5 ms·

So where is the protection from all their video taping being used for data mining purposes? I can see a future where their cameras are on all the time or nearly

So where is the protection from all their video taping being used for data mining purposes? I can see a future where their cameras are on all the time or nearly all the time. This indirect recording would treated similarly to how they now treat license plate scanners and I do not doubt some police are actively hoping they can. So yeah while its nice that cops will have to wear them there needs to be sufficient protection from extending what they are used for. I don't want to live in a world where every cop I walk by, see or don't see, records me.

brandonmenc 12y ago
The solution is to keep the recordings locked and unviewed until the court needs them as evidence.
- hndamien 12y ago
  Great idea.
  - pawn 12y ago
    In case you're wondering why you were downvoted, it's not that people disagree with you, but that people don't want to see comments of agreement or disagreement without anything else to say.
polarix 12y ago
Every cop you walk by is already recording you, in a forgetful, hostile, and potentially hallucinatory medium.
- knodi123 12y ago
  yeah, but he's talking about automated indexing by a database. not really relevant.
- Crito 12y ago
  While typically a bad thing (see, the unreliability of eye-witness testimony) it isn't always. It is easy to imagine a near-future where all police lapel-cams feed into a centralized database where facial recognition can be used to retro-actively follow individuals throughout the city. It is just as easy to imagine ways that this could be abused. This sort of tracking can and is already be done manually in relatively small areas using CCTV footage (airports, malls, hotels), but expect to see it become "a thing" for entire cities. "Quantity has a quality all its own." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh#Investigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mab... "The chief of Dubai Police Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said that there are 648 hours of video films in which the 27 suspected persons are appearing.[110]"
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The downsides are hypotheticals about the police potentially nabbing you based on an extreme ability to find out what you did, while the upsides involve current, actual, real stories about the police nabbing you by simply making up violations and then getting them to stick. I'm not a big fan of surveillance, but it seems to me that being able to retroactively follow individuals throughout the city could be a good tradeoff if it means the police can never again send an innocent person to prison by planting drugs on him after arresting him for something he didn't even do.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      > The downsides are hypotheticals about the police potentially nabbing you based on an extreme ability to find out what you did, while the upsides involve current, actual, real stories about the police nabbing you by simply making up violations and then getting them to stick. The problem is having a huge pile of incomplete evidence makes it easier to make up violations and get them to stick. Illegitimate prosecutions are built on confirmation bias. The amount of false positive evidence against you is proportional to the amount of surveillance you're under. More government cameras only produce more false positive evidence against you. Meanwhile government cameras can't really help you because your public defender doesn't have the resources to look through the footage and regardless any strong evidence of your innocence will have been the victim of a camera malfunction which "isn't suspicious" because it "happens all the time." The better solution is for citizens to carry cameras and to have strong laws protecting the right of citizens to record the police. That way the footage can't "disappear" as easily and the recordings are decentralized so you aren't making it easier to fabricate an illegitimate prosecution out of the biased selection of false positives from big data.
peteretep 12y ago
In the UK, for the last 10 years, you have been recorded almost all the time in urban centres by CCTV. The end of the world (or even mild abuse of the system) hasn't yet materialised.
- deciplex 12y ago
  I seem to recall lots of reports of what should at least count as 'mild abuse' e.g. voyeurism.
- iamwithnail 12y ago
  There are countless examples of CCTV abuse in the UK and beyond: http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3384 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (UK) http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/CCTV http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (Norway, replicated in the UK a couple of years ago, but I can't find it offhand) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600869855469#.VAlYt7ywKIc http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600869855469#.V... (More meta piece on it) CCTV hasn't exactly been the panacea that it was made out to be. In fact, councils and private companies have gone ahead with CCTV systems despite the fact that the cost/benefit is dubious at best, and a pretext for reducing staff numbers in a significant number of cases. tl;dr - Not the end of the world, but not great either, and has paved the way for a number of subsequent surveillance modes.
  - peteretep 12y ago
    > There are countless examples of CCTV abuse in the UK OK, but you've linked to a paper on CCTV operators being bored and ineffective, a list of papers discussing the moral implications, and finally a 16-year-old piece that claims to have substantiated some of the public's concerns. That feels quite a long way from "countless examples".
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Councils routinely abuse powers under RIPA. Such abuses include spying on families the check whether they live in catchment areas for schools; whether they live in an area where they're claiming parking permits; checking whether people are throwing non-recyclables into recycling bins; etc etc. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Councils-have-mounted-millions-of-snooping-operations-in-past-decade-finds-report.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Council... (That article kind of misses the point of RIPA - councils always did that kind of snooping, but now they're required to work so a standard and are somewhat accountable.)

