8 ms·

Gazing Back at the Surveillance Cameras That Watch Us

76 points by mattbierner 8y ago

gitgud 8y ago
Are the concepts; security and privacy mutually exclusive? Can we have secure and safe places to live without surveillance and invasion of privacy?
- nxc18 8y ago
  Yes, we can have security and privacy. People drastically over estimate the risks from things like terrorist attacks and high crime. Just think about the number of people and hugely vulnerable systems (even existing security is a joke - why not bomb a TSA line for example? Or accidentally carry a gun through, which happens all the time) and how rarely things go wrong. There's just no need for these over the top surveillance machines. Security doesn't stop motivated attackers anyway (see all terrorist attacks since 9/11). As far as everyday crime goes, I suspect a social safety net would take care of most of it. Most people aren't bad, but they will do bad things when they need help but don't get it. Once you get past that point, the cost of crime is probably less than the cost of trying to get perfect enforcement.
  - bArray 8y ago
    Agreed. 1. Security is usually a knee jerk reaction to something that has happened and rarely correctly addresses the full problem scope, just one specific edge case that was experienced. This typically happens because people over weight the probability of such an event happening to them, due to the short nature of it and lack of control. In contrast to 9/11, you won't see nearly the funding or awareness of some of the largest killers, such as obesity, cancer, US-based violence, alcohol, opioids, etc. 2. Anybody correctly motivated can bypass said security, because it is never well thought out and doesn't cover all possible scenarios. With some time and some know-how, any individual could defeat TSA (or any other Countries) security. At the moment the only benefit is those who seek to terrorize Western society are usually desperate or ill funded. 3. Security tends to lure people into a false sense of security, so people in general are just as secure as they were, because they stop being aware of insecurities. There is a study showing that Countries with and without bicycle helmets have roughly the same number of deaths - the reason being that drivers recognize cyclists without helmets as being more vulnerable, hence going to greater lengths to avoid collision. To the point, all of these cameras are unlikely to make us more secure. What they will do on the other hand is lend themselves to abuse by government or corporate entities to any extent they think they can get away with.
    - lambdadmitry 8y ago
      I have a counterexample to make: Skripal's case. AFAIK the police pieced together CCTV footage from multiple cameras, which allowed to track and identify the suspects. Given that the suspects are likely trained hitmen and the stakes were pretty high, I can only assume that the main reason most crimes don't get solved that way is the complexity of the search. ML is poised to change that. I'm not sure I'm for surveillance per se, but I do believe painting CCTV as useless and inefficient is wrong. It can be efficient in aiding high-level investigations if applied properly.
  - King-Aaron 8y ago
    > Or accidentally carry a gun through I couldn't possibly imagine a scenario where you just forget that you're carrying a gun...
    - xboxnolifes 8y ago
      Do you carry a gun daily?
      - King-Aaron 8y ago
        Why would one need to, unless you are police/military and thus required to for work?
        stonogo 8y ago
        Nobody is required to demonstrate need to King-Aaron. Your opinions on the policy are not relevant to the practical concerns regarding its implementation. For the record, I agree with you, but this isn't really an appropriate place to soapbox about it.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        I started carrying a gun after I was attacked and the nearby police unit continued to write a parking ticket in the meanwhile.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      If you carry all the time (which most people who carry do, better than just leaving it in your car or something) it becomes natural like carrying your keys or wallet. If you're carrying your handgun in the bottom of a purse and rarely take it out it's even easier to forget.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - lambdadmitry 8y ago
  - siruncledrew 8y ago
    I see it as security is about control, and privacy is about removal. Privacy and security aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't exactly symbiotic either. It's fair to say an individual would want both security and privacy (for example, as with your home). Like many things, it's about finding the right balance. I'm sure if you look to the extremes of security and privacy you could find a bunch of crazy examples. The wildcard is the who. That is what throws off the scales, as the security/privacy relationship moves from a micro to a macro level, and suddenly a person's real autonomy comes into question.
- mindslight 8y ago
  Privacy is an integral part of security - one cannot have security without privacy! Witness the various locations (eg the hotel in the article) that treat a small encroachment on their privacy as a security threat! What has severely muddied the water is the term "security" has been bandied about by governments (and other large centralized entities) to refer to their own security, often at at the expense of our security. In order to sell the lie, we're encouraged to think that their security implies our security, which is obviously bullshit when you look at the positions their various security measures actually put us in - eg bunched up, undressed, split up, and disassembled in the airport groping line.
  - pm 8y ago
    I hadn't really thought about the difference between my security and the Government's security, but the distinction you make is important.
