11 ms·

Growing up in the UK and living in the US has given me the odd distinction of being strongly against online surveillance of private space, and strongly in favor

• h4nkoslo 10y ago
  It absolutely cannot "protect the people [you] care about". It may, perhaps, lead to apprehension after the fact.
  • PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    That seems awfully nitpicky. Cameras cannot physically stop a crime in progress, but neither can any other remotely reasonable public safety measure.
    • Qantourisc 10y ago
      The best prevention is preventing criminal behaviour. By taking care of mental health, community, opportunity and support.
      • nradov 10y ago
        The vast majority of violent criminals are not mentally ill.
        • aminorex 10y ago
          It does not seem like a stretch to expand the definition of mental illness to include mental conditions which predispose to the commission of violent crimes. Certainly such conditions are maladaptive for the sufferer.
          • jawbone3 10y ago
            Most violence is morally motivated[1], so working on changing societal norms are most important. 1: http://www.doktorikool.ut.ee/kstt/orb.aw/class=file/action=preview/id=1167735/Fiske,+Virtuous+Violence+24.09.2012.pdf http://www.doktorikool.ut.ee/kstt/orb.aw/class=file/action=p...
          • varjag 10y ago
            I don't see how reclassifying crime as illness is going to help anything except making psychiatry much less credible.
        • Qantourisc 10y ago
          I meant mental health, I didn't mean mentally ill. Mental health even includes being unhappy. Not sure if violent acts are entirely random, I have not enough expertise on that. Currently I assume most acts of violence are not entirely random; and if they are, they are a mental/medical/neurological illness. And it might be perfectly normal to be dispositioned to be like this, but it would still be a problem.
      • Qantourisc 10y ago
        Edit/Comment: best in this case does not mean cost-effective or easy ;)
    • h4nkoslo 10y ago
      "neither can any other remotely reasonable public safety measure" How about allowing citizens to carry their own protection?
  • repiret 10y ago
    Apprehension after the fact does actually prevent the perpetrator from committing a substantially similar crime, as least for as long as they're in custody. In addition, things that increase the likelihood of getting caught serve as a deterrent for other potential criminals. Which of course is not to say that on balance mass surveillance of public spaces is a net benefit. But it does have some benefits, and it does the debate disservice to deny them.
    • belorn 10y ago
      > In addition, things that increase the likelihood of getting caught serve as a deterrent for other potential criminals. Heard studies that proves the opposite. The kind of crimes that substantially deterred by the chance of getting caught are crimes which the perpetrator has had time to consider for a length of time. Violence of the moment is generally not deterred by the chance of getting caught, and is practically unaffected by surveillance of public spaces. Or to mention a few practical examples, road rage isn't effected by surveillance. A person being enraged at a bar isn't effected by surveillance, through a fight outside the bar could. Premeditated murder is deterred by the punishment/likelihood of getting caught, but other forms of murder isn't. Based on the theory, I would also guess that sexual harassment is decreased while rape isn't.
      • repiret 10y ago
        I absolutely agree that not all crimes are deterred by the likelihood or consequences of being caught. But the intersection of crimes that are committed in public and crimes that are committed dispassionately, where the likelihood of being caught can deter them, is non-zero; therefore public surveillance can deter crimes, and one cannot simply dismiss that possibility when considering the pros and cons of mass public surveillance
  • k-mcgrady 10y ago
    Wrong, and a news story this week proves it. I can't find the link but there was a known sex offender who had served his sentence. A woman was walking home alone late at night so someone monitoring public CCTV decided to follow her via the cameras. They then saw the sex offender approach and begin verbally harassing her. Police were called and got there before things got more serious.
    • h4nkoslo 10y ago
      "Someone monitoring public CCTV" is where it tends to break down.
• morgante 10y ago
  I definitely share your views. If I'm in public, I by definition should not expect privacy.
  • jawbone3 10y ago
    Actually some countries demand that the genitals should be kept hidden even in public spaces, and even beyond that many encryption advocates believe you have a right to use encryption even in public spaces.
  • willvarfar 10y ago
    But perhaps not everything in the public space viewshed is public? Are police allowed to stand on the street and look over your fence, or through your windows? Are police allowed to leave a camera outside your house so they don't have to stand there while they look over your fence or through your windows? This is particularly pertinent because the FBI happen to believe that everything that can be seen from public space is public. (And airspace more than a few meters above your house is also public.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11912696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11912696 was on HN just a few months ago.