brandonmenc 12y ago

The solution is to keep the recordings locked and unviewed until the court needs them as evidence.

hndamien 12y ago
Great idea.
- pawn 12y ago
  In case you're wondering why you were downvoted, it's not that people disagree with you, but that people don't want to see comments of agreement or disagreement without anything else to say.

polarix 12y ago

Every cop you walk by is already recording you, in a forgetful, hostile, and potentially hallucinatory medium.

knodi123 12y ago
yeah, but he's talking about automated indexing by a database. not really relevant.
Crito 12y ago
While typically a bad thing (see, the unreliability of eye-witness testimony) it isn't always. It is easy to imagine a near-future where all police lapel-cams feed into a centralized database where facial recognition can be used to retro-actively follow individuals throughout the city. It is just as easy to imagine ways that this could be abused. This sort of tracking can and is already be done manually in relatively small areas using CCTV footage (airports, malls, hotels), but expect to see it become "a thing" for entire cities. "Quantity has a quality all its own." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh#Investigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mab... "The chief of Dubai Police Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said that there are 648 hours of video films in which the 27 suspected persons are appearing.[110]"
- mikeash 12y ago
  The downsides are hypotheticals about the police potentially nabbing you based on an extreme ability to find out what you did, while the upsides involve current, actual, real stories about the police nabbing you by simply making up violations and then getting them to stick. I'm not a big fan of surveillance, but it seems to me that being able to retroactively follow individuals throughout the city could be a good tradeoff if it means the police can never again send an innocent person to prison by planting drugs on him after arresting him for something he didn't even do.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    > The downsides are hypotheticals about the police potentially nabbing you based on an extreme ability to find out what you did, while the upsides involve current, actual, real stories about the police nabbing you by simply making up violations and then getting them to stick. The problem is having a huge pile of incomplete evidence makes it easier to make up violations and get them to stick. Illegitimate prosecutions are built on confirmation bias. The amount of false positive evidence against you is proportional to the amount of surveillance you're under. More government cameras only produce more false positive evidence against you. Meanwhile government cameras can't really help you because your public defender doesn't have the resources to look through the footage and regardless any strong evidence of your innocence will have been the victim of a camera malfunction which "isn't suspicious" because it "happens all the time." The better solution is for citizens to carry cameras and to have strong laws protecting the right of citizens to record the police. That way the footage can't "disappear" as easily and the recordings are decentralized so you aren't making it easier to fabricate an illegitimate prosecution out of the biased selection of false positives from big data.

peteretep 12y ago

In the UK, for the last 10 years, you have been recorded almost all the time in urban centres by CCTV. The end of the world (or even mild abuse of the system) hasn't yet materialised.

deciplex 12y ago
I seem to recall lots of reports of what should at least count as 'mild abuse' e.g. voyeurism.
iamwithnail 12y ago
There are countless examples of CCTV abuse in the UK and beyond: http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3384 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (UK) http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/CCTV http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (Norway, replicated in the UK a couple of years ago, but I can't find it offhand) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600869855469#.VAlYt7ywKIc http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600869855469#.V... (More meta piece on it) CCTV hasn't exactly been the panacea that it was made out to be. In fact, councils and private companies have gone ahead with CCTV systems despite the fact that the cost/benefit is dubious at best, and a pretext for reducing staff numbers in a significant number of cases. tl;dr - Not the end of the world, but not great either, and has paved the way for a number of subsequent surveillance modes.
- peteretep 12y ago
  > There are countless examples of CCTV abuse in the UK OK, but you've linked to a paper on CCTV operators being bored and ineffective, a list of papers discussing the moral implications, and finally a 16-year-old piece that claims to have substantiated some of the public's concerns. That feels quite a long way from "countless examples".
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Councils routinely abuse powers under RIPA. Such abuses include spying on families the check whether they live in catchment areas for schools; whether they live in an area where they're claiming parking permits; checking whether people are throwing non-recyclables into recycling bins; etc etc. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Councils-have-mounted-millions-of-snooping-operations-in-past-decade-finds-report.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Council... (That article kind of misses the point of RIPA - councils always did that kind of snooping, but now they're required to work so a standard and are somewhat accountable.)