    - mindslight 8y ago
      This is very pronounced at eg a federal building. At an airport, there obviously is a decent part of one's security that corresponds to the government's security. The real problem, and why drawing the distinction is important even there, is that the government is choosing to do things that may or may not make government/group security slightly better because they/it cannot see a downside. When in reality it/they is hurting all the individuals' ability to take care of ourselves (eg my above description), even with respect to utterly banal threats like theft.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Are we getting safety in return? We’re giving up virtually all our rights to privacy, but are we really any safer than we were in the 70’ies? Violent crime is certainly down in general, but is that because of increased surveillance? Terror and postal episodes are more frequent, so the surveillance certainly didn’t prevent that. Some surveillance is arguably helping prevent terror without us knowing, but we’re not even having a debate on what works and what doesn’t. Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
  - draugadrotten 8y ago
    > Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer. Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context. Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing. Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off? The only way to win is not to play.
    - maze-le 8y ago
      GPS devices are not on themselves active senders, you can choose not to have Wifi or cellphones. You can opt-out to do face tracking on Facebook, its just your friends you have to worry about. MACs can be spoofed. In short, you can pretty much avoid or conceal all the activities you posted above, not a CCTV installation though. If it is near your home or work, you can definitely forget even trying to avoid it, except for reconstructive surgery. >> Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. Well, I heard lots of claims to this, but never seen a reasonable POC. Most of these claims turn out to be mere geospatial statistics and analysis. Interesting to do, but it won't give you more information, than your local police precinct already knows (where are the 'troubled' neighbourhoods). Given time, more people (even bureucrats) will develop a bit of scrutiny against "AI solves everything" approaches. At least I hope they do...
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I think obviously so. There's a very simple way to illustrate as such. In particular much of the crime that affects us and surveillance attempts to stop is not particularly new. It's mostly people just killing and hurting each other in ways that are centuries old. Surveillance of society as a whole has increased on a very sharp exponential scale, yet there's been no clear causal connection to a decline in crime. If surveillance was useful, let alone necessary, to a society being made as safe as it could we would have expected to see a proportional decline in crime with some reasonably decent evidence of a causal link. But that is not present, at all. So we're really just submitting to surveillance and sacrificing ever greater swaths of personal privacy for no real gains.
- a_imho 8y ago
  I would not consider a perfect surveillance state a particularly safe place. Even without holding conflicting opinions.
themodelplumber 8y ago
Has anyone proposed a set of "marking" standards for surveillance cameras? For example, presenting a law that government cameras be marked as such, that there is an indication of the audience type (eg some kind of "public audience symbol" for a zoo cam), and maybe some kind of RF broadcast URL, or a URL to be posted within 100 feet for more information? If just a few localities had regulations like this covering government and private cameras, and if they were reasonably well designed regulations, I'll bet it would be a huge privacy benefit that would give people more peace of mind and improve communities. There will always be some exceptions for whatever Black Ops are going down in the desert, or whatever, but a lot of these needlessly anxiety-making camera-human-sensor-loop systems could probably be brought to an end quickly.
- DanBC 8y ago
  In the UK (at least, in England) all traffic speed cameras have to be bright yellow. (I feel this is caving in to the driving lobby.) There are restrictions in where they can be placed. We have laws governing use of cameras (RIPA and DPA), a data protection regulator who requires people and companies to register if they use CCTV, and we have a surveillance commissioner who provides some scrutiny of the use of these powers. Here's a jargon-heavy discussion about some of these powers: https://www.lateosurveillance.co.uk/idiots-guide-ripa-directed-surveillance/ https://www.lateosurveillance.co.uk/idiots-guide-ripa-direct... https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-surveillance-commissioners https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-survei... https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/surveillance-camera-commissioner https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/surveillance-cam... All of this regulation doesn't seem to have stopped the proliferation of cameras. People say that London has more CCTV cameras than any other city.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    >>all traffic speed cameras have to be bright yellow. (I feel this is caving in to the driving lobby.) If we assume that the primary purpose of a speed camera is to reduce speeding where its placed, then you want it to be as visible as physically possible. A hidden camera does absolutely nothing to slow someone down - they will get a ticket in the post few weeks later, but at the time when they drove past it, it didn't do anything to slow them down.