    • logfromblammo 10y ago
      What the FBI (executive) believes is legal and what the courts (judicial) believe is legal will occasionally differ. Also, if you were to stand on a public right-of-way and photograph an FBI building, you would quickly find that the FBI's beliefs about photography are a bit more nuanced, and a lot more hypocritical. Usually, the courts take into account the typical movements of actual people when determining the expectation of privacy. If you put up an 8-ft privacy fence around your backyard, and an aerial camera can still see into it from unrestricted public airspace, that doesn't really matter, because you have made the gesture of enclosing a private space. The fence is a request for the public to honor your desire for privacy. Genuine privacy is what you get when the government builds a classified facility. Fences, restricted airspace, guards with guns, and locked windowless rooms. No private person can afford that, so we pretend that a fig leaf is as good as a tuxedo.
  • 10y ago
• anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Probably mainly smoke and mirrors. I've lost count of the number of UK stories where some terrorist or criminal was known to authorities, or already on a watch list. They never manage to catch or prevent despite all these huge surveillance programmes. Then the news almost inevitably follows up that they've found out there were public exchanges of messages on Twitter 2 days before the incident or some such. It would be comical were it not for people dying. My take is it's utterly irrelevant. The chance, even with Daish and current events, of dying in a terrorist attack are less than by falling off a ladder. Something like 20 times less. It's firmly down there with the silly and odd causes of death. I see no war on ladders.
  • sandworm101 10y ago
    >> I see no war on ladders. Have you tried to buy a large ladder lately? They come covered in so many warning stickers you'd think you were buying pesticide. Snowmobiles come with fewer warnings.
    • jawbone3 10y ago
      You are comparing the invasion of afganistan with warning stickers, just clarifying.
      • Normal_gaussian 10y ago
        And what an enlightening comparison it is. Whilst one has had significantly more resources spent on it than the other, you do have to wonder - would spending the same on ladders make much difference? Is the ladder safety market saturated and the invading foreign nations not?
    • rasz_pl 10y ago
      in US maybe, the land of "do not swallow" stickers on baseball bats
  • throwaway1892 10y ago
    > ... the number of UK stories where some terrorist or criminal was known to authorities, or already on a watch list It was the case of most of the terrorists who've attacked France those last years.
• tn13 10y ago
  Nah! Any comparison between UK and USA on law enforcement is completely way off the mark. USA is far too diverse and the range of crime far too wide for visual surveillance of public spaces to be common. To be honest UK police are complete rubbish. They are corrupt and far to cowardly. Large crimes are pushed under the carpet simply because cops do not have the courage to take up the baddies. It takes years for the London cops admit widespread sexual exploitation of young girls by Pakistani gangs. London tend to have no-go streets and their are Sharia courts on the streets of London. I am not sure what UK cops do looking at the footage of white girls harassed on street for wearing a skirt. American cops use excessive force yet I think they overall do a significantly better job of defending people.
• billyjobob 10y ago
  Men are far more likely than women to be the victims of all forms of violent crime, so why are you 'especially' concerned about women?
  • icebraining 10y ago
    Not anymore, at least in the US: "Unlike in 2005 when a higher percentage of males than females were victims of one or more violent crimes, no significant difference was detected in the 2014 prevalence rates for males (1.2%) and females (1.1%) in 2014." https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv14.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv14.pdf
    • predavlad 10y ago
      Equality ... finally !!!
• AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > CCTV surveillance can protect the people I care about (especially women at night) from horrible violent crimes I'm actually scared of. One of the biggest problems with public surveillance isn't what you do in public, it's where you go. You don't have to see what's going on behind closed doors to get the picture when you see someone go into an oncologist's or psychiatrist's office, or an abortion clinic, or an AA meeting, or political party meeting etc. etc. (Also FWIW males are the victims of violent crime significantly more often than females are.)
• 3131s 10y ago
  > strongly against online surveillance of private space, and strongly in favor of regulated visual surveillance of public space. I share this view, largely because visual surveillance of public space is probably a technological inevitability, but under the condition that anyone is allowed to surveil public spaces and that the resulting data from government surveillance is made open source.
• dumb-saint 10y ago
  I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial. I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me. In the end, I am aware that this is a losing battle, and that people who feel as strongly as me about not being constantly under surveillance will have to move out of big cities. Big cities are becoming highly controlled environment, where one doesn't feel like a sovereign human being anymore. In a sense they are an externalisation of corporate culture.
  • ciaranm 10y ago
    I agree with the parent r.e. safety concerns though. It's a cheap, easy way to provide a relatively sure record of truth for public spaces. It helps prosecute people who enact violent or other crimes, and reduces the number of those in the first place. Do you disagree with that, or value being invisible in public higher?
    • dumb-saint 10y ago
      I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before. Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of having some police officers "keeping an eye on me" but in the new sense of using the full power of all of our current technology to track me. I'll tell you what the cost is: spontaneity, randomness, street-level interaction, the right to be WEIRD. All this while crime rates have been naturally going down for decades. None of this stuff is about crime for the politicians, it's about control and business deals (I promise you someone sells all those cameras and related equipment to the cities, and it's not you or me). I am not that old, but old enough to already see that historical lessons don't last long, and everything has to be learned over and over again :(