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It's never "all these automated license plate readers, phone and internet metadata harvesting, countless surveillance cameras on public property, surveillance d

It's never "all these automated license plate readers, phone and internet metadata harvesting, countless surveillance cameras on public property, surveillance drones [1], and facial, voice, and gait recognition are making our job so much easier, we can allow people to keep the tiny scrap of privacy they have left", is it? They won't stop until every room in every home has mandatory cameras installed. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-rapid-rise-of-federal-surveillance-drones-over-america/473136/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-rap...

saiya-jin 4y ago
Well UK is a special version of hell when it comes to surveillance. I don't know where this apathy in general population comes from, but to me it signals there is something rotten in the base fabric of their society. Can't be just government act alone, since I haven't noticed any significant pushback from citizens. And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty. And 'they' get smarter too - if you watch Skyfall, one of the better recent Bond movies, there is a nice speech about why MI 6 needs more and more surveillance, powers and budget in front of government officials, because of boogeymen and so on. Of course the whole meeting is attacked by the main adversary. Its exactly kind of glorifying speech that CIA (or FBI, army, air force etc.) likes to sneak to Hollywood movies to purport the image of good guys fighting to save democracy and little children (when we know thanx to Snowden how things look like in real life). Hollywood in exchange at least gets access to special places like aircraft carriers or military bases, not sure what they got in UK, maybe just extra budget.
- iasay 4y ago
  I think you're overblowing it a little bit there. As someone from London in the UK it's more nuanced. Firstly the stabbings are fairly infrequent and mostly isolated to territorial disputes between idiots and the odd psycho. You can walk past the perpetrators up to the eyeballs in Apple kit at midnight and say hello and they are fine and they actually help people in the local community. Just don't sell crack on their territory and you won't end up with any extra holes. I feel completely safe here unlike when I travel to the US. Secondly most of the surveillance is broken or ineffective or unmanned so the possibility of a conviction or an issue from it is fairly low. Really no one is that bothered about it. That is amplified by the constant tales of incompetence in this area and anyone who's had any direct experience with it. Realistically we do live in a bit of a pit of apathy but that's because it doesn't really have any detrimental effects on our lives on a daily basis. If it does then we tend to flip our shit rather rapidly and deal with it. Case in point a box junction camera was recently added to a very difficult to cross obscured junction. Bad decision by the council just to make money. After about a week someone burned the camera down. They replaced it. It lasted another week before it was burned again and they got the point.
  - helios_invictus 4y ago
    I don't believe that the incompetence of the surveillance or police state is a defense of its existence or growth. Furthermore direct physical attacks against the infrastructure of the control only reinforce the perception that it's needed. Also it costs council resources to build, and repair it, resource that could be used for any number of other far more useful ends.
    - iasay 4y ago
      I don't think it's a defence either. It's just how it is. The council never reinvests in infra that is destroyed. They don't work like you think they do.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    You say this, but the number of folks I know in London who have been mugged for phones, handbags and wallets by blokes on scooters is unreal, in broad daylight too.
    - iasay 4y ago
      That's a rapidly declining issue now the met have started ramming them off the bikes. They know they're not getting away so there is risk.
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        OK, so if you acknowledge that muggings on scooters were/are/were an issue, what do you think these former/would-be scooter muggers will do? Go back to do doing it on foot, which is in stark contrast to what the post I replied to said. Personally, I'd never stand with something like a Nintendo Switch out in public in "London", but it honestly depends on the area of London. Some are much worse than others for crime. I think the point is that whilst stabbings might not be high, the use of knives as a weapon to intimidate and mug people (going beyond just purse snatchers) is very effective, and much more common than you might imagine, nobody wants to get cut, and nobody really wants to stab anybody over a few hundred quid of electronics.
- plonk 4y ago
  Wasn’t the Skyfall speech about the need for human intelligence, and precisely against the officials who want to replace it with mass surveillance?
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty. There are not frequent stabbings. They are reported on because they are so rare. There were 235 homicides with a sharp object in the entire country of 60+ million people in 2021, which is about one third to half of all of them (which makes sense, without a gun, your options are limited). That makes fewer than single cities elsewhere. If you think the UK is a specific violent crime hotspot, consider what angle whoever is telling you that is trying to push.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  > And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty. I presume the reference to gun violence means you're comparing the UK to to US. This is nonsense, gun violence hasn't been "replaced" with stabbings - the UK homicide rate (by any means) is a sixth of the US's - 1.2 per 100,000 people for the UK vs 6.3 per 100,000 people for the US. [0] Not only that but the US has a higher rate of knife murders than the UK. The US had 1739 homicides by knife or other cutting implement in 2020 [1], or 0.52 per 100,000. The UK had 235 knife murders in the year ending in March 2021 [2], or 0.35 per 100,000. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in... [2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
  - giobox 4y ago
    Just looking at "murder", "homicide" or "manslaughter" crimes with guns and knives doesn't tell you the whole picture; many knife crime victims will not suffer life ending injury, just really really nasty ones. This is obviously also the case with criminal gun usage to some extent too. If you look at knife crime in the UK, especially in deprived areas, it's been a growing problem for a long time. For example, there was over 15 thousand knife crimes reported in London alone in 2019/20, many of which are armed muggings etc.
    - hackbinary 4y ago
      Knife crime statistics include "stop and search" where orinary working people have boxcutters, Leatherman multitools, and Swissarmy knives taken off them. POC and young people are particularly targeted. Knife crime in the UK is a red herring.
      - giobox 4y ago
