. Ingsoc is a child's view of dystopia, now-- we have far surpassed it.
  - varjag 11y ago
    Do you really believe you are in a dystopian world surpassing 1984?
    - opnitro 11y ago
      I think he means we have the capabilities to be in a world surpassing 1984.
      - varjag 11y ago
        Doesn't mean much if the capabilities aren't being exploited. 1984 wasn't a book about technology. It did feature mass surveillance exceeding anything we have today, even if described in 1940s state of art terms.
        ptaipale 11y ago
        Not to mention the political oppression and violence enabled by that surveillance. Even most lynchings by a Twitter mob aren't actual executions where someone is really killed (although sometimes someone might be pushed to suicide by the psychological pressure; that is still a far cry from an actual political purge with murder.)
JumpJumpJump 11y ago
In '1984' every room of every house and apartment was monitored, if this is currently not the case in the UK, the quote is hyperbole.
- mtgx 11y ago
  Every PC, cellphone, console, smart TV, and soon every appliance and lightbulb will be under surveillance (everything that connects to them is captured by the spy agencies, encrypted or not). Close enough, I would say.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  That's because the person who wrote 1984 did not foresee a little snitch in every pocket.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    A little snitch that people pay for the privilege of carrying around! That's the real thing Orwell missed -- not that surveillance would increase, but that the surveilled would so enthusiastically cooperate in their own surveillance.
    - chopman 11y ago
      Well people payed for their telescreens, rigth? I remember the lower class didn't have them, possibly because they couldn't afford them.
      - drdeca 11y ago
        Still had the cameras though.
    - branchless 11y ago
      This is where 1984 and Brave New World diverge. In 1984 people obeyed because they were afraid. In Brave New World, which is closer to reality, people fell into the arms of the big stage. They wanted it. That is why Brave New World is far more chilling.
philip142au 11y ago
Is the UN chief worried that hes being surveilled by every company and government? It's always ok when it's happening to everone else but when it hurts those in power then things change.
mtgx 11y ago
People here are missing the point, where it's "less", "more" or "just the same" level of surveillance as 1984 is kind of besides the point. The point is he's asking for a Geneva convention for the Internet, and I think that would be a good thing to have, even if some abuses will exist, at least we'll have a framework other than the current "whatever the spy agencies can come up with in terms of surveillance is a-okay".
- tajen 11y ago
  Correct. In the same way that government-organized torture in Singapore wouldn't be published in La Haye because they've never signed any international treaty about it, citizen spying is legal in the Western world because there is no global treaty about it. You're right that we need a framework, like a Geneva convention for the Internet. However, I'm afraid that the willfulness and the balance of powers isn't the same as for the Geneva convention itself.
spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
Sorry this guy sounds like a minor career technocrat angling for a budget increase and pandering to the crowd. Possibly pointing a finger at the Euro states that still have mandatory ID cards and allow local government to run their own secret police as well as the main federal ones - might be more useful.
- nsajko 11y ago
  Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the_European_Economic_Area#Overview_of_national_identity_cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the...
nbevans 11y ago
A lot of CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned, not state owned. I would guess the majority are actually.
- chopman 11y ago
  But they would happily, or at least with a warrant, give the recordings to the government should they ask for them.
  - nbevans 11y ago
    But that is still far away from the '84 doctrine of "watching everyone all the time".
    - peterwaller 11y ago
      You don't need a video link to be meaningfully watching someone.
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    My experience, at least in Glasgow, is that often the criminals are known to the owner of the small shop the crime was committed outside, because they're often small local shops serving small local communities… and they'll just drag their feet on handing any evidence over the police, and sometimes "forget" they were meant to and just delete it as part of their ongoing fortnightly (or monthly) cycle. Showing this was deliberate and not negligence is hard. They don't care about providing evidence to the police, because their customers might stop going if they're going to be ratted out on, they only care about protecting their own shop.
  - reasonishy 11y ago
    Which is a good thing. It means if you get mugged, if your kid gets abducted, if you get stabbed, there may well be some garage or shop with CCTV who will have some useful evidence. It's one of the reasons there's very little crime in the UK.
SixSigma 11y ago
> Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. As a regular visitor to the English countryside, where are these rural cameras ?
- notahacker 11y ago
  Hanging round the necks or sitting in the pockets of tourists, most probably. Seriously, most CCTV cameras are attached to buildings. If there are people genuinely expecting privacy standing outside because they can't see anyone inside the building observing them, then I have an invisibility cloak to sell them.
EGreg 11y ago
Not sure what the UN or any organization would be able to accomplish in an ecosystem of organizations and improving tech. The genie is out of the bottle. Welcome to the big data revolution. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
FlaceBook 11y ago
Thanks to many on HN who can't come up with any way to make a living that doesn't involve creepily probing the private data of millions of people, it's all down hill from here.
veidr 11y ago
Fuck off with hyperbolic mouth-frothing; in the novel 1984, the government cameras were in your house. Even China and the UK haven't done that yet, nor are they close to it.
- mattgibson 11y ago
  Oh, really? http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/462230/Edward-Snowden-revelations-GCHQ-harvested-webcam-pics-including-sexual-material http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/462230/Edward-Snowden-re...
  - veidr 11y ago
    Yes, really. That the government is hacking private webcams en masse is a flagrant criminal act. The collusion of purported democratic governments to do this kind of thing is a threat to the rule of law itself. It's a very serious problem, and absurd, over-the-top exaggeration doesn't help. Like when people say, "Working at McDonald's is slavery!" No, it isn't. Actual slavery is a whole different level of badness. Obviously. And along those same lines, odious though it is, government spies hacking your webcam to see your dick pics is not as bad as the government installing mandatory government cameras inside the homes of all citizens. Obviously. So I don't think Cannataci is helping with this kind of hyperbolic statement. It could reasonably be argued that government surveillance in the UK and the US today is worse than it was in East Germany and the USSR -- and that's very alarming. The notion it's as bad as the fictional dystopia of 1984 is absurd and unhelpful.
- sillygeese 11y ago
  Living in Denial? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2014/12/16/the-elf-on-the-shelf-is-preparing-your-child-to-live-in-a-future-police-state-professor-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2014/12/16... http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-toward-forty/2013/11/elf-on-the-shelf-nsa-santa/ http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-toward-forty/2013/11/elf-o... "Smart" TVs, and most of the "Internet of Things" stuff is all about monitoring us. XBox's Kinect is in the mix too. And they're just brazenly telling us through the mainstream media. Again, they're acclimating us to being aware that we're surveilled all the time.
amyjess 11y ago
Enough with the hyperbole. The fact that you can criticize the government without being sent to minilove for crimethink is proof enough that things aren't "worse than 1984".
- wmeredith 11y ago