wpdev_63 8y ago
Imagine a world where there was some sort of legal apparatus to prevent abuse of these surveillance devices. And then even go further, let's imagine that there's some sort of legal protection for whistle blowers who witness such abuses of power... I can only imagine.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  How would you enforce and maintain these?
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    We could write what we thought should happen down, and then assign an elected official along with twelve randomly selected citizens to the task of deciding if any breach had happened.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Do you think secret services don't have enough power (as in monetary, brute force, manpower, etc) to influence that (I'm assuming that secret services would be the interested party there)?
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        Billionaires, senators and the president all have a lot of power, and they're still subject to the court system. If there was an insutution that became more powerful than the law then I guess it would be a good idea to... Not have it.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        Secret services are specifically made to be exempt from the law (or its parts) that applies to billionaires, though.
        craftyguy 8y ago
m0rphy99 8y ago
I will let you in with a little secret that 99% of the public is not aware of or refuse to believe. Every guest room in every hotel is equipped with extremely sophisticated surveillance equipment. Yes, every single room! It is okay if you refuse to believe this because I know it's very difficult to accept. I didn't believe it myself until I saw everything in front of my own eyes. Just keep this thought in the back of your head as a possibility, one day you'll see the truth comes out.
- rhn_mk1 8y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please back it up with something.
  - m0rphy99 8y ago
    You will never see proof because even if someone has it, they can never publish it for legal reasons, hotels are private properties and they are owned by giant MNCs. That's why I said everyone is free to believe what they want, but just keep the thought at the back of your head as a possibility because I used to be in that position until I witnessed it for myself.
    - theandrewbailey 8y ago
      > You will never see proof because even if someone has it, they can never publish it for legal reasons Since when are guests required to sign surveillance equipment NDAs to get a hotel room?
- mywittyname 8y ago
  What do you mean by, 'extremely sophisticated surveillance equipment'? Are we talking about smoke detectors, meters for water/electricity usage, or do you mean things like audio/video capture of your activities throughout the room? I definitely expect there to be equipment to determine if you've been smoking in your room (how else would they know) or doing something to destroy the room. Who has access to this sort of thing? I imagine there'd be leaks if the regular security guards had access to this, so I'm guessing it must go to some LEO HQ.
ataturk 8y ago
David Brin wrote "The Transparent Society" in 1998. Most all of what he said was incredibly prescient. He certainly understood that dangers of the one-sided panopticon. Unfortunately, I gave away my copy of that book to a CEO while working for a company that built police car cameras and was trying to go into the mass transit market. That CEO was a complete asshat when it came to privacy, a total "if you have nothing to hide..." type of mentality. He also didn't return my book. Maybe he read it, though. Maybe it had some tiny, lasting impact on his ideas.
another-cuppa 8y ago
Look up "Surveillance Camera Man" on Youtube. It's really fascinating to see that (not surprisingly) people hate being filmed by someone with a camera. Yet for some reason they don't care about the hundreds of other cameras being operated remotely that line the streets.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  People are illogical. If they are in any large city in the world, they are likely being watched by at least 10 cameras over the course of the day, and nobody seems concerned. But, when you have someone holding the camera, all of a sudden they lose their minds. Which one is likely to be a bigger threat to you? A city-wide network of always-on cameras monitored by who knows how many people, or a single rando pointing a single camera at you?
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Given that: - there are strict laws about what surveillance video can be used for - surveillance video is rarely abused - people with video cameras are a whole lot more likely to upload me to youtube and facebook (where I'll stay forever, possibly with nasty comments both by the uploader and commenters) - while surveillance video will most likely be deleted within 14 days or 3 months or something I'll happily - take 10 surveillance cameras - over one random person pointing filming me - today That said, I think there might be too much surveillance. And it might be dangerous in the future. The person who wants to make a funny video with me is however a more imminent threat.
    - JadeNB 8y ago
      > surveillance video is rarely abused What makes you believe this? I am cynical and suspect it happens all the time, but I doubt either of us knows.
    - another-cuppa 8y ago
      That is probably why people think there is a difference. But it's completely illogical. How do you think someone is going to "abuse" the footage? You say uploading to Youtube but there's all kinds of potentially embarrassing CCTV footage all over Youtube. Maybe there is some other kind of abuse possible, but you'd never know about it, just like you'd never know if someone is abusing the CCTV footage.