        Slightly better knife crime breakdown for London: Year beginning April 2020 to March 2021: – Fatal Injury – 223 – Injury with intent to cause serious harm – 21,421 – Threat to kill – 4,984 – Attempted murder – 465 Yes stop and search affects knife crimes, but there is still a lot of violence, and overall rates of violent knife crime have risen notably faster than the population has grown in London over past 10 years.
- jen20 4y ago
  Your ideas are so bizarre that I thought it might be worth doing a bit of investigation, specifically around this one claim: > instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings According to [1], in 2020/21 there were 235 homicides involving a knife or other sharp instrument in England and Wales. Because of the ability of COVID lockdowns to influence those numbers, let's wind back to 2017/18* - incidentally the highest recorded - at 281. By contrast, per the FBI [2], 72.6% of the 15129 recorded homicides used a firearm - that is approximately 10983. Per Wolfram Alpha, the population of England and Wales in 2017 was 58.3 million, and the population of the USA in 2017 was 325 million - meaning the UK had approximately 18% of the US population. Clearly, you are _VASTLY_ more likely to be murdered by gun violence in the US than by knife crime in England or Wales. Notice this only covers gun violence and not other types of homicide - even the rate of knife crime in the US is higher than the UK, as others have subsequently pointed out. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-in-england-and-wales/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-i... [2]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/expanded-homicide https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-... * The UK records April->March for such figures, the US seems to report calendar year. 2017 was a high water mark for both countries.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    I hate it when people compare the US to any other country, except possibly Russia, or the EU as a whole. Here's the thing first off the US is more multicultural than any other nation on earth, most other countries have had one ethnicity/nationality in it for 100s of year. The US by contrast has always has a mix of different cultures and backgrounds coming into it, from the Irish to the Italians, from the Slavic people's to the current influx of Latin America migration. This may not seem like a big deal but there are differences between cultures and having a heterogeneous cultures results in places where they will come in conflict. 2nd the United States is a group of states that are united. This isn't like simply administrative divisions, there are clear and distinct separations and lines of authority between different levels of administration, so much so that going from Illinois to Florida has such a wide gulf in laws, policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales. Finally the size, the US is big, huge in fact. It's so big that there are numerous states within the US that could fit multiple European countries in them with room left over. All in all this comparison on gun deaths or really any other metric between the US and any other country except from Russia or the EU is like comparing an SMBs closet "data center" to an AWS data center, they are totally different discussions. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
insickness 4y ago
I don't agree that surveillance cameras on public property are an invasion of privacy any more than police body cams. As a photographer, I am allowed to take photos and video anywhere on public property, with the exception of places where there is an expectation of privacy, like a public restroom. To me, the same applies to government surveillance. The problem arises when the government restricts that video from the public, which can be countered with laws like the Freedom of Information Act.
- AinderS 4y ago
  Your initial claim is that it is not an invasion of privacy, but your argument is only that it is legal. And is it also not an invasion of privacy in China, where facial recognition cameras log everywhere you go in public? Any protest you attend, or coffee shop where troublemakers congregate that you visit, all of it is logged, and you don't even need to carry your phone with you. The UK is showing every intention of reaching parity with China in this regard. But that's no different than a random photographer taking your picture, or a grandmother noticing you come and go through a window? I agree "privacy" isn't the perfect word, but seems to be the best one we have to describe what we're losing as surveillance expands.
  - foverzar 4y ago
    You can't realistically expect privacy in a public space.
    - ehvatum 4y ago
      Note that there are 8 state jurisdictions in the United States where surveillance in public of one specific individual by another is illegal if the surveilled party objects. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/stlkbook.pdf https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/stlkbook.pdf
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      You are out and about it your car. It’s reasonable to think people can’t just open it and search it. You are sitting on a park bench. It would be considered an invasion of privacy if someone opened your bag and took out a diary or note book and started reading it. If you were meeting a friend in a public space and someone later confronted you about something you had said and produced a recording, it would probably make some portion of people uncomfortable.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>They won't stop until every room in every home has mandatory cameras installed. And we will happily implement the APIs and integrate the databases they need to do it so long as they tell us they're gonna use it to prosecute our neighbor's cash landscaper for tax evasion, fine the teenager with a loud exhaust on his car and find our stolen packages (as if that ever happens when the less equal animals are victim). People have such short sighted and infantile attraction toward seeing the surveillance state as being used "optimize society" by enforcing whatever their pet issue is that they fail to see the average or median case it will be used to enforce something they don't care about at all and will frequently be used to enforce things they don't really want enforced that hard.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Gotta make sure no one is watching the beeb without a tv license.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Not that there's anything worth watching on it anyway. I've not seen broadcast TV since 2010. I don't miss it.
  - BobbyJo 4y ago
    Your TV is already tracking everything you watch, and selling the data to 3rd parties.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  >find our stolen packages (as if that ever happens when the less equal animals are victim). I've read so many accounts of people with Ring footage of a theft who tried to give it to the police and they refused to even look at it. I don't think I've ever heard of someone actually getting stolen property back outside of a Mark Rober video. The police surveillance state isn't there for you, and people need to realize that. <stage whisper>It's there to serve the interests of Capital</stage whisper>
  - 4y ago
buscoquadnary 4y ago
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