  I thought the same thing. Until they're subjecting people to having their body parts gnawed off by live rats, this is hyperbolic bullshit and it doesn't help the conversation.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Surveillance is worse. In 1984 there was one camera and one microphone per room. Now we carry multiple cameras and microphones and tracking devices everywhere we go. In 1984 the party had to break into an apartment to read a person's journal. Now our most private thoughts are stored in text messages, private Facebook posts, and Evernote, within easy and undetectable reach of governments. Behavioral analysis can tell surveillance operators things about us that we don't even know about ourselves. Every person we talk to on the phone, every page we like, every link we share on our blogs can be wired together into a graph of our identity, ideas, and social networks (see software like Palantir).
- melloclello 11y ago
  You would think with all the posts about East Germany on here lately people would recognise this. Edit: playing devil's advocate, you could almost argue that the surveillance system in the UK is at least a lot better than that of Airstrip One/the GDR - while the level of surveillance is perhaps about the same, the Thought Police/Stasi used it to feed their obsession with picking up harmless political dissenters, while at the very least GHCQ seems to (thankfully) be focussed on (somewhat) more genuine existential threats.
mc32 11y ago
>So the situation in some cases is far worse already." So, that's the thing, in some ways it's worse. It has more detail, it's voluntary and less intrusive. The one thing which is quite different is it's not a system to control people, by control I mean controlling as in Orwell's vision. And, for the most part, with few sheepish objections, people are willing to trade in their privacy in exchange for services rendered. People in practice value free resources and services over privacy, else we would have seen a system of micropaymets or economic alternative take root but it has not. At some point people may change their minds and may want to hold on to their privacy and begin paying for services, maybe, but for most people that is not the case at this time.
- cm2187 11y ago
  Most of the people I know do not understand/realize the extent to which they are spied on. If GCHQ was opening their paper mail every day and keeping a copy of all their correspondance and they knew it, they would start a revolution.
  - mc32 11y ago
    I don't think that would be the case. At first there would be indignation, but then they'd conclude that despite the pervasiveness nothing bad had come of it to them (hauled down to the met office, say), therefore it cannot actually be bad and that on balance it was probably good since it allows "them" to catch the baddies. It's something akin to the slow boil effect.
  - tobltobs 11y ago
    They just don't care. Even when Cameron said: “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which […] we cannot read?” nobody cared. Maybe if they start implanting transponders into peoples heads there would be a small uproar, but forget a revolution in the UK against surveillance, this will never happen.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      That they "just don't care" is not in my experience true. When it is explained most people I've spoken do care. However, then they ask "and what can we do about it?" and the answer is either "change everything about how you do things" or "not much"... And then they don't care enough to go beyond this stage or they are just confused and scared. Either way back to facebook the next day.
jug5 11y ago
Understatement. If you want to find pro government shills come read the comments in here.
dijit 11y ago
All these words and nobody is talking about Tempora[0]? I mean, tempora is pretty bad, rank and file stronger than the collection obtained by NSA, metadata is stored, content is stored, there are examples of "owning" certificate authorities and even examples of downgrading SSL/TLS to not include perfect forward secret ciphers. And this is done for any content that passes UK borders. :| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
- rhino369 11y ago
  The whole reason the privacy debate hasn't reached critical mass amongst the general population is because there is no actual impact. It's entire theoretical for almost everyone. 99.99 of people aren't being actually spied on. Despite the fact that the western governments can spy on everything you do. They just don't. They can't spy on all of us. Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners. Sure my emails are probably buffered for a little while. But as long as I don't ride a jet into the Sears tower nobody will actually read them. The people asked themselves: if a tree fell in the woods and nobody heard it, did it make a sound. And our answer is no it didn't. The fact is the biggest intrusion in our lives is Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Google literally exists to spy on you. It's a many many billion dollar industry. The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does.
  - zo1 11y ago
    >"The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does." I don't mean to detract from your mains points about why people aren't in an uproar over these things. But, there is a big difference between what "Google" can do to you, and what a government institution such as the NSA can.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      I fear google way more than the NSA or the government. Google can link my name to someone claiming I'm a racist. It can tie me to stupid things I said online 15 years ago. Who knows what it will do in 5 years when Bing reduces their profit margin. In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database. That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.
xacaxulu 11y ago
Christopher Hitchens has an amazing book called "Why Orwell Matters" and I strongly advise reading it. He also does a takedown of Kissinger in "The Trial of Henry Kissinger".
deltaprotocol 11y ago
Seriously, I read several posts here that I'm absolutely sure where written by NSA/GCHQ agents working very comfy to try and manipulate technical opinion. Anyone with a brain and enough technical knowledge (which can be assumed of HN readers) knows the situation is much worse than 1984, beyond Orwellian, absurd, ridiculous, disgusting. If you where a Secret Agency, and you knew the top 100 news/forums for opinionated technical people, would you not set a division of monkeys to try and confuse people? They win if some people even "doubt" or "question"... we must all be 100% sure of what is happening, 24h a day, ready to feel threatened and abused by cameras, abusive permissions, tracking devices, dragnets. We must feel the disgust 24h a day.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Yeah, I definitely get this vibe quite strongly too. We know they're out there, if not here. HN readers understand the scope of the dragnet and the systematic analysis of content and metadata. In part, this is why I am patrolling around to offer good objections to the idiots. I am highly suspicious of very-upvoted yet very dumb/uneducated/intentionally misleading comments in this thread, also. The objections are too canned/simple/easy to shoot down, and they rely on emotion rather than facts. The tech crowd's acquiescence to the surveillance state is absolutely necessary for it to function as designed.
  - deltaprotocol 11y ago
    "The tech crowd's acquiescence to the surveillance state is absolutely necessary for it to function as designed. " Well said! Since we have the toolset to understand what is happening, we must be the main source of outrage. When we come online and do our stuff, we represent our families, our friends, or coworkers. Everyone around us that do not have the same tools to understand/interpret the abuses and the propaganda. We like to think that everyone should understand what is going on, but this is impossible in a short/medium or even long term. People use the Internet like they use the building they live, or the house. They haven't built it and they don't understand, and don't need to understand how it was built or its internals. They are the users. They presume the architects/engineers involved where responsible, good people, that did a good job and wanted for them, future residents, to have a nice home. If you are an engineer building a Shopping Center, and you get to know how the company you work for is abusive towards its employees or how they are overpricing resources in a public contract or manipulating prices, or doing a dirty job using an unsafe structure or bad materials, it is you who should act. You can't expect someone else or everyone to act, to understand what you understand because you are in a position to understand. If you do not act, if you do not take a position, if you do not represent the ones that are unaware, you become the same as them. The only way we can make out of this bizarre situation is if everyone of us takes his role in society, whatever society, with his/her heart. Do it with love towards your neighbour. There is no other way. In tech, we are often quite cold because we deal with machines, but we are still flesh and bone behind screens, and our love should be directed to protecting the users.