76 points by mattbierner 8y ago

Are the concepts; security and privacy mutually exclusive? Can we have secure and safe places to live without surveillance and invasion of privacy?

nxc18 8y ago
Yes, we can have security and privacy. People drastically over estimate the risks from things like terrorist attacks and high crime. Just think about the number of people and hugely vulnerable systems (even existing security is a joke - why not bomb a TSA line for example? Or accidentally carry a gun through, which happens all the time) and how rarely things go wrong. There's just no need for these over the top surveillance machines. Security doesn't stop motivated attackers anyway (see all terrorist attacks since 9/11). As far as everyday crime goes, I suspect a social safety net would take care of most of it. Most people aren't bad, but they will do bad things when they need help but don't get it. Once you get past that point, the cost of crime is probably less than the cost of trying to get perfect enforcement.
- bArray 8y ago
  Agreed. 1. Security is usually a knee jerk reaction to something that has happened and rarely correctly addresses the full problem scope, just one specific edge case that was experienced. This typically happens because people over weight the probability of such an event happening to them, due to the short nature of it and lack of control. In contrast to 9/11, you won't see nearly the funding or awareness of some of the largest killers, such as obesity, cancer, US-based violence, alcohol, opioids, etc. 2. Anybody correctly motivated can bypass said security, because it is never well thought out and doesn't cover all possible scenarios. With some time and some know-how, any individual could defeat TSA (or any other Countries) security. At the moment the only benefit is those who seek to terrorize Western society are usually desperate or ill funded. 3. Security tends to lure people into a false sense of security, so people in general are just as secure as they were, because they stop being aware of insecurities. There is a study showing that Countries with and without bicycle helmets have roughly the same number of deaths - the reason being that drivers recognize cyclists without helmets as being more vulnerable, hence going to greater lengths to avoid collision. To the point, all of these cameras are unlikely to make us more secure. What they will do on the other hand is lend themselves to abuse by government or corporate entities to any extent they think they can get away with.
  - lambdadmitry 8y ago
    I have a counterexample to make: Skripal's case. AFAIK the police pieced together CCTV footage from multiple cameras, which allowed to track and identify the suspects. Given that the suspects are likely trained hitmen and the stakes were pretty high, I can only assume that the main reason most crimes don't get solved that way is the complexity of the search. ML is poised to change that. I'm not sure I'm for surveillance per se, but I do believe painting CCTV as useless and inefficient is wrong. It can be efficient in aiding high-level investigations if applied properly.
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  > Or accidentally carry a gun through I couldn't possibly imagine a scenario where you just forget that you're carrying a gun...
  - xboxnolifes 8y ago
    Do you carry a gun daily?
    - King-Aaron 8y ago
      Why would one need to, unless you are police/military and thus required to for work?
      - stonogo 8y ago
        Nobody is required to demonstrate need to King-Aaron. Your opinions on the policy are not relevant to the practical concerns regarding its implementation. For the record, I agree with you, but this isn't really an appropriate place to soapbox about it.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        I started carrying a gun after I was attacked and the nearby police unit continued to write a parking ticket in the meanwhile.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    If you carry all the time (which most people who carry do, better than just leaving it in your car or something) it becomes natural like carrying your keys or wallet. If you're carrying your handgun in the bottom of a purse and rarely take it out it's even easier to forget.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - lambdadmitry 8y ago
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  I see it as security is about control, and privacy is about removal. Privacy and security aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't exactly symbiotic either. It's fair to say an individual would want both security and privacy (for example, as with your home). Like many things, it's about finding the right balance. I'm sure if you look to the extremes of security and privacy you could find a bunch of crazy examples. The wildcard is the who. That is what throws off the scales, as the security/privacy relationship moves from a micro to a macro level, and suddenly a person's real autonomy comes into question.
mindslight 8y ago
Privacy is an integral part of security - one cannot have security without privacy! Witness the various locations (eg the hotel in the article) that treat a small encroachment on their privacy as a security threat! What has severely muddied the water is the term "security" has been bandied about by governments (and other large centralized entities) to refer to their own security, often at at the expense of our security. In order to sell the lie, we're encouraged to think that their security implies our security, which is obviously bullshit when you look at the positions their various security measures actually put us in - eg bunched up, undressed, split up, and disassembled in the airport groping line.
- pm 8y ago
  I hadn't really thought about the difference between my security and the Government's security, but the distinction you make is important.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    This is very pronounced at eg a federal building. At an airport, there obviously is a decent part of one's security that corresponds to the government's security. The real problem, and why drawing the distinction is important even there, is that the government is choosing to do things that may or may not make government/group security slightly better because they/it cannot see a downside. When in reality it/they is hurting all the individuals' ability to take care of ourselves (eg my above description), even with respect to utterly banal threats like theft.
eksemplar 8y ago
Are we getting safety in return? We’re giving up virtually all our rights to privacy, but are we really any safer than we were in the 70’ies? Violent crime is certainly down in general, but is that because of increased surveillance? Terror and postal episodes are more frequent, so the surveillance certainly didn’t prevent that. Some surveillance is arguably helping prevent terror without us knowing, but we’re not even having a debate on what works and what doesn’t. Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
- draugadrotten 8y ago
  > Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer. Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context. Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing. Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off? The only way to win is not to play.
  - maze-le 8y ago
    GPS devices are not on themselves active senders, you can choose not to have Wifi or cellphones. You can opt-out to do face tracking on Facebook, its just your friends you have to worry about. MACs can be spoofed. In short, you can pretty much avoid or conceal all the activities you posted above, not a CCTV installation though. If it is near your home or work, you can definitely forget even trying to avoid it, except for reconstructive surgery. >> Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. Well, I heard lots of claims to this, but never seen a reasonable POC. Most of these claims turn out to be mere geospatial statistics and analysis. Interesting to do, but it won't give you more information, than your local police precinct already knows (where are the 'troubled' neighbourhoods). Given time, more people (even bureucrats) will develop a bit of scrutiny against "AI solves everything" approaches. At least I hope they do...
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think obviously so. There's a very simple way to illustrate as such. In particular much of the crime that affects us and surveillance attempts to stop is not particularly new. It's mostly people just killing and hurting each other in ways that are centuries old. Surveillance of society as a whole has increased on a very sharp exponential scale, yet there's been no clear causal connection to a decline in crime. If surveillance was useful, let alone necessary, to a society being made as safe as it could we would have expected to see a proportional decline in crime with some reasonably decent evidence of a causal link. But that is not present, at all. So we're really just submitting to surveillance and sacrificing ever greater swaths of personal privacy for no real gains.
a_imho 8y ago
I would not consider a perfect surveillance state a particularly safe place. Even without holding conflicting opinions.