saiya-jin 4y ago

Well UK is a special version of hell when it comes to surveillance. I don't know where this apathy in general population comes from, but to me it signals there is something rotten in the base fabric of their society. Can't be just government act alone, since I haven't noticed any significant pushback from citizens. And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty. And 'they' get smarter too - if you watch Skyfall, one of the better recent Bond movies, there is a nice speech about why MI 6 needs more and more surveillance, powers and budget in front of government officials, because of boogeymen and so on. Of course the whole meeting is attacked by the main adversary. Its exactly kind of glorifying speech that CIA (or FBI, army, air force etc.) likes to sneak to Hollywood movies to purport the image of good guys fighting to save democracy and little children (when we know thanx to Snowden how things look like in real life). Hollywood in exchange at least gets access to special places like aircraft carriers or military bases, not sure what they got in UK, maybe just extra budget.

iasay 4y ago
I think you're overblowing it a little bit there. As someone from London in the UK it's more nuanced. Firstly the stabbings are fairly infrequent and mostly isolated to territorial disputes between idiots and the odd psycho. You can walk past the perpetrators up to the eyeballs in Apple kit at midnight and say hello and they are fine and they actually help people in the local community. Just don't sell crack on their territory and you won't end up with any extra holes. I feel completely safe here unlike when I travel to the US. Secondly most of the surveillance is broken or ineffective or unmanned so the possibility of a conviction or an issue from it is fairly low. Really no one is that bothered about it. That is amplified by the constant tales of incompetence in this area and anyone who's had any direct experience with it. Realistically we do live in a bit of a pit of apathy but that's because it doesn't really have any detrimental effects on our lives on a daily basis. If it does then we tend to flip our shit rather rapidly and deal with it. Case in point a box junction camera was recently added to a very difficult to cross obscured junction. Bad decision by the council just to make money. After about a week someone burned the camera down. They replaced it. It lasted another week before it was burned again and they got the point.
- helios_invictus 4y ago
  I don't believe that the incompetence of the surveillance or police state is a defense of its existence or growth. Furthermore direct physical attacks against the infrastructure of the control only reinforce the perception that it's needed. Also it costs council resources to build, and repair it, resource that could be used for any number of other far more useful ends.
  - iasay 4y ago
    I don't think it's a defence either. It's just how it is. The council never reinvests in infra that is destroyed. They don't work like you think they do.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  You say this, but the number of folks I know in London who have been mugged for phones, handbags and wallets by blokes on scooters is unreal, in broad daylight too.
  - iasay 4y ago
    That's a rapidly declining issue now the met have started ramming them off the bikes. They know they're not getting away so there is risk.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      OK, so if you acknowledge that muggings on scooters were/are/were an issue, what do you think these former/would-be scooter muggers will do? Go back to do doing it on foot, which is in stark contrast to what the post I replied to said. Personally, I'd never stand with something like a Nintendo Switch out in public in "London", but it honestly depends on the area of London. Some are much worse than others for crime. I think the point is that whilst stabbings might not be high, the use of knives as a weapon to intimidate and mug people (going beyond just purse snatchers) is very effective, and much more common than you might imagine, nobody wants to get cut, and nobody really wants to stab anybody over a few hundred quid of electronics.
plonk 4y ago
Wasn’t the Skyfall speech about the need for human intelligence, and precisely against the officials who want to replace it with mass surveillance?
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty. There are not frequent stabbings. They are reported on because they are so rare. There were 235 homicides with a sharp object in the entire country of 60+ million people in 2021, which is about one third to half of all of them (which makes sense, without a gun, your options are limited). That makes fewer than single cities elsewhere. If you think the UK is a specific violent crime hotspot, consider what angle whoever is telling you that is trying to push.
DoughnutHole 4y ago
