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Now more than ever we need surveillance camera man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13587614/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13587614/, https://youtube.fandom.com/wi

Now more than ever we need surveillance camera man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13587614/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13587614/, https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Surveillance_Camera_Man https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Surveillance_Camera_Man) to return. By directly associating a human with the surveillance he allowed us to see what people's true reactions are to being passively surveiled: very, very angry and confrontational. People hate being surveilled, but they can't quite make the connection that there are humans behind passive surveillance due to the abstraction. Surveillance camera man reveals people's true feelings. Unfortunately youtube has repeatedly deleted his videos over the years and we are currently in such a period: https://www.youtube.com/c/SurveillanceCameraMan/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/SurveillanceCameraMan/videos . Luckily vimeo has at least one of the 1 through 8 videos: https://vimeo.com/98862974 https://vimeo.com/98862974

ajb 5y ago
This is very true, and indicative of a wider issue: people naturally have an instinct to suspect and react against bad behavior in other people, but this instinct is muted when they interact with technology. It's worth noting that surveillance interests are aware of this. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, Sir David Omand (former head of GCHQ, the UK equivalent of the NSA) went about promoting the idea that because there were no people literally listening to recordings of phone calls, as in the days of the Stasi, this meant that ubiquitous surveillance is harmless.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  >people naturally have an instinct to suspect and react against bad behavior in other people, but this instinct is muted when they interact with technology. That seems like an evolutionary trait where survival considers if you're being closely watched, the thing watching you is a predator and the predator is closely connected to the observation: they're right there using their eyes watching you waiting on an opportunity to attack you in some way. With technology, specifically cameras, the predators are removed from the observation by distance and perhaps even significant time. A camera by itself isn't going to hurt you, it's largely an inanimate object as far as an immediate danger is concerned. People may be watching and they may even be doing so predatorily but they're not registered as a threat to us even if they are a threat because we don't see them. Those instincts lack assessment for long reactionary time horizons. Your consciousness needs to perform a risk assessment because lower functions just don't see an immediate danger there, there's no evolutionary precedent. Cameraman mentioned illustrated the difference because he reconnected the surveillance to the potential predator. We don't have a consciously educated population about the dangerous of surveillance so this is what we see.
harryf 5y ago
The premise of the article... > A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it I think comfortable is the wrong word here. Perhaps "people who have no choice but accept it" is more accurate. If you do the math, it's basically; 1. is this issue important enough to your daily life to want to make sacrifices to fight it 2. how would I effectively fight it and not just waste effort? And a significant minority DO care - I've commented before here like the impact on sales of a secure messaging app when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587
- onli 5y ago
  There is that concept that people are comfortable with surveillance, even want it. A maybe somewhat fringe pop cultural reference to that is in Deus Ex (2000), the best video game made so far: > JC Denton: "Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance." > Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms." > JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence." > Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary." > JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera." > Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment." One can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw, but it's stronger when experienced as part of the game.
  - malka 5y ago
    21 years. Still relevant. A masterpiece of a game.
  - harryf 5y ago
    I agree in principle but also this feels like retroactive justification for the current state or affairs. I think it’s safe to assume that the “actors” that created the “surveillance state” weren’t acting from some profound philosophy of mass control but rather some more immediate KPIs be it “increased user engagement” or “reduction of terror threats” that seemed important at the time. In other words we stumbled into this mess and now we need to figure out how to stumble out again.
Buttons840 5y ago
Or you could pull a stunt where you monitor a road a set up a website where people can check the license plates of all who have passed and at what time. Would probably only move us closer to having having private surveillance banned, while the real problems continue.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  A lot of state departments of highway/transport already do this. You can even access the video streams online, intentionally. Just check your state, there's probably a lot of traffic cameras you can access. These are often used for traffic analysis like identifying and fixing congestion, accidents, etc. It's not too different than you setting up a higher res camera from your home or yard and doing the same. Some states have protection laws on cameras setup for these purposes that the data cannot be used as evidence for criminal acts IIRC. For example, many traffic lights have cameras to adjust patterns as needed. It's not a huge step to then turn all of them into red light cameras the record running violations. It's a bit more complex for other violations but you get the idea. I'm surprised private entities haven't already tried using this public data to associate license plates with cars, perhaps attempt to detect dangerous driving behaviors, and sell that to insurance companies to adjust the rates. There's so much surveillance data that could be mined in largely harmful ways to the general population at large and I think it's only a matter of time before businesses start doing more of this type of work as soon as they see value and a population complacent enough to take yet another attack on them. Car insurance companies seem like they'd be interested in traffic video they can associate with license plates and improve risk assessment on their customers. Not sure what, if any, consumer protections exist to prevent this right now. It's probably just cost prohibitive currently.
