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Didn't know Singapore has so many cams as well. But then it's one of the safest countries and in the US i dare not walking alone in many places not worrying abo

Didn't know Singapore has so many cams as well. But then it's one of the safest countries and in the US i dare not walking alone in many places not worrying about being robbed..

agorabinary 9y ago
Whether your wallet or your privacy, you are being robbed regardless.
- stickfigure 9y ago
  When someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you will reconsider this equivocation.
  - yadongwen 9y ago
    exactly.. i've been robbed a few times with knifes etc but never guns in countries not discussed here. i really hoped there were cams
  - thunderbong 9y ago
    This can happen even with cameras being there, no? In which case, you've lost both
    - kercker 9y ago
      Everything can happen to anyone. I think stickfigure is trying to say that, with cameras above head, which will result in higher probability of being caught if someone commits a crime, the one who would commit a crime if there was no camera will refrain from committing a crime. With cameras, the probability of losing life will be smaller than without them.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions. If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people got scared. You know what also reduces gun-related incidents: denying people the ability to have guns. It won't eliminate them (there's always a black market for everything), but it'll damn well reduce them, probably to a point that reasonable people would believe is an acceptable number.
    - tzahola 9y ago
      As if you couldn’t rob someone with a knife.
      - kelnos 9y ago
        What's your point? I was specifically responding to a claim about gun-related robberies. Knives are also short-range weapons and are arguably a ton less dangerous than guns. If someone brandishes a knife at me and doesn't have an accomplice to surround me, I've got pretty good odds if I simply turn around and run. The equation changes if they have a gun.
    - Simon_says 9y ago
      The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force. More people will die of murder and suicide in an armed society, but it's the price we pay to protect against an existential threat to our culture's way of life, which in aggregate is more important than the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence. It's not good enough to just say that a disarmed society is safer. You have to show how we can have equal protection against a government run amok without guns. So far as I know, there's nothing equal. Human history is quite long. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own. Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check. This isn't some abstract fear. It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.
  - sgt101 9y ago
    Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others. Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing! Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.
    - Jyaif 9y ago
      Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.
      - bryananderson 9y ago
        History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same? We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”). We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch. The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.
        Tyrek 9y ago
        How does this play into how we perceive security threats? As far as I understand it, the general model to reduce threats to any system is to create bottlenecks (reduce attach surface) where you can focus the majority of your countermeasures. Is it at least not a valid consideration that one model of society/government effectively forces a bottleneck of social/political decisions at the government level in order to head off any issues? Citizens in this model would presumably have a higher level of vested interest in the proper functioning of the government, and therefore have higher involvement.
  - ataturk 9y ago
    Surveillance doesn't prevent that, however.
- StreamBright 9y ago
  Not really. Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death. Look how many times robbery goes wrong resulting in the victims death.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    > Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death. I submit that that statement is false, and removing someone's privacy rights can indeed result in their death. And that's not even really the point: I am ok with there being a price to privacy, even if that is some amount of deaths that might otherwise be reduced.
  - krick 9y ago
    I would question living a life like that being worth it. It horrifies me to think I would't even know otherwise should I be born in a country like that.
- chrischen 9y ago
  There is no expectation of privacy in a public place, or on someone else’s property.
darklajid 9y ago
Singapore just looks/looked at Malaysia the last couple days because a man was killed in a rather spectacular fashion - and everything's on camera.. (I live in Singapore. I'm not a fan of CCTVs, not at all. Locals all seem to be fine with them so far, even happily quoting that they make life saver as a consequence and therefor are a Good Thing)

Didn't know Singapore has so many cams as well. But then it's one of the safest countries and in the US i dare not walking alone in many places not worrying about being robbed..

agorabinary 9y ago

Whether your wallet or your privacy, you are being robbed regardless.

stickfigure 9y ago
When someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you will reconsider this equivocation.
- yadongwen 9y ago
  exactly.. i've been robbed a few times with knifes etc but never guns in countries not discussed here. i really hoped there were cams
- thunderbong 9y ago
  This can happen even with cameras being there, no? In which case, you've lost both
  - kercker 9y ago
    Everything can happen to anyone. I think stickfigure is trying to say that, with cameras above head, which will result in higher probability of being caught if someone commits a crime, the one who would commit a crime if there was no camera will refrain from committing a crime. With cameras, the probability of losing life will be smaller than without them.
- kelnos 9y ago
  Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions. If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people got scared. You know what also reduces gun-related incidents: denying people the ability to have guns. It won't eliminate them (there's always a black market for everything), but it'll damn well reduce them, probably to a point that reasonable people would believe is an acceptable number.
  - tzahola 9y ago
    As if you couldn’t rob someone with a knife.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      What's your point? I was specifically responding to a claim about gun-related robberies. Knives are also short-range weapons and are arguably a ton less dangerous than guns. If someone brandishes a knife at me and doesn't have an accomplice to surround me, I've got pretty good odds if I simply turn around and run. The equation changes if they have a gun.
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force. More people will die of murder and suicide in an armed society, but it's the price we pay to protect against an existential threat to our culture's way of life, which in aggregate is more important than the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence. It's not good enough to just say that a disarmed society is safer. You have to show how we can have equal protection against a government run amok without guns. So far as I know, there's nothing equal. Human history is quite long. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own. Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check. This isn't some abstract fear. It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.
- sgt101 9y ago
  Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others. Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing! Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.
  - Jyaif 9y ago
    Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.
    - bryananderson 9y ago
      History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same? We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”). We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch. The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.
      - Tyrek 9y ago
        How does this play into how we perceive security threats? As far as I understand it, the general model to reduce threats to any system is to create bottlenecks (reduce attach surface) where you can focus the majority of your countermeasures. Is it at least not a valid consideration that one model of society/government effectively forces a bottleneck of social/political decisions at the government level in order to head off any issues? Citizens in this model would presumably have a higher level of vested interest in the proper functioning of the government, and therefore have higher involvement.
- ataturk 9y ago
  Surveillance doesn't prevent that, however.
StreamBright 9y ago
Not really. Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death. Look how many times robbery goes wrong resulting in the victims death.
- kelnos 9y ago
  > Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death. I submit that that statement is false, and removing someone's privacy rights can indeed result in their death. And that's not even really the point: I am ok with there being a price to privacy, even if that is some amount of deaths that might otherwise be reduced.
- krick 9y ago
  I would question living a life like that being worth it. It horrifies me to think I would't even know otherwise should I be born in a country like that.
chrischen 9y ago
There is no expectation of privacy in a public place, or on someone else’s property.

darklajid 9y ago

Singapore just looks/looked at Malaysia the last couple days because a man was killed in a rather spectacular fashion - and everything's on camera.. (I live in Singapore. I'm not a fan of CCTVs, not at all. Locals all seem to be fine with them so far, even happily quoting that they make life saver as a consequence and therefor are a Good Thing)