> And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty. I presume the reference to gun violence means you're comparing the UK to to US. This is nonsense, gun violence hasn't been "replaced" with stabbings - the UK homicide rate (by any means) is a sixth of the US's - 1.2 per 100,000 people for the UK vs 6.3 per 100,000 people for the US. [0] Not only that but the US has a higher rate of knife murders than the UK. The US had 1739 homicides by knife or other cutting implement in 2020 [1], or 0.52 per 100,000. The UK had 235 knife murders in the year ending in March 2021 [2], or 0.35 per 100,000. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in... [2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
- giobox 4y ago
  Just looking at "murder", "homicide" or "manslaughter" crimes with guns and knives doesn't tell you the whole picture; many knife crime victims will not suffer life ending injury, just really really nasty ones. This is obviously also the case with criminal gun usage to some extent too. If you look at knife crime in the UK, especially in deprived areas, it's been a growing problem for a long time. For example, there was over 15 thousand knife crimes reported in London alone in 2019/20, many of which are armed muggings etc.
  - hackbinary 4y ago
    Knife crime statistics include "stop and search" where orinary working people have boxcutters, Leatherman multitools, and Swissarmy knives taken off them. POC and young people are particularly targeted. Knife crime in the UK is a red herring.
    - giobox 4y ago
      Slightly better knife crime breakdown for London: Year beginning April 2020 to March 2021: – Fatal Injury – 223 – Injury with intent to cause serious harm – 21,421 – Threat to kill – 4,984 – Attempted murder – 465 Yes stop and search affects knife crimes, but there is still a lot of violence, and overall rates of violent knife crime have risen notably faster than the population has grown in London over past 10 years.
jen20 4y ago
Your ideas are so bizarre that I thought it might be worth doing a bit of investigation, specifically around this one claim: > instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings According to [1], in 2020/21 there were 235 homicides involving a knife or other sharp instrument in England and Wales. Because of the ability of COVID lockdowns to influence those numbers, let's wind back to 2017/18* - incidentally the highest recorded - at 281. By contrast, per the FBI [2], 72.6% of the 15129 recorded homicides used a firearm - that is approximately 10983. Per Wolfram Alpha, the population of England and Wales in 2017 was 58.3 million, and the population of the USA in 2017 was 325 million - meaning the UK had approximately 18% of the US population. Clearly, you are _VASTLY_ more likely to be murdered by gun violence in the US than by knife crime in England or Wales. Notice this only covers gun violence and not other types of homicide - even the rate of knife crime in the US is higher than the UK, as others have subsequently pointed out. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-in-england-and-wales/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-i... [2]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/expanded-homicide https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-... * The UK records April->March for such figures, the US seems to report calendar year. 2017 was a high water mark for both countries.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I hate it when people compare the US to any other country, except possibly Russia, or the EU as a whole. Here's the thing first off the US is more multicultural than any other nation on earth, most other countries have had one ethnicity/nationality in it for 100s of year. The US by contrast has always has a mix of different cultures and backgrounds coming into it, from the Irish to the Italians, from the Slavic people's to the current influx of Latin America migration. This may not seem like a big deal but there are differences between cultures and having a heterogeneous cultures results in places where they will come in conflict. 2nd the United States is a group of states that are united. This isn't like simply administrative divisions, there are clear and distinct separations and lines of authority between different levels of administration, so much so that going from Illinois to Florida has such a wide gulf in laws, policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales. Finally the size, the US is big, huge in fact. It's so big that there are numerous states within the US that could fit multiple European countries in them with room left over. All in all this comparison on gun deaths or really any other metric between the US and any other country except from Russia or the EU is like comparing an SMBs closet "data center" to an AWS data center, they are totally different discussions. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