313 points by fukusa 11y ago

Disclaimer: I am one of the most paranoid people I know and I know some pretty radical left-wing hippies. I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be. But if articles like this is what it will take to finally get mesh network projects off the ground then I'm happy to be outraged.

rbehrends 11y ago
It's a matter of scale; the power of surveillance scales non-linearly with the degree of coverage you have. What he is talking about is the case where CCTV cameras are pretty much everywhere. Quantity has a quality all of its own. Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different.
- nacnud 11y ago
  > Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different. Thought experiment: what if we could?
  - rbehrends 11y ago
    Well, we could make a website for that. We could call it Facebook or something.
    - lfowles 11y ago
      What about Google Photos? ;) They're already explicitly categorizing my pictures (Dog, Flowers, Food, Chicago, etc)
  - unfamiliar 11y ago
    I was thinking the other day how great it would be to just go out for the day without my phone, and then at night just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went at the time I went and voila, complete set of holiday photos.
    - dTal 11y ago
      Would it be great if anyone could do that?
    - vidarh 11y ago
      In the UK you can submit a Subject Access Request and describe what you looked liked and when you were there (and provide ID) to anyone whose CCTV you believe you'd have gotten caught on, and pay a fee to have them attempt to retrieve the footage (the fee, though limited by statute, will quickly make it the most expensive set of low resolution horrible quality holiday photos ever) E.g. here's a form for Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council [1] but anyone holding personally identifiable information in the UK are required to handle subject access requests (and there are similar mechanism required in all EU countries to comply with the relevant EU directive) [1] http://www.stockport.gov.uk/2013/2976/66897/subjectaccessrequestformcctv http://www.stockport.gov.uk/2013/2976/66897/subjectaccessreq...
    - qntm 11y ago
      > just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went Or where someone else went...
  - jff 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
- jon-wood 11y ago
  > Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different. That's more or less the situation with CCTV cameras though. Its not like there's some national control room where people sit and watch every camera in the country 24/7. Most CCTV cameras are being recorded to a hard disk or video in the premises their located, and for authorities to access it they'd have to turn up in person and ask to see the videos (assuming the storage hasn't been reused yet).
  - filoeleven 11y ago
    Your assertion contradicts this one made by anonymousDan above[0]: > what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies. Neither of you have offered evidence to back up the statements, and both are plausible. Does anyone have evidence pointing to which statement is more representative of reality? [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116097
    - joshuacc 11y ago
      It's not necessarily a contradiction. "Most" could mean 51% while "a significant portion" could mean 49%. Each person is emphasizing what they believe to be most important, but they might actually agree on the numbers.
  - stevejones 11y ago
    Those recordings are subject to the Data Protection Act. Most are blatantly not following the Data Protection Act, and as such are illegal.
x5n1 11y ago
A camera at a place is fine. Cameras that watch your every move when in public are very bad. Not a hard concept if you think about it and hardly hyperbole.
- aninhumer 11y ago
  People can already watch your every move in public. Cameras don't change that, they just make it more efficient. If the only reason we're comfortable with the police having a particular power is that they don't have the resources to use it in a way we don't like, then maybe we should reconsider letting them have that power?
  - pjc50 11y ago
    There's a big difference between "for everything you do in public, at least one person witnesses it, but any one person only sees you for a short while" and "for everything you do in public, a specific person is aggregating that information".
    - aninhumer 11y ago
      The police can already do the latter by having officers follow you. As long as we're talking about individuals, I don't have a problem with letting them use cameras in the same way. The real thing we object to is dragnet surveillance, and we should think about how we limit police power accordingly. It might be the case that there's no effective way to prevent abuse of cameras in this way, and the only thing we can do is remove them. But if we reach that conclusion, it should be argued from principles, not kneejerk objection to cameras.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        But they're not using cameras in the same way. The cameras are always there. If police followed you 24/7 without sufficient justification you could sue for harassment. You have no recourse against the cameras.
aninhumer 11y ago
While I used to think similarly about CCTV, I think facial recognition software changes the game. Without it, I don't see CCTV as significantly different from the targeted monitoring of individuals we're mostly comfortable with, other than its potential to be used retroactively. But it becomes a lot more sinister when software allows the same system to track everyone at once wherever they go in public.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
DanBC 11y ago
> they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Except when they're pointing at your private property. And even when you're in public it's still unpleasant for them to be slurping this information, especially if they misuse it. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/michael-mcintyre-spy-cam-tweet-investigated-for-data-protection-breach http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/michael-mcintyr...
- BuildTheRobots 11y ago
  >> they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. > Except when they're pointing at your private property. My understanding in the UK is that (apart from some "special buildings") if I'm on public land (eg a road) I can film anything visible from that spot, even if it is your private property. Edit: Have just realised that we're talking about CCTV cameras rather than me romping around taking photos with my camera. With regard to CCTV, I believe it has to be properly signposted with contact details, but I'd have to go read up again before I could properly comment.
  - lucaspiller 11y ago
    This is my understanding too. Before EU human rights were written into law in 1998 there wasn't even anything providing a "right to privacy" and it's still not completely clear. http://findlaw.co.uk/law/z_articles-for-carousel/500284.html http://findlaw.co.uk/law/z_articles-for-carousel/500284.html The libel laws on the other hand are quite strong, so filming someone privately in their own home and publishing it could land you in trouble with those.
GordonS 11y ago
I think the issue is the sheer scale of the CCTV network. When combined with facial recognition and the unsavoury characters at GCHC/Langley/Fort Meade, it means you can be tracked all over the country, and the complete history of everywhere you ever go can be archived. Nasty.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  There isn't really a "CCTV network". There's a lot of isolated CCTV systems, most of which aren't centrally controlled.
  - GordonS 11y ago
    It's true that many are isolated, particularly those ran privately by businesses for security purposes. But many are connected, such as those on the road network.
  - eloy 11y ago
    The infrastructure to connect them is widespread available. It is a relatively little step to connect them with each other. That might happen faster than you'd expect.
a3n 11y ago
It's about correlation, potential risk, and the relationship of the citizen and the state. Bottom line, we citizens should be able to tell the state, in theory our servant and not our master, to do or not do whatever we want. That does not seem to be the case with surveillance, to the extant that we don't even really know what they're doing, modulo Snowden and the like. The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use. And they can't arrest you for questioning or jail you, particularly if you point out to people that the correlation between the two cameras and the telecom companies has merely been done. It's different.
- a3n 11y ago
