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I know how anti-surveillance HN is, but I would like to make a case this could be an amazingly good thing. The cost of crime to society has been estimated to b

I know how anti-surveillance HN is, but I would like to make a case this could be an amazingly good thing. The cost of crime to society has been estimated to be on the order of $300 billion/year (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/). But that doesn't include numerous indirect costs. E.g. decreased property values, white flight and the various issues it causes, people staying indoors or making sacrifices due to fear of crime, etc. One of the biggest things is that bothers me about our society, is children are not allowed to go outside anymore. People blame electronics, but it's almost entirely due to parents that fear their kids being outside of their eyesight. Look at the incredible map on this article, on how much range children have lost over time: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... And it's almost entirely due to fear of child abductors and crime, although other issues like increased automobile traffic play a part. I find this incredibly sad. A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact. I too, find the idea of being watched constantly creepy. So I propose some restrictions. They should require a warrant to get the data from the surveillance machines, and only be allowed to use it for a particular case. It should be entirely air gapped. It should be deleted after a week. And it should ideally be stuff like this surveillance drone, which can't make out individual faces, just movements to see where people have gone. We are looking at a society that is surrounded by sensors anyway. Surveillance cameras on businesses are becoming nearly universal now they are so cheap, and everyone walks around with a microphone in their pocket. Soon all cars will have insurance mandated dashcams, not to mention self driving cars loaded with sensors. All that stuff seems much creepier than a drone, as it can't make out the faces of individuals and what they are doing or saying.

dmos62 10y ago
I'd like to note that crime has deeper roots than opportunity. I think knowing who pulled the trigger does not fix the societal problems. This can be used in a good way, like you said, but I'm worried that stuff like this will give new hope to War on Drugs, premise of which is fundamentally flawed.
paganel 10y ago
> A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact. I wanted to be on your side, I really did, until I came to this paragraph. From my point of view "crime" is an intrinsic part of our species, doing bad things is one of the things that make us humans. I'm not condoning rapes nor murders, it's just that, if you look at the history of our species, you'd realize that we are where we are (we've sent people to the Moon and discovered planets from galaxies far, far away) also because we did "bad" stuff. Take the Bible, a book that has had a profound effect on the "Western" civilization. The story of Cain and Abel is one of the most important from the Old Testament. The New Testament is also a "Chronicle of a Crime Foretold", to paraphrase Garcia Marquez. Or Homer's The Iliad, the book that defined the Greek-Roman antiquity. It's full of murders and rapes and bad things. Long story short, we wouldn't have had the "enormous economic and social impact" that we have today as a species if, let's say, an omnipotent God/Spaghetti Flying Monster would have just watched us from the very beginning and would have prevented us from doing any crimes.
- XorNot 10y ago
  I hardly see the relevance of crime fiction as an argument against an efficient justice and crime prevention system, which is the argument you seem to be making. I'm also fairly sure actual rape and murder are not pre-requisites to writing crime fiction...otherwise the Law & Order series apparently has a much higher production cost then I imagined.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  Seems a bit of a stretch from "crime happened in the past and people wrote about it in fiction" to "crime is fundamentally necessary for our societal development"...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - paganel 10y ago
    Fiction represented what people saw around them and considered them as some sort of values. Someone above mentioned "Law&Order" as some sort of dismissal, but that's exactly the point, in a "know it all surveillance society" the societal aspects that made the producers think: "hey, let's make a show about the good guys catching the bad guys, let's call it 'Law&Order'" would not be present. Fiction is always backed up by facts from the real life. I should know, i grew up in a wannabe "know it all surveillance society" (on the Eastern side of the wall), where we did not have TV shows like 'Law&Order' because, technically, the "socialist society" we were part of didn't have any bad guys. There were of course criminals, and rapist, and bad people, but they were just a glitch hidden under the rug. It was sort of supposed that in the brighter future awaiting us all those "bad elements" would have been gone for good. The former socialist government of my country was against the bad guys because in the end we were all supposed "to all be equal", some commenters on HN are against the bad guys because it brings down real estate prices, maybe some other people are against the bad guys because in a book of fiction 2000-years old someone wrote it down that: "You should not steal", the fact remains that no-one, ever, would be able to hide the "bad guys" under the rug, for ever. It's against our very nature as a species.
yoo1I 10y ago
> A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact. The problem with your assertion that once crime is reduced significantly children will be allowed to go play on the streets again does not match reality, as evidenced by this randomly googled graph[0]. Crime's been down for a long time, yet fear is way up. This fear is easily but not correctly explained by direct factor such as crime or terrorism. So any reductions in crime or terrorism will not induce a reduction in fear, it will just shift so to something else. Why all the fear though, I don't have a good answer to... [0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-c...
- zo1 10y ago
  My theory about that is that once crime starts going down, people become even more "averse" to it. I.e. it ceases to become a day to day thing, and consequently people want to avoid it even more. Sort of the inverse of desensitizing. Though, to be fair, I'd posit that it should balance out after a while. Once people start noticing that their fear is unwarranted, they'll start becoming more comfortable.
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    Humans have an innate need for stress & conflict. Crime has gone way down, to the point that most fears are unwarranted, yet people invent even more fears to be uncomfortable about.
pjc50 10y ago
I can just as easily see omnipresent being used to further constrain children's lives. Especially those of teenagers.
ctdonath 10y ago
You really need to read/watch 1984, Brazil, and Brave New World this week.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Yes I've read 1984. It's a parody of socialism and totalitarianism. It has nothing to do with modern democracies, or drones. Its also entirely a work of fiction.
  - faktorialas 10y ago
    The author clearly worried about many of the same issues affecting his own democracy, and wrote about it too. It's not just a parody of totalitarianism if the author describes the same issues in democracy. Totalitarianism is absolutely relevant for democracies, because many are only nominally democratic, many employ totalitarian practices and many turn into totalitarianism.