  - Aboh33 5y ago
    Years ago I saw a blog post from one of the major Security Conferences where the author mentioned flashing the tires on their car with an old-skool camera to destroy some sort of rfid tag or something similar. I don't recall the article, but the reasoning was something along the lines that there are rfid readers at various points probably used for parallel construction etc.
beardog 5y ago
I've seen this guy before and had the same thought as you, and my guess is that there is truth to it (the abstraction makes people weirdly ok with surveillance) - but i also think someone being fairly close to you monitoring you is different: that person could potentially harm you at any moment and them just staring at you filming with minimal to no conversation is threatening. I would like to see this stunt again but done in a way that gets a clearer message out and doesn't make it seem like they're about to pull a weapon.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
Surveillance camera man is a troll that seems to be making a point as an excuse rather than a protest, IMO. I don't think people would be comfortable if a surveillance camera could stand a few inches away from them (sometimes while following) while answering questions with a disconcerting lack of affect. I also don't have to worry about being assaulted by a security camera... Americans live in a world where young antisocial men have become the stereotype for mass shooters. I'm incredibly familiar with the rights of photographers in public places and the extent of surveillance in public places, but I would also not be comfortable with the way he acts. He also walks into private property, like the back of restaurants, to record in multiple cases... behavior that serves no purpose and proves no point.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  Many of the private places into which he walks are already under surveillance that the people in those places have forgotten is there. To paraphrase someone else on this thread, the existence of EC2 means that we all have the equivalent of having a camera inches away from us or following us, and most of us don't even realize it. Nobody would be comfortable with the way he acts, and nobody should be comfortable with ubiquitous mass surveillance.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    You're completely ignoring the fact that it's alarming for a person to act this way towards you in public... camera or not. He acts in a way that many people, especially women, associate with antisocial or predatory behavior. There's also a significant difference between employer-installed cameras and trespassing (which unlike photographing public space, is actually a crime). If someone stood stationary in a public place while recording, the reactions would be much more mundane. There are all sorts of street photographers who photograph people in public, and while people do get upset, it's nowhere near the frequency in his videos. There's a reason for that. There's a point to be made about surveillance, but surveillance camera man is also defying social norms to get these reactions... which severely clouds his alleged purpose.
maccard 5y ago
I mentioned this on another post last week [0] but this is a very different situation, the person filming is clearly targetting specific people. Set up a prominent video camera in the corner of a public space for a more comparable scenario - you will have a minority of people who will be hugely offended by this, and the majority of people who will say "huh, I don't see the problem". > Surveillance camera man reveals people's true feelings. No, surveillance camera man reveals peoples feelings at having a person standing next to them with a camera, not their feelings on having their data and movements tracked with precision. The scenarios _are_ very different, and by equating the two, the real issue is getting lost. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808435
- titzer 5y ago
  People don't seem to understand that a datacenter full of 100,000 CPUs and 100PB of storage is tantamount to sticking a camera in every single person's face 24/7. Whether that is because the footage is just indexed and stored, analyzed later when interesting, or analyzed in realtime, it's really no different. Be accused of a crime, be framed for a crime, share the wrong opinion about a political figure, or be in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and you are a target. And really, you're being modeled and studied for "market research" purposes all the dang time. > The scenarios _are_ very different, and by equating the two, the real issue is getting lost. Stop saying that. If anything, mass surveillance is much, much worse.
  - maccard 5y ago
    > is tantamount to sticking a camera in every single person's face 24/7 It's not. Having a drone flying beside you 24/7 would be the same. It's much closer to having a video camera sitting in the corner of a room with a red blinking light. > Stop saying that. If anything, mass surveillance is much, much worse. I won't stop saying it, because they're not the same. Mass surveillance _is_ worse.
    - titzer 5y ago
      You still don't understand my point because of some quibble you have about your immediate experience of surveillance, and not how it operates on the backend, how it impacts society, and ultimately your life in the long run. Mass surveillance is silent, unblinking, all-seeing (like Hal in 2001), all-knowing, all-correlating. But it seems that if your personal experience is not impacted, then it's all fine. I dunno, maybe it isn't all fine compared to you, but your comments downplay and deflect. > Mass surveillance _is_ worse. Well then I am confused about your point, because it seems like you want to agree but argue, needlessly attacking someone trying to raise awareness.

