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It's just a matter of time until we have country-wide full surveillance. It will be the perfect tool for anyone who wants to create a dictatorship. The thought

• panic 8y ago
  This sort of defeatism isn't helpful. Surveillance technology doesn't sprout up from nothingness; it's built on a culture and a political/economic environment which can be changed.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    This isn't defeatism. I just think there is a wave coming that's really hard to stop and I don't see anything in the current political structure that's willing to stop it.
    • nosuchthing 8y ago
      Just because you're not interested or motivated in changing something, doesn't mean it can't be changed. City and state level political change is very malleable.
      • 50656E6973 8y ago
        Federal power trumps state and local
        • nosuchthing 8y ago
          Marijuana legalization is proof of the contrary
          • 50656E6973 8y ago
            Any examples with regard to "national security" i.e. mass surveillance, perpetual war, besides Kennedy?
          • enraged_camel 8y ago
            It is not. The federal government has simply chosen not to challenge the states on this issue... so far.
            • godelski 8y ago
              Frankly because it would be extremely unpopular. Even in the right wing places, where there is a correlation to less favorable views of marijuana, there's a high correlation to belief that states rights should trump federal rights. Really they believe that the fed should be minimal and things mostly run by the states.
      • username223 8y ago
        > City and state level political change is very malleable. Corporations have already figured this out, e.g. ALEC [1] writes laws, then gets sympathetic minions to enact them, but city politics still operate on a human scale in many places. I'd bet that a motivated campaign could reverse this move in San Diego, or at least figure out who pushed for it. I don't think there was massive popular support for cameras in streetlights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
    • gumby 8y ago
      More articles like this to raise awareness and importance of issues. Getting younger people who give a shit to vote, and to become immune to the bogus fear mongering. Hope the baby boomers die off of old age before the panopticon is built.
      • maxxxxx 8y ago
        "Hope the baby boomers die off of old age before the panopticon is built." The current builders of the panopticon are very young and work for Google, Facebook and others. This has nothing to do with age.
        • bronco21016 8y ago
          The ‘builders’ are better described as ‘profiteers’. The panopticon is being requested and purchased by municipalities, which are predominantly governed by those from the baby boomer generation. Start-up 101. Build what the Users want.
          • hectip 8y ago
            Young blindly build Facebook like apps, old build a CCTV network. Everything feels scary, try walking around at 2 a.m. and not feeling it. People are tired of it. I don't think that all the surveillance will work. You always find the most amount of sketchy people around police stations. The cameras will make things worse. Good people will flee to other neighborhoods, were they are not being watched. Fundamentally, why arn't things safe?
            • CarlSchmitt 8y ago
              > Fundamentally, why aren't things safe? My guess..a lack to tight-knit communities, very large cities with millions of strangers, increased cultural/ethnic/religious diversity within a community, increased portrayal of political/racial/gender conflict in our 24x7 media, etc...these things might lead to a sense of less social cohesion and distrust of out-groups in general...add to this multicultural "mixing pot" (at least in the U.S.) an increased surveillance state and militarized police force and your "society" will seem very "unsafe"
    • trophycase 8y ago
      People need to band together and vandalize and destroy these things, basically the only way currently.
  • Mikeb85 8y ago
    > which can be changed. But won't be. GWB expanded the state's powers with the Patriot Act, Obama signed an extension and then a new version of the act when parts expired. When both sides are pro-surveillance and Americans refuse to change the system or support 3rd parties, what change can there be?
    • rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
      Why call them the "two sides" if there are the same? You need actual change.
      • Mikeb85 8y ago
        Both parties then.
      • nosuchthing 8y ago
        The two-party system is a direct result of FPTP election forms. First past the post receives a lot of criticism for restricting options to vote for due to the idea of vote splitting and strategic voting. This leads elections to run into the commonly referred to "Lesser of two evils" dilemma and ends with a 2-party system in place. With 42% of Americans saying they identify as independent and 60% of Americans saying the need for a new party is apparent, it would suggest that the FPTP voting system is failing democracy, failing Americans, and failing America. https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/ https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...