  > The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use. I think I just described how tracking advertising works today, except for the cameras. How soon before businesses' cameras are money makers in advertising networks? Maybe we'll all have them in our cars. Maybe Google glass or whatever fills in that void. Glance at a Slim Jim and see ads for bulk purchases from Amazon for the next few days. "Get the Variety Pak! Beef. Pork. Llama. A surprise Mystery Meat in every Pak!"
nly 11y ago
"people who are not fully aware they are giving [permission]" haven't given you their permission.
pjc50 11y ago
> permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). That's not really permission - proper permission requires informed consent. We're back to the data protection principles here. There's also a big difference between a CCTV system which stores to a set of local VHS tapes which are generally overwritten after a short while, and a CCTV system which is online and capable of face recognition and tracking. The extent to which the CCTV system can be used against 'innocent' people is unclear and there aren't any clear abuses to point to. The Metropolitan Police "FIT" camera teams that go around filming protestors are another matter.
anonymousDan 11y ago
I don't have any citations to back this up, but I had an interesting discussion with someone from one of the defense research labs in the UK regarding the accessibility of private CCTV cameras to the security services (I collaborate with them as part of my work). He said that what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies. Gaining access to their systems is obviously a much easier proposition than having to negotiate with the actual owners of the properties. Whether this happens already I don't know, but I think it's a relatively plausible way for a government to build up a worrying monitoring capability.
- vidarh 11y ago
  It's quite possible that a significant portion of the large scale CCTV installations are up for grabs, but they make up a relatively small portion of private CCTV overall. Most CCTV in the UK are non-networked installation in the local corner shop and the like. That said, it is excessive in the UK.
- sillygeese 11y ago
  You can rest assured that the cameras are being used by the government. All over the West, they're clearly showing us they don't want us to have any privacy. As for the article, it is, of course, some sort of propaganda. I guess they're just acclimating us to being aware that we're monitored all the time, everywhere. That way we're easier to lead down the slippery slope all the way to where ever we're headed. But it's not good. People need to wake up and start seeing that governments are obviously not working towards our interests. It's amazing how the masses still don't see it. Do we want surveillance? No. Are we going to be surveilled anyway? Yes, of course. It's not about what we want - it's about what our rulers want.
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    Yes, the propaganda is quite thick on this topic. They don't want us to have privacy because (duh) knowledge is power, and they want even more power. Maligning opting out is covered safely by the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" cliche (which is never challenged in the public channels) and allegations of surveillance are still shut down by the "conspiracy theory" smear. They're ready for widespread rebellion and attacks on government installations. Many of the people-tracking systems that they have in place were tested against guerrilla IED networks in Iraq, and they've armed every government agency to the teeth-- even the US Department of Education has a SWAT team [0]. [0]: http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2011/06/beware-the-us-education-department-swat-team http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2011/06/beware-t...
ionised 11y ago
How can you give permission if you are unaware that you are giving permission?
sklogic 11y ago
Someone filming you in a public place won't immediately commit the recording into a centralised storage accessible to dozens of (potentially corrupt) government agencies, alongside with the face recognition data.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Consider if everything you do in public is taped. Then consider that a team of 1.000 people monitors you and you alone, everywhere you go, everything you do. Then imagine what that says about you. About where you work, where you shop, what you buy, which friends you keep, who you bring home etc. Then think about whether you're cool with this 1.000 man team recording this in a database, to be potentially used by the government. Consider your familiarity with historical and current governments who have abused this for purposes ranging from ethnic cleansing to political oppression. And then consider that in the world of computers, that 1000 man team costs a few dollars of computing power at some point. Facial recognition combined with a whole range of data (from your cellphone being registered, to your financial accounts making transactions being registered, to your car being registered, obviously your home and workplace, and social media networks detailing your network, and your communications being monitored). The combination of this all is incredibly dangerous. Should we worry and fear? Well it depends on one question, which is 'do you think your government will ever shift so incredibly to actually abuse this'. If the answer is yes, then there's no escape and our lives in relation to tech as we know it today is incredibly dangerous. If the answer is no, and you also don't fear individual gov users illegally abusing their privileges, nor hackers abusing the gov systems, then you're good. But again that question has nothing to do with whether we should hate CCTV or not. The question is do you think it'll be abused. If the answer is yes, then CCTV is incredibly dangerous. Now about the question of the chance for abuse... Well I'm totally not paranoid, indeed I generally feel quite optimistic about these things. I live in the Netherlands and I don't think we'll make such a shift towards abuse on a large scale. At the same time I live in a city that commemorates the 'terrorist' attacks on the civil registry during WWII by the resistance movement, because jews were being processed for genocide with these records which detailed where ethnicities lived in Amsterdam, and the resistance sought to destroy the registry to prevent it. They succeeded but unfortunately they held a copy in another city. And that's relatively recent history, in my parents' lifetimes, in one of the otherwise freest societies on earth. It's largely because of this reason that many countries don't have a civil registry. For example here in the Netherlands we don't hold a census because you can simply pull the information from a database, it's like Facebook doing a census on the age of their users, it'd be silly. For the same reasons one may wonder whether CCTV cameras which can help track people in similar ways, combined with other information, makes sense. That doesn't mean I don't think the cameras' benefits outweigh the risks, but for me to say they're completely harmless would be myopic, too. The 'it's public space' I think is a weak argument against mass surveillance. Humans can't live without participating in public spaces, you can't remain in private space and live a full life, so we must ensure high levels of privacy in public spaces, too. Just because a space is open to the public doesn't mean your privacy is.
sp332 11y ago
I don't like being treated like a criminal every time I step outside.
vidarh 11y ago
They are in public spaces, substantial proportions of would be relatively secluded and private were it not for CCTV. That is what I dislike about CCTV cameras. Without them, there would substantial parts even of London where you could walk around and feel alone and be reasonably sure you're not being observed. It is an odd feeling, e.g. walking down a relatively secluded part of the riverside with nobody around with a date and suddenly being face to face with a camera pointed right at you. > 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it If people are not fully aware they are giving it, it may still legally be permission (though in that case the laws need to change), but it certainly isn't morally permission. There's also a vast difference between surveillance by private entities locked in silos and subject to the Data Protection Act, and secret government surveillance.
wcummings 11y ago
I can take your picture in public, that's fine. If I follow you around every time you go in public and photograph you, I think you could make a strong case I'm stalking or harassing you.
rawTruthHurts 11y ago
Many of these CCTV services are outsourced, which means private entities are recording you, me, and everybody else in public places. I don't know how paranoid are those friends of you, but you'd better be concerned.
- golergka 11y ago
  So? Private company may very well put a camera in a public space and record everyone for any reason whatsoever, that's why we call it "public". How is it conceptually different from you taking photo of Eiffel tower (and every tourist around it)?
