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"Who cares if someone roofies your drink? Your goal was to hook up with somebody anyway." /s You are drastically oversimplifying the situation here. The goal o

"Who cares if someone roofies your drink? Your goal was to hook up with somebody anyway." /s You are drastically oversimplifying the situation here. The goal of a protest is not to be seen, or to be harassed by police. The goal is to effect change, and surveillance is a tool of the powerful that the United States has long had a healthy skepticism for.

marshmallow_12 6y ago
speaking from London here. Clearly news of the invention of CCTV has only recently spread across the pond. It's pretty much a fact of life here that everything you do is being surveilled by multiple lenses. Maybe in the us the distribution of power makes it more likely that such information will be abused? (and btw usa data privacy laws is inferior to european law, stricter privacy laws=less surveillance. (Maybe its to compensate for more CCTV?))
- smolder 6y ago
  Don't EUs privacy laws stop applying to UK since brexit?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- danShumway 6y ago
  I don't know if this is a good point. It's not that people like me are just discovering that this is how London operates; I knew how London operates, and I don't want to be in that environment. London is incredibly surveilled, constantly. I'm not going to go and complain about it because I'm not living in Europe, and it's not really my place to tell you that you're being over-surveilled. But if you're pointing at London and saying, "don't worry, we already have this" -- bad example, that doesn't make me feel better. I don't want the US to have the surveillance omnipresence that London has, that would be a negative outcome for me. I don't think London's situation should be treated like it's normal. To be blunt, I think your city has a over-surveillance problem, albeit not one that it's my responsibility to solve or draw attention to. GP's analogy is gross and hyperbolic, it's not the one I would use. But there are some concerns I have here. A better analogy would be something like Baltimore's (thankfully ending) drone program, which creeps me the heck out even as I acknowledge that it's not obviously an invasion of a private space. The point of a protest is often to be seen, but not necessarily to be surveilled in that level of detail, and there are concerns that people should have about police departments paying special attention and putting special effort into monitoring those protests.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

speaking from London here. Clearly news of the invention of CCTV has only recently spread across the pond. It's pretty much a fact of life here that everything you do is being surveilled by multiple lenses. Maybe in the us the distribution of power makes it more likely that such information will be abused? (and btw usa data privacy laws is inferior to european law, stricter privacy laws=less surveillance. (Maybe its to compensate for more CCTV?))

smolder 6y ago
Don't EUs privacy laws stop applying to UK since brexit?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
danShumway 6y ago
I don't know if this is a good point. It's not that people like me are just discovering that this is how London operates; I knew how London operates, and I don't want to be in that environment. London is incredibly surveilled, constantly. I'm not going to go and complain about it because I'm not living in Europe, and it's not really my place to tell you that you're being over-surveilled. But if you're pointing at London and saying, "don't worry, we already have this" -- bad example, that doesn't make me feel better. I don't want the US to have the surveillance omnipresence that London has, that would be a negative outcome for me. I don't think London's situation should be treated like it's normal. To be blunt, I think your city has a over-surveillance problem, albeit not one that it's my responsibility to solve or draw attention to. GP's analogy is gross and hyperbolic, it's not the one I would use. But there are some concerns I have here. A better analogy would be something like Baltimore's (thankfully ending) drone program, which creeps me the heck out even as I acknowledge that it's not obviously an invasion of a private space. The point of a protest is often to be seen, but not necessarily to be surveilled in that level of detail, and there are concerns that people should have about police departments paying special attention and putting special effort into monitoring those protests.