        • ams6110 8y ago
          Downvoted for indented text. Sorry I don't know how else to put an end to this.
          • harshreality 8y ago
            HN has this dogma where they won't add any more markup even if it's reasonable. I guess they don't want every comment turning into a fancy formatted mess with different font sizes and lists, but blockquotes are a necessity. > is used a lot, and it always looks bad, particularly for multi-line quotes. HN won't add proper blockquote rendering for ">", so people try to mimic it, badly, using indented <pre>/unflowed text (which HN bizarrely implemented even though they didn't implement indented flowed text). Don't blame people, blame HN.
  • HashThis 8y ago
    US Congress doesn't represent US citizens. 84% of the time, the congress person that wins in that district raised the most money. Corporations and the wealthy provide that money to get congress people who represent THEM, not US citizens. US Congress doesn't represent US citizens. So nothing changes if moneyed interests want US citizens to live under surveillance.
    • drawnwren 8y ago
      Your logic doesn't leave room for the possibility that there is a correlation between electability and ability to raise funds. I.e. the candidate most likely to win raises more funds and not vice versa.
      • dontbenebby 8y ago
        >Your logic doesn't leave room for the possibility that there is a correlation between electability and ability to raise funds. I.e. the candidate most likely to win raises more funds and not vice versa. That's circular logic. "They must be the most qualified, because they raised the most money and the person who gets elected is the one who raised the most money". In a functioning democracy there should be a cliff where, no matter how much you spent, you cannot simply buy the election.
      • mach5 8y ago
        the whole notion of 'electability' is a ruse created by democrats to push voters towards politicians that agree more with the corporate wing of the party than any issues people care about. if electability was actually a thing, trump would not have won. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-67-the-gate-keeping-power-serving-tautology-of-electability https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-67-the-gate-keepi...
    • starik36 8y ago
      Except when this correlation is wrong. Such as when Trump won with less than 60% of the money spent by Hillary Clinton. https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidential-campaign-fundraising/ https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
  • gscott 8y ago
    There are already cameras at every intersection in California that feed into the Department of Homeland Security. https://www.cu-citizenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/202_Traffic-1170x654.jpg https://www.cu-citizenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/...
• veryworried 8y ago
  Under control from what? Committing crimes, breaking into homes, shooting people dead, raping women going out for a jog, planning terrorist activity? I welcome it.
  • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Voting for the wrong person? Attending 'subversive' meetings that criticize the current regime? Going to the wrong church?
    • BurningFrog 8y ago
      How will a streetlight camera affect any of that?
      • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        By allowing tracking of every citizen to and from every other citizen's house, place of work or worship, park, street corner or alley 24 hours a day.
        • BurningFrog 8y ago
          I guess that could have some marginal effect. But I'd be much more worried about eavesdropping on my electronic communication. Which they apparently already do at will.
          • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
            What?! Its the standard surveillance technique of security forces worldwide - tracking the movements of a suspect. I'm convinced somebody is trolling here, and it isn't me.
  • opportune 8y ago
    If you create a massive surveillance system for "good" purposes that doesn't mean someone can't later use it for nefarious purposes. One (rather primitive by modern standards) example is that Poland required people to list if they were Jewish for their national census, and then the Nazis used that list to round up and account for Jews in the holocaust. Since the US routinely violates the constitution in the name of fighting "terrorism", I don't want to government to have arbitrarily strong and specific surveillance in case they later expand the definition of what it means to be a terrorist.
• nostrademons 8y ago
  There's probably too many security holes inherent in modern technology to get that sort of one-party equilibrium. You'll have the governments who paid for the surveillance tech, the companies that installed backdoors in products they manufactured, the suppliers that installed backdoors in the components of those products, rival nation states, various hacker collectives, and the criminals they sold exploits to all jockeying for power in a cat & mouse game of information warfare. It'll probably end in a war of some sort, as power struggles usually do, but a chaotic don't-know-who-your-enemies-are war like Syria rather than the Great Power contests of WW2. Then after the war we'll likely see the survival of technologies that don't require large-scale maintenance (like solar, batteries or mechanical/thermal storage, electric motors, market economies, flexible micro-manufacturing, computers, and drones) over those that do (like the electric grid, large corporations, state-wide surveillance, broadcast networks, large standing armies, etc.).