  - vidarh 11y ago
    He isn't putting his camera up there 24/7, that's how it is conceptually different. Even up in the Eiffel Tower there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras, and on the ground around it you can be pretty much alone at times - even the hordes of tourists do not manage to reduce the level of relative privacy as much as the CCTV.
    - golergka 11y ago
      > there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras Yes, but I think it's strange to consider that as a necessary requirement. First of all, can you even formulate this requirement precisely? Because "in any public space, there should be up to 10 seconds a day where a person would find himself not observed by anybody" sounds a little bit ridiculous.
      - nitrogen 11y ago
        I think you have it backward. The original claim is that there was never privacy in public. The next comment refuted that claim by giving counterexamples. Can you demonstrate that a lack of privacy is a requirement?
chopman 11y ago
The water is warming and the frog is not feeling it.
Nursie 11y ago
>> I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Until relatively recently there was no expectation of being filmed anywhere, ever. This idea that we're fair game for recording anywhere outside our own homes is a recent one. I just don't agree that being out in public means I'm fair game to be recorded and monitored constantly. >> 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission No, it's not. Implicit permission and default browser behaviour do not constitute permission.
- rhino369 11y ago
  No expectations that you'd be filmed. But an expectation that you'd be seen. And in small towns that would destroy anonymity much worse than CCTV. Why should anything you do in public ever be private?
  - Nursie 11y ago
    There's a middle ground somewhere, between expecting privacy in public and total surveillance. It doesn't have to be black and white like that.
agd 11y ago
Just because somewhere is public does not mean that it is expected (or ok) to be under blanket surveillance there. People can film you in public places, but they can't follow you around all day filming constantly from multiple angles. That would be harassment and invasion of privacy. This is however, the real situation in large parts of the UK. It's now impossible in most of London to meet with political activists or journalists without being surveilled.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
norea-armozel 11y ago
I have mixed feelings towards blank CCTV in a public setting at least owned by the government. When it comes to private entities I know they're there to protect themselves from theft, property damage, and etc. But what business does the government have with constant surveillance? I know that some studies have indicated that even broken or disconnected CCTV cameras does curtail crime, but wouldn't adding police patrols to troubled areas be better (especially well trained and communicative officers in said patrols)? I feel that CCTV is just a lazy approach to a deeper problem when it comes to crime. If you want to prevent it then figure out the root cause. If you want to curtail it then hire more competent police officers. They both work and they're both easier to hold accountable (imo).
- notahacker 11y ago
  I'm not sure I'd feel more liberated in a shopping precinct lined with police officers rather than cameras, even if I wasn't paying any more taxes for the increased police presence. (I'll concede I felt happier with armed guards outside every building in Quito, but the threat they were supposed to be combating was also a tad more obvious)
  - ralfd 11y ago
    This is totally offtopic, but one cannot reply to old comments on hacker news and you made me read HPMOR, so I have to went now: > Ironically, most of the better bits, and indeed the overarching plot thread of HPMOR are largely down to the huge gaps in various characters' rational thought. If Harry had made the obvious "let's not trust the sinister guy that's obviously manipulative and definitely more experienced at it than me" leap right at the beginning it might have been a much shorter series. Oh God, yes! After 2500 pages finishing, uff, I have to say it was not uninteresting, but is way overdone how singular awesome that Harry there is. I also disliked that he "solves" death. I get that transhumanists/futurists are pretty scared by it, but the story ending with everyone in the magical world getting virtually immortal and forever young? Apart from the wish fulfillment by the author, how would that even work with population growth? I am also a bit wary now about fanfiction in general, because after so much time invested reading such a long story, it does change your imagination/interpretation of the original story.
otis_inf 11y ago
> Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be. No it isn't. Please read up on GCHQ and their pals NSA and what they do, e.g. 'dragnets' and other mass surveillance which absolutely isn't 'by permission' but is happening at a massive scale. Also, you can claim you're one of the most paranoid people you know, but your whole post sounds like a post written by one of the 'I have nothing to hide so nothing to fear' group. If you'd be even a little bit paranoid, you wouldn't be ok with whatever surveillance, CCTV cameras etc.
- caskance 11y ago
  So don't be even a little bit paranoid. If you'd be even a little bit racist, you wouldn't be OK with miscegenation. Only someone starting from the premise that miscegenation is bad would conclude that this statement means that everyone should be at least a little bit racist.
kirsebaer 11y ago
> I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. If the police found out about a meeting to discuss police corruption, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting. There is a long history of harassment of activists and whistleblowers.
- caskance 11y ago
  If the police found out about a meeting to discuss a bank robbery, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting. There is a long history of arresting bank robbers.
  - ocb 11y ago
    Because bank robberies are something that happens often enough and affects enough people that we should allow people in power (who are never, ever corrupt!) to have the capability to do something where the potential for abuse is incredibly easy to imagine. East Germany and the Stasi are a pretty good example of what happens when mass surveillance goes wrong. That wasn't very long ago.
    - caskance 11y ago
      People in power by definition have that capability. That's what it means to be in power.
      - ocb 11y ago
        I see now that you're trolling, but being in power does not necessarily imply mass surveillance capabilities ;)
        caskance 11y ago
        Since when is that the only item in the set of "things where the potential for abuse is incredibly easy to imagine"?
TimJRobinson 11y ago
I agree with you. When balancing risk vs reward I'm happy for their to be surveillance cameras everywhere in public. I might think differently if I was a high profile person as then there's the possibility the government could be watching your moves to use as blackmail or for nefarious purposes. But as an every day citizen I believe it's much more likely that I'm going to get mugged in an alleyway than have big brother mess with my life. I'd rather have that increased safety from everyday criminals than worry about the government. On the internet I believe the opposite, because there is such a low chance of intelligence services catching anyone trying to harm me. I feel like gathering peoples public unencrypted information will do almost nothing to stop online criminals.
worklogin 11y ago
I have several issues with your post. 1) Public places /used/ to be private! In practice, anyway, because CCTV wasn't ubiquitous, and constant recording by every passerby wasn't the norm. It's a public space, but 24/7 recording by a dozen private parties at a time is NOT the norm historically. 2) If most of our surveillance online is "by consent" but no one reads the EULA or signs anything, is it really consent? Just because people are ignorant to the problems, or do not feel immediate impact of online surveillance, doesn't make it right or consensual.
xorcist 11y ago
The division between private and public space is very much political, just as perhaps more famously free contra paid time is. Public space is not owned by the watchers (in most jurisdictions). Even if it was, ownership does not translate well to physical space. There are lots of things you're not allowed to do with a place you "own", including building there. Regarding permissions for surveillance, it's far from clear how such a contract works and what you even can be said to agree to. In some places, both parties in the conversation need to agree to recording a telephone conversation for example, and the same principle should hold true for email.