ajb 5y ago

This is very true, and indicative of a wider issue: people naturally have an instinct to suspect and react against bad behavior in other people, but this instinct is muted when they interact with technology. It's worth noting that surveillance interests are aware of this. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, Sir David Omand (former head of GCHQ, the UK equivalent of the NSA) went about promoting the idea that because there were no people literally listening to recordings of phone calls, as in the days of the Stasi, this meant that ubiquitous surveillance is harmless.

Frost1x 5y ago
>people naturally have an instinct to suspect and react against bad behavior in other people, but this instinct is muted when they interact with technology. That seems like an evolutionary trait where survival considers if you're being closely watched, the thing watching you is a predator and the predator is closely connected to the observation: they're right there using their eyes watching you waiting on an opportunity to attack you in some way. With technology, specifically cameras, the predators are removed from the observation by distance and perhaps even significant time. A camera by itself isn't going to hurt you, it's largely an inanimate object as far as an immediate danger is concerned. People may be watching and they may even be doing so predatorily but they're not registered as a threat to us even if they are a threat because we don't see them. Those instincts lack assessment for long reactionary time horizons. Your consciousness needs to perform a risk assessment because lower functions just don't see an immediate danger there, there's no evolutionary precedent. Cameraman mentioned illustrated the difference because he reconnected the surveillance to the potential predator. We don't have a consciously educated population about the dangerous of surveillance so this is what we see.

harryf 5y ago

The premise of the article... > A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it I think comfortable is the wrong word here. Perhaps "people who have no choice but accept it" is more accurate. If you do the math, it's basically; 1. is this issue important enough to your daily life to want to make sacrifices to fight it 2. how would I effectively fight it and not just waste effort? And a significant minority DO care - I've commented before here like the impact on sales of a secure messaging app when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587

onli 5y ago
There is that concept that people are comfortable with surveillance, even want it. A maybe somewhat fringe pop cultural reference to that is in Deus Ex (2000), the best video game made so far: > JC Denton: "Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance." > Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms." > JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence." > Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary." > JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera." > Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment." One can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw, but it's stronger when experienced as part of the game.
- malka 5y ago
  21 years. Still relevant. A masterpiece of a game.
- harryf 5y ago
  I agree in principle but also this feels like retroactive justification for the current state or affairs. I think it’s safe to assume that the “actors” that created the “surveillance state” weren’t acting from some profound philosophy of mass control but rather some more immediate KPIs be it “increased user engagement” or “reduction of terror threats” that seemed important at the time. In other words we stumbled into this mess and now we need to figure out how to stumble out again.

Buttons840 5y ago

Or you could pull a stunt where you monitor a road a set up a website where people can check the license plates of all who have passed and at what time. Would probably only move us closer to having having private surveillance banned, while the real problems continue.

Frost1x 5y ago
A lot of state departments of highway/transport already do this. You can even access the video streams online, intentionally. Just check your state, there's probably a lot of traffic cameras you can access. These are often used for traffic analysis like identifying and fixing congestion, accidents, etc. It's not too different than you setting up a higher res camera from your home or yard and doing the same. Some states have protection laws on cameras setup for these purposes that the data cannot be used as evidence for criminal acts IIRC. For example, many traffic lights have cameras to adjust patterns as needed. It's not a huge step to then turn all of them into red light cameras the record running violations. It's a bit more complex for other violations but you get the idea. I'm surprised private entities haven't already tried using this public data to associate license plates with cars, perhaps attempt to detect dangerous driving behaviors, and sell that to insurance companies to adjust the rates. There's so much surveillance data that could be mined in largely harmful ways to the general population at large and I think it's only a matter of time before businesses start doing more of this type of work as soon as they see value and a population complacent enough to take yet another attack on them. Car insurance companies seem like they'd be interested in traffic video they can associate with license plates and improve risk assessment on their customers. Not sure what, if any, consumer protections exist to prevent this right now. It's probably just cost prohibitive currently.
- Aboh33 5y ago
  Years ago I saw a blog post from one of the major Security Conferences where the author mentioned flashing the tires on their car with an old-skool camera to destroy some sort of rfid tag or something similar. I don't recall the article, but the reasoning was something along the lines that there are rfid readers at various points probably used for parallel construction etc.

