From: Ross A. Finlayson (raf@tiki-lounge.com)
Date: Fri Dec 17 1999 - 09:36:36 MST
Charlie Stross wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 17, 1999 at 08:12:03AM -0500, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
> >
> > One can of opaque spraypaint will cover quite a few lens-sized areas.
>
> Yup. Which is why most cameras