dmos62 10y ago

I'd like to note that crime has deeper roots than opportunity. I think knowing who pulled the trigger does not fix the societal problems. This can be used in a good way, like you said, but I'm worried that stuff like this will give new hope to War on Drugs, premise of which is fundamentally flawed.

paganel 10y ago

> A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact. I wanted to be on your side, I really did, until I came to this paragraph. From my point of view "crime" is an intrinsic part of our species, doing bad things is one of the things that make us humans. I'm not condoning rapes nor murders, it's just that, if you look at the history of our species, you'd realize that we are where we are (we've sent people to the Moon and discovered planets from galaxies far, far away) also because we did "bad" stuff. Take the Bible, a book that has had a profound effect on the "Western" civilization. The story of Cain and Abel is one of the most important from the Old Testament. The New Testament is also a "Chronicle of a Crime Foretold", to paraphrase Garcia Marquez. Or Homer's The Iliad, the book that defined the Greek-Roman antiquity. It's full of murders and rapes and bad things. Long story short, we wouldn't have had the "enormous economic and social impact" that we have today as a species if, let's say, an omnipotent God/Spaghetti Flying Monster would have just watched us from the very beginning and would have prevented us from doing any crimes.

XorNot 10y ago
I hardly see the relevance of crime fiction as an argument against an efficient justice and crime prevention system, which is the argument you seem to be making. I'm also fairly sure actual rape and murder are not pre-requisites to writing crime fiction...otherwise the Law & Order series apparently has a much higher production cost then I imagined.
ceejayoz 10y ago
Seems a bit of a stretch from "crime happened in the past and people wrote about it in fiction" to "crime is fundamentally necessary for our societal development"...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- paganel 10y ago
  Fiction represented what people saw around them and considered them as some sort of values. Someone above mentioned "Law&Order" as some sort of dismissal, but that's exactly the point, in a "know it all surveillance society" the societal aspects that made the producers think: "hey, let's make a show about the good guys catching the bad guys, let's call it 'Law&Order'" would not be present. Fiction is always backed up by facts from the real life. I should know, i grew up in a wannabe "know it all surveillance society" (on the Eastern side of the wall), where we did not have TV shows like 'Law&Order' because, technically, the "socialist society" we were part of didn't have any bad guys. There were of course criminals, and rapist, and bad people, but they were just a glitch hidden under the rug. It was sort of supposed that in the brighter future awaiting us all those "bad elements" would have been gone for good. The former socialist government of my country was against the bad guys because in the end we were all supposed "to all be equal", some commenters on HN are against the bad guys because it brings down real estate prices, maybe some other people are against the bad guys because in a book of fiction 2000-years old someone wrote it down that: "You should not steal", the fact remains that no-one, ever, would be able to hide the "bad guys" under the rug, for ever. It's against our very nature as a species.

yoo1I 10y ago

> A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact. The problem with your assertion that once crime is reduced significantly children will be allowed to go play on the streets again does not match reality, as evidenced by this randomly googled graph[0]. Crime's been down for a long time, yet fear is way up. This fear is easily but not correctly explained by direct factor such as crime or terrorism. So any reductions in crime or terrorism will not induce a reduction in fear, it will just shift so to something else. Why all the fear though, I don't have a good answer to... [0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-c...

zo1 10y ago
My theory about that is that once crime starts going down, people become even more "averse" to it. I.e. it ceases to become a day to day thing, and consequently people want to avoid it even more. Sort of the inverse of desensitizing. Though, to be fair, I'd posit that it should balance out after a while. Once people start noticing that their fear is unwarranted, they'll start becoming more comfortable.
- ctdonath 10y ago
  Humans have an innate need for stress & conflict. Crime has gone way down, to the point that most fears are unwarranted, yet people invent even more fears to be uncomfortable about.

pjc50 10y ago

I can just as easily see omnipresent being used to further constrain children's lives. Especially those of teenagers.

ctdonath 10y ago

You really need to read/watch 1984, Brazil, and Brave New World this week.

Houshalter 10y ago
Yes I've read 1984. It's a parody of socialism and totalitarianism. It has nothing to do with modern democracies, or drones. Its also entirely a work of fiction.
- faktorialas 10y ago
  The author clearly worried about many of the same issues affecting his own democracy, and wrote about it too. It's not just a parody of totalitarianism if the author describes the same issues in democracy. Totalitarianism is absolutely relevant for democracies, because many are only nominally democratic, many employ totalitarian practices and many turn into totalitarianism.