insickness 4y ago

I don't agree that surveillance cameras on public property are an invasion of privacy any more than police body cams. As a photographer, I am allowed to take photos and video anywhere on public property, with the exception of places where there is an expectation of privacy, like a public restroom. To me, the same applies to government surveillance. The problem arises when the government restricts that video from the public, which can be countered with laws like the Freedom of Information Act.

AinderS 4y ago
Your initial claim is that it is not an invasion of privacy, but your argument is only that it is legal. And is it also not an invasion of privacy in China, where facial recognition cameras log everywhere you go in public? Any protest you attend, or coffee shop where troublemakers congregate that you visit, all of it is logged, and you don't even need to carry your phone with you. The UK is showing every intention of reaching parity with China in this regard. But that's no different than a random photographer taking your picture, or a grandmother noticing you come and go through a window? I agree "privacy" isn't the perfect word, but seems to be the best one we have to describe what we're losing as surveillance expands.
- foverzar 4y ago
  You can't realistically expect privacy in a public space.
  - ehvatum 4y ago
    Note that there are 8 state jurisdictions in the United States where surveillance in public of one specific individual by another is illegal if the surveilled party objects. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/stlkbook.pdf https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/stlkbook.pdf
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    You are out and about it your car. It’s reasonable to think people can’t just open it and search it. You are sitting on a park bench. It would be considered an invasion of privacy if someone opened your bag and took out a diary or note book and started reading it. If you were meeting a friend in a public space and someone later confronted you about something you had said and produced a recording, it would probably make some portion of people uncomfortable.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

>They won't stop until every room in every home has mandatory cameras installed. And we will happily implement the APIs and integrate the databases they need to do it so long as they tell us they're gonna use it to prosecute our neighbor's cash landscaper for tax evasion, fine the teenager with a loud exhaust on his car and find our stolen packages (as if that ever happens when the less equal animals are victim). People have such short sighted and infantile attraction toward seeing the surveillance state as being used "optimize society" by enforcing whatever their pet issue is that they fail to see the average or median case it will be used to enforce something they don't care about at all and will frequently be used to enforce things they don't really want enforced that hard.

BitwiseFool 4y ago
Gotta make sure no one is watching the beeb without a tv license.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Not that there's anything worth watching on it anyway. I've not seen broadcast TV since 2010. I don't miss it.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  Your TV is already tracking everything you watch, and selling the data to 3rd parties.
LordDragonfang 4y ago
>find our stolen packages (as if that ever happens when the less equal animals are victim). I've read so many accounts of people with Ring footage of a theft who tried to give it to the police and they refused to even look at it. I don't think I've ever heard of someone actually getting stolen property back outside of a Mark Rober video. The police surveillance state isn't there for you, and people need to realize that. <stage whisper>It's there to serve the interests of Capital</stage whisper>
- 4y ago

buscoquadnary 4y ago

"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]