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    Sounds like life won't be pretty for the citizens who are caught in this.
• gotu 8y ago
  "Country-wide full surveillance"? Maybe we have it already, but just don't know it yet. Search for "Gorgon Stare". It's featured in a new book called "Eyes in the Sky", and is said to have been used secretly over several cities in the US.
  • kefs 8y ago
    Gorgon Stare was featured in PBS Nova Rise of the Drones (2013) Skip to 30m mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o?t=30m29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o?t=30m29s
• Zenst 8y ago
  I'm kinda expecting vehicle cameras to be conscripted into this surveillance penchant on the back of road safety in some future autonomous vehicle standard. But if you want to see 1984 play out - look at parenting and children today compared to children growing up in 1984. Many freedoms removed directly and indirectly by laws on the back of child safety.
• chr1 8y ago
  Technology makes full surveillance easy, and usefulness of surveillance in preventing small crimes, regulating traffic, etc. makes fighting against it hard. Maybe instead of fighting with technology we should find ways preventing it's misuse: more open governments, electronic voting for individual laws, more surveillance over finances of elected officials.
• deepstream 8y ago
  Hahaha. You already have it. Covert interception. FAANG. Snowden "blew the whistle" on only a tiny fraction. You already exceeded 1984's monitoring. Dictatorship forms okay without it. More overt surveillance is a civil maintainer. Taiwan has camera surveillance everywhere and solves above 90% crime. It used to surprise me how in denial people can be about their own localities' surveillance. Now I think that makes sense as a consequence of the surveillance mostly being covert.
• jammygit 8y ago
  Honestly, we need to discuss how to stop it. Everyone goes around trading opinions and complaining, but this is an entrepreneurship community. We need to talk about solutions. Could a startup make a dent?
  • omeid2 8y ago
    No. Surveillance is something that easily sold with "think of the children" or under the pretense of national security, most people don't understand or comprehend the issue to care; It is a fight for public opinion and educating them of the risk, but it is not a profitable venture nor an easy one when big brother can shut you up before you can finish your breakfast.
  • perfmode 8y ago
    Entrepreneurs need to rediscover collective action. Not everything can be solved by the so-called free market.
  • casefields 8y ago
    https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...
• tomohawk 8y ago
  Everyone's already walking around with a device that can hear everything they hear, and see much of what they see, track location, etc. They even bring these devices into their private spaces. This info may be owned by Google or Apple, but fascism is about control, not ownership. No warrant required for LEO to see that data. The government putting devices on lights that are owned by the government, in public places - that's small potatoes in comparison.
• jdavis703 8y ago
  It’s up to us to stop this. Me and many others took time off work to tell our transit agency, BART, not to implement a draconian police state, including facial recognition cameras. BART wound up becoming one of the first (if not first) transit agencies in the US to implement a privacy policy instead [0]. Work still remains though, one BART employee told the press they were considering fake gun turrets that would drop down from the ceiling on suspected criminals. Work still remains to make American culture see the dangers of a police state as more than a punch line [1] 0: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/09/bart-delays-action-on-parts-of-controversial-safety-plan-following-backlash/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/09/bart-delays-action-on... 1: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/amp/For-these-BART-engineers-it-s-all-about-13582589.php https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/amp...
  • zaroth 8y ago
    But that is kinda funny. Probably effective too! Maybe add in a dub from Robocop.
    • jdavis703 8y ago
      It’s not funny when you consider that BART police have shot and killed at least three unarmed people in the last few years, not to mention they’ve even engaged in fatal “friendly fire” of their own... This is easily one of the most violent transit police departments.
      • zaroth 8y ago
        So then replacing their guns with toy turrets seems pretty smart. And still funny. I tried to search for some actual national statistics it couldn’t readily find anything. My suspicion is that some of those BART stations are extremely dangerous environments that put police in very tricky situations. There have also admittedly been a few very high profile accidental shootings.
• olefoo 8y ago
  Do you have a smart phone? A telescreen by any other name...