beardog 5y ago

I've seen this guy before and had the same thought as you, and my guess is that there is truth to it (the abstraction makes people weirdly ok with surveillance) - but i also think someone being fairly close to you monitoring you is different: that person could potentially harm you at any moment and them just staring at you filming with minimal to no conversation is threatening. I would like to see this stunt again but done in a way that gets a clearer message out and doesn't make it seem like they're about to pull a weapon.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

Surveillance camera man is a troll that seems to be making a point as an excuse rather than a protest, IMO. I don't think people would be comfortable if a surveillance camera could stand a few inches away from them (sometimes while following) while answering questions with a disconcerting lack of affect. I also don't have to worry about being assaulted by a security camera... Americans live in a world where young antisocial men have become the stereotype for mass shooters. I'm incredibly familiar with the rights of photographers in public places and the extent of surveillance in public places, but I would also not be comfortable with the way he acts. He also walks into private property, like the back of restaurants, to record in multiple cases... behavior that serves no purpose and proves no point.

pwinnski 5y ago
Many of the private places into which he walks are already under surveillance that the people in those places have forgotten is there. To paraphrase someone else on this thread, the existence of EC2 means that we all have the equivalent of having a camera inches away from us or following us, and most of us don't even realize it. Nobody would be comfortable with the way he acts, and nobody should be comfortable with ubiquitous mass surveillance.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  You're completely ignoring the fact that it's alarming for a person to act this way towards you in public... camera or not. He acts in a way that many people, especially women, associate with antisocial or predatory behavior. There's also a significant difference between employer-installed cameras and trespassing (which unlike photographing public space, is actually a crime). If someone stood stationary in a public place while recording, the reactions would be much more mundane. There are all sorts of street photographers who photograph people in public, and while people do get upset, it's nowhere near the frequency in his videos. There's a reason for that. There's a point to be made about surveillance, but surveillance camera man is also defying social norms to get these reactions... which severely clouds his alleged purpose.

maccard 5y ago

I mentioned this on another post last week [0] but this is a very different situation, the person filming is clearly targetting specific people. Set up a prominent video camera in the corner of a public space for a more comparable scenario - you will have a minority of people who will be hugely offended by this, and the majority of people who will say "huh, I don't see the problem". > Surveillance camera man reveals people's true feelings. No, surveillance camera man reveals peoples feelings at having a person standing next to them with a camera, not their feelings on having their data and movements tracked with precision. The scenarios _are_ very different, and by equating the two, the real issue is getting lost. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808435

titzer 5y ago
People don't seem to understand that a datacenter full of 100,000 CPUs and 100PB of storage is tantamount to sticking a camera in every single person's face 24/7. Whether that is because the footage is just indexed and stored, analyzed later when interesting, or analyzed in realtime, it's really no different. Be accused of a crime, be framed for a crime, share the wrong opinion about a political figure, or be in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and you are a target. And really, you're being modeled and studied for "market research" purposes all the dang time. > The scenarios _are_ very different, and by equating the two, the real issue is getting lost. Stop saying that. If anything, mass surveillance is much, much worse.
- maccard 5y ago
  > is tantamount to sticking a camera in every single person's face 24/7 It's not. Having a drone flying beside you 24/7 would be the same. It's much closer to having a video camera sitting in the corner of a room with a red blinking light. > Stop saying that. If anything, mass surveillance is much, much worse. I won't stop saying it, because they're not the same. Mass surveillance _is_ worse.
  - titzer 5y ago
    You still don't understand my point because of some quibble you have about your immediate experience of surveillance, and not how it operates on the backend, how it impacts society, and ultimately your life in the long run. Mass surveillance is silent, unblinking, all-seeing (like Hal in 2001), all-knowing, all-correlating. But it seems that if your personal experience is not impacted, then it's all fine. I dunno, maybe it isn't all fine compared to you, but your comments downplay and deflect. > Mass surveillance _is_ worse. Well then I am confused about your point, because it seems like you want to agree but argue, needlessly attacking someone trying to raise awareness.