themodelplumber 8y ago

Has anyone proposed a set of "marking" standards for surveillance cameras? For example, presenting a law that government cameras be marked as such, that there is an indication of the audience type (eg some kind of "public audience symbol" for a zoo cam), and maybe some kind of RF broadcast URL, or a URL to be posted within 100 feet for more information? If just a few localities had regulations like this covering government and private cameras, and if they were reasonably well designed regulations, I'll bet it would be a huge privacy benefit that would give people more peace of mind and improve communities. There will always be some exceptions for whatever Black Ops are going down in the desert, or whatever, but a lot of these needlessly anxiety-making camera-human-sensor-loop systems could probably be brought to an end quickly.

DanBC 8y ago
In the UK (at least, in England) all traffic speed cameras have to be bright yellow. (I feel this is caving in to the driving lobby.) There are restrictions in where they can be placed. We have laws governing use of cameras (RIPA and DPA), a data protection regulator who requires people and companies to register if they use CCTV, and we have a surveillance commissioner who provides some scrutiny of the use of these powers. Here's a jargon-heavy discussion about some of these powers: https://www.lateosurveillance.co.uk/idiots-guide-ripa-directed-surveillance/ https://www.lateosurveillance.co.uk/idiots-guide-ripa-direct... https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-surveillance-commissioners https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-survei... https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/surveillance-camera-commissioner https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/surveillance-cam... All of this regulation doesn't seem to have stopped the proliferation of cameras. People say that London has more CCTV cameras than any other city.
- gambiting 8y ago
  >>all traffic speed cameras have to be bright yellow. (I feel this is caving in to the driving lobby.) If we assume that the primary purpose of a speed camera is to reduce speeding where its placed, then you want it to be as visible as physically possible. A hidden camera does absolutely nothing to slow someone down - they will get a ticket in the post few weeks later, but at the time when they drove past it, it didn't do anything to slow them down.

wpdev_63 8y ago

Imagine a world where there was some sort of legal apparatus to prevent abuse of these surveillance devices. And then even go further, let's imagine that there's some sort of legal protection for whistle blowers who witness such abuses of power... I can only imagine.