AndrewOMartin 11y ago

UN privacy chief "sensationally cites 1984" says commenter on Hacker News.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
All he needed was a reference to Gun Control, Hitler and Bob Heinlein and he would have a full house :-)

PlzSnow 11y ago

Perhaps the UN privacy chief should actually read 1984, then he would realise how silly he sounds.

cryoshon 11y ago
It's perfectly reasonable: in 1984 they didn't have cell phones or internet histories. No chances for Big Brother to snoop on what kind of information you're seeking or what kinds of comments you'll make when you think you are anonymous. No physical tracking device on people at all times. No network construction of who each individual talks to and when; no harvesting of metadata. 1984 had a bunch of CCTVs without enough people to monitor all of them, no recording capacity, and an extreme political indoctrination regime to help make up the difference by having informants. Ingsoc is a child's view of dystopia, now-- we have far surpassed it.
- varjag 11y ago
  Do you really believe you are in a dystopian world surpassing 1984?
  - opnitro 11y ago
    I think he means we have the capabilities to be in a world surpassing 1984.
    - varjag 11y ago
      Doesn't mean much if the capabilities aren't being exploited. 1984 wasn't a book about technology. It did feature mass surveillance exceeding anything we have today, even if described in 1940s state of art terms.
      - ptaipale 11y ago
        Not to mention the political oppression and violence enabled by that surveillance. Even most lynchings by a Twitter mob aren't actual executions where someone is really killed (although sometimes someone might be pushed to suicide by the psychological pressure; that is still a far cry from an actual political purge with murder.)