TomMarius 8y ago
How would you enforce and maintain these?
- whatshisface 8y ago
  We could write what we thought should happen down, and then assign an elected official along with twelve randomly selected citizens to the task of deciding if any breach had happened.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Do you think secret services don't have enough power (as in monetary, brute force, manpower, etc) to influence that (I'm assuming that secret services would be the interested party there)?
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      Billionaires, senators and the president all have a lot of power, and they're still subject to the court system. If there was an insutution that became more powerful than the law then I guess it would be a good idea to... Not have it.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        Secret services are specifically made to be exempt from the law (or its parts) that applies to billionaires, though.
      - craftyguy 8y ago

m0rphy99 8y ago

I will let you in with a little secret that 99% of the public is not aware of or refuse to believe. Every guest room in every hotel is equipped with extremely sophisticated surveillance equipment. Yes, every single room! It is okay if you refuse to believe this because I know it's very difficult to accept. I didn't believe it myself until I saw everything in front of my own eyes. Just keep this thought in the back of your head as a possibility, one day you'll see the truth comes out.

rhn_mk1 8y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please back it up with something.
- m0rphy99 8y ago
  You will never see proof because even if someone has it, they can never publish it for legal reasons, hotels are private properties and they are owned by giant MNCs. That's why I said everyone is free to believe what they want, but just keep the thought at the back of your head as a possibility because I used to be in that position until I witnessed it for myself.
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    > You will never see proof because even if someone has it, they can never publish it for legal reasons Since when are guests required to sign surveillance equipment NDAs to get a hotel room?
mywittyname 8y ago
What do you mean by, 'extremely sophisticated surveillance equipment'? Are we talking about smoke detectors, meters for water/electricity usage, or do you mean things like audio/video capture of your activities throughout the room? I definitely expect there to be equipment to determine if you've been smoking in your room (how else would they know) or doing something to destroy the room. Who has access to this sort of thing? I imagine there'd be leaks if the regular security guards had access to this, so I'm guessing it must go to some LEO HQ.

ataturk 8y ago

David Brin wrote "The Transparent Society" in 1998. Most all of what he said was incredibly prescient. He certainly understood that dangers of the one-sided panopticon. Unfortunately, I gave away my copy of that book to a CEO while working for a company that built police car cameras and was trying to go into the mass transit market. That CEO was a complete asshat when it came to privacy, a total "if you have nothing to hide..." type of mentality. He also didn't return my book. Maybe he read it, though. Maybe it had some tiny, lasting impact on his ideas.

another-cuppa 8y ago

Look up "Surveillance Camera Man" on Youtube. It's really fascinating to see that (not surprisingly) people hate being filmed by someone with a camera. Yet for some reason they don't care about the hundreds of other cameras being operated remotely that line the streets.

ryandrake 8y ago
People are illogical. If they are in any large city in the world, they are likely being watched by at least 10 cameras over the course of the day, and nobody seems concerned. But, when you have someone holding the camera, all of a sudden they lose their minds. Which one is likely to be a bigger threat to you? A city-wide network of always-on cameras monitored by who knows how many people, or a single rando pointing a single camera at you?
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Given that: - there are strict laws about what surveillance video can be used for - surveillance video is rarely abused - people with video cameras are a whole lot more likely to upload me to youtube and facebook (where I'll stay forever, possibly with nasty comments both by the uploader and commenters) - while surveillance video will most likely be deleted within 14 days or 3 months or something I'll happily - take 10 surveillance cameras - over one random person pointing filming me - today That said, I think there might be too much surveillance. And it might be dangerous in the future. The person who wants to make a funny video with me is however a more imminent threat.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > surveillance video is rarely abused What makes you believe this? I am cynical and suspect it happens all the time, but I doubt either of us knows.
  - another-cuppa 8y ago
    That is probably why people think there is a difference. But it's completely illogical. How do you think someone is going to "abuse" the footage? You say uploading to Youtube but there's all kinds of potentially embarrassing CCTV footage all over Youtube. Maybe there is some other kind of abuse possible, but you'd never know about it, just like you'd never know if someone is abusing the CCTV footage.