JumpJumpJump 11y ago

In '1984' every room of every house and apartment was monitored, if this is currently not the case in the UK, the quote is hyperbole.

mtgx 11y ago
Every PC, cellphone, console, smart TV, and soon every appliance and lightbulb will be under surveillance (everything that connects to them is captured by the spy agencies, encrypted or not). Close enough, I would say.
jacquesm 11y ago
That's because the person who wrote 1984 did not foresee a little snitch in every pocket.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  A little snitch that people pay for the privilege of carrying around! That's the real thing Orwell missed -- not that surveillance would increase, but that the surveilled would so enthusiastically cooperate in their own surveillance.
  - chopman 11y ago
    Well people payed for their telescreens, rigth? I remember the lower class didn't have them, possibly because they couldn't afford them.
    - drdeca 11y ago
      Still had the cameras though.
  - branchless 11y ago
    This is where 1984 and Brave New World diverge. In 1984 people obeyed because they were afraid. In Brave New World, which is closer to reality, people fell into the arms of the big stage. They wanted it. That is why Brave New World is far more chilling.

philip142au 11y ago

Is the UN chief worried that hes being surveilled by every company and government? It's always ok when it's happening to everone else but when it hurts those in power then things change.

mtgx 11y ago

People here are missing the point, where it's "less", "more" or "just the same" level of surveillance as 1984 is kind of besides the point. The point is he's asking for a Geneva convention for the Internet, and I think that would be a good thing to have, even if some abuses will exist, at least we'll have a framework other than the current "whatever the spy agencies can come up with in terms of surveillance is a-okay".

tajen 11y ago
Correct. In the same way that government-organized torture in Singapore wouldn't be published in La Haye because they've never signed any international treaty about it, citizen spying is legal in the Western world because there is no global treaty about it. You're right that we need a framework, like a Geneva convention for the Internet. However, I'm afraid that the willfulness and the balance of powers isn't the same as for the Geneva convention itself.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago

Sorry this guy sounds like a minor career technocrat angling for a budget increase and pandering to the crowd. Possibly pointing a finger at the Euro states that still have mandatory ID cards and allow local government to run their own secret police as well as the main federal ones - might be more useful.

nsajko 11y ago
Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the_European_Economic_Area#Overview_of_national_identity_cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the...

nbevans 11y ago

A lot of CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned, not state owned. I would guess the majority are actually.

chopman 11y ago
But they would happily, or at least with a warrant, give the recordings to the government should they ask for them.
- nbevans 11y ago
  But that is still far away from the '84 doctrine of "watching everyone all the time".
  - peterwaller 11y ago
    You don't need a video link to be meaningfully watching someone.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  My experience, at least in Glasgow, is that often the criminals are known to the owner of the small shop the crime was committed outside, because they're often small local shops serving small local communities… and they'll just drag their feet on handing any evidence over the police, and sometimes "forget" they were meant to and just delete it as part of their ongoing fortnightly (or monthly) cycle. Showing this was deliberate and not negligence is hard. They don't care about providing evidence to the police, because their customers might stop going if they're going to be ratted out on, they only care about protecting their own shop.
- reasonishy 11y ago
  Which is a good thing. It means if you get mugged, if your kid gets abducted, if you get stabbed, there may well be some garage or shop with CCTV who will have some useful evidence. It's one of the reasons there's very little crime in the UK.

SixSigma 11y ago

> Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. As a regular visitor to the English countryside, where are these rural cameras ?

notahacker 11y ago
Hanging round the necks or sitting in the pockets of tourists, most probably. Seriously, most CCTV cameras are attached to buildings. If there are people genuinely expecting privacy standing outside because they can't see anyone inside the building observing them, then I have an invisibility cloak to sell them.

EGreg 11y ago

Not sure what the UN or any organization would be able to accomplish in an ecosystem of organizations and improving tech. The genie is out of the bottle. Welcome to the big data revolution. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

FlaceBook 11y ago

Thanks to many on HN who can't come up with any way to make a living that doesn't involve creepily probing the private data of millions of people, it's all down hill from here.

veidr 11y ago

Fuck off with hyperbolic mouth-frothing; in the novel 1984, the government cameras were in your house. Even China and the UK haven't done that yet, nor are they close to it.

mattgibson 11y ago
Oh, really? http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/462230/Edward-Snowden-revelations-GCHQ-harvested-webcam-pics-including-sexual-material http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/462230/Edward-Snowden-re...
- veidr 11y ago
  Yes, really. That the government is hacking private webcams en masse is a flagrant criminal act. The collusion of purported democratic governments to do this kind of thing is a threat to the rule of law itself. It's a very serious problem, and absurd, over-the-top exaggeration doesn't help. Like when people say, "Working at McDonald's is slavery!" No, it isn't. Actual slavery is a whole different level of badness. Obviously. And along those same lines, odious though it is, government spies hacking your webcam to see your dick pics is not as bad as the government installing mandatory government cameras inside the homes of all citizens. Obviously. So I don't think Cannataci is helping with this kind of hyperbolic statement. It could reasonably be argued that government surveillance in the UK and the US today is worse than it was in East Germany and the USSR -- and that's very alarming. The notion it's as bad as the fictional dystopia of 1984 is absurd and unhelpful.
sillygeese 11y ago
Living in Denial? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2014/12/16/the-elf-on-the-shelf-is-preparing-your-child-to-live-in-a-future-police-state-professor-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2014/12/16... http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-toward-forty/2013/11/elf-on-the-shelf-nsa-santa/ http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-toward-forty/2013/11/elf-o... "Smart" TVs, and most of the "Internet of Things" stuff is all about monitoring us. XBox's Kinect is in the mix too. And they're just brazenly telling us through the mainstream media. Again, they're acclimating us to being aware that we're surveilled all the time.

amyjess 11y ago

Enough with the hyperbole. The fact that you can criticize the government without being sent to minilove for crimethink is proof enough that things aren't "worse than 1984".

wmeredith 11y ago
I thought the same thing. Until they're subjecting people to having their body parts gnawed off by live rats, this is hyperbolic bullshit and it doesn't help the conversation.
nitrogen 11y ago
Surveillance is worse. In 1984 there was one camera and one microphone per room. Now we carry multiple cameras and microphones and tracking devices everywhere we go. In 1984 the party had to break into an apartment to read a person's journal. Now our most private thoughts are stored in text messages, private Facebook posts, and Evernote, within easy and undetectable reach of governments. Behavioral analysis can tell surveillance operators things about us that we don't even know about ourselves. Every person we talk to on the phone, every page we like, every link we share on our blogs can be wired together into a graph of our identity, ideas, and social networks (see software like Palantir).
melloclello 11y ago
You would think with all the posts about East Germany on here lately people would recognise this. Edit: playing devil's advocate, you could almost argue that the surveillance system in the UK is at least a lot better than that of Airstrip One/the GDR - while the level of surveillance is perhaps about the same, the Thought Police/Stasi used it to feed their obsession with picking up harmless political dissenters, while at the very least GHCQ seems to (thankfully) be focussed on (somewhat) more genuine existential threats.

mc32 11y ago

>So the situation in some cases is far worse already." So, that's the thing, in some ways it's worse. It has more detail, it's voluntary and less intrusive. The one thing which is quite different is it's not a system to control people, by control I mean controlling as in Orwell's vision. And, for the most part, with few sheepish objections, people are willing to trade in their privacy in exchange for services rendered. People in practice value free resources and services over privacy, else we would have seen a system of micropaymets or economic alternative take root but it has not. At some point people may change their minds and may want to hold on to their privacy and begin paying for services, maybe, but for most people that is not the case at this time.

cm2187 11y ago
Most of the people I know do not understand/realize the extent to which they are spied on. If GCHQ was opening their paper mail every day and keeping a copy of all their correspondance and they knew it, they would start a revolution.
- mc32 11y ago
  I don't think that would be the case. At first there would be indignation, but then they'd conclude that despite the pervasiveness nothing bad had come of it to them (hauled down to the met office, say), therefore it cannot actually be bad and that on balance it was probably good since it allows "them" to catch the baddies. It's something akin to the slow boil effect.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  They just don't care. Even when Cameron said: “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which […] we cannot read?” nobody cared. Maybe if they start implanting transponders into peoples heads there would be a small uproar, but forget a revolution in the UK against surveillance, this will never happen.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    That they "just don't care" is not in my experience true. When it is explained most people I've spoken do care. However, then they ask "and what can we do about it?" and the answer is either "change everything about how you do things" or "not much"... And then they don't care enough to go beyond this stage or they are just confused and scared. Either way back to facebook the next day.

jug5 11y ago

Understatement. If you want to find pro government shills come read the comments in here.

dijit 11y ago

All these words and nobody is talking about Tempora[0]? I mean, tempora is pretty bad, rank and file stronger than the collection obtained by NSA, metadata is stored, content is stored, there are examples of "owning" certificate authorities and even examples of downgrading SSL/TLS to not include perfect forward secret ciphers. And this is done for any content that passes UK borders. :| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora

rhino369 11y ago
The whole reason the privacy debate hasn't reached critical mass amongst the general population is because there is no actual impact. It's entire theoretical for almost everyone. 99.99 of people aren't being actually spied on. Despite the fact that the western governments can spy on everything you do. They just don't. They can't spy on all of us. Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners. Sure my emails are probably buffered for a little while. But as long as I don't ride a jet into the Sears tower nobody will actually read them. The people asked themselves: if a tree fell in the woods and nobody heard it, did it make a sound. And our answer is no it didn't. The fact is the biggest intrusion in our lives is Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Google literally exists to spy on you. It's a many many billion dollar industry. The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does.
- zo1 11y ago
  >"The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does." I don't mean to detract from your mains points about why people aren't in an uproar over these things. But, there is a big difference between what "Google" can do to you, and what a government institution such as the NSA can.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    I fear google way more than the NSA or the government. Google can link my name to someone claiming I'm a racist. It can tie me to stupid things I said online 15 years ago. Who knows what it will do in 5 years when Bing reduces their profit margin. In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database. That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.

xacaxulu 11y ago

Christopher Hitchens has an amazing book called "Why Orwell Matters" and I strongly advise reading it. He also does a takedown of Kissinger in "The Trial of Henry Kissinger".

deltaprotocol 11y ago

Seriously, I read several posts here that I'm absolutely sure where written by NSA/GCHQ agents working very comfy to try and manipulate technical opinion. Anyone with a brain and enough technical knowledge (which can be assumed of HN readers) knows the situation is much worse than 1984, beyond Orwellian, absurd, ridiculous, disgusting. If you where a Secret Agency, and you knew the top 100 news/forums for opinionated technical people, would you not set a division of monkeys to try and confuse people? They win if some people even "doubt" or "question"... we must all be 100% sure of what is happening, 24h a day, ready to feel threatened and abused by cameras, abusive permissions, tracking devices, dragnets. We must feel the disgust 24h a day.

cryoshon 11y ago
Yeah, I definitely get this vibe quite strongly too. We know they're out there, if not here. HN readers understand the scope of the dragnet and the systematic analysis of content and metadata. In part, this is why I am patrolling around to offer good objections to the idiots. I am highly suspicious of very-upvoted yet very dumb/uneducated/intentionally misleading comments in this thread, also. The objections are too canned/simple/easy to shoot down, and they rely on emotion rather than facts. The tech crowd's acquiescence to the surveillance state is absolutely necessary for it to function as designed.
- deltaprotocol 11y ago
  "The tech crowd's acquiescence to the surveillance state is absolutely necessary for it to function as designed. " Well said! Since we have the toolset to understand what is happening, we must be the main source of outrage. When we come online and do our stuff, we represent our families, our friends, or coworkers. Everyone around us that do not have the same tools to understand/interpret the abuses and the propaganda. We like to think that everyone should understand what is going on, but this is impossible in a short/medium or even long term. People use the Internet like they use the building they live, or the house. They haven't built it and they don't understand, and don't need to understand how it was built or its internals. They are the users. They presume the architects/engineers involved where responsible, good people, that did a good job and wanted for them, future residents, to have a nice home. If you are an engineer building a Shopping Center, and you get to know how the company you work for is abusive towards its employees or how they are overpricing resources in a public contract or manipulating prices, or doing a dirty job using an unsafe structure or bad materials, it is you who should act. You can't expect someone else or everyone to act, to understand what you understand because you are in a position to understand. If you do not act, if you do not take a position, if you do not represent the ones that are unaware, you become the same as them. The only way we can make out of this bizarre situation is if everyone of us takes his role in society, whatever society, with his/her heart. Do it with love towards your neighbour. There is no other way. In tech, we are often quite cold because we deal with machines, but we are still flesh and bone behind screens, and our love should be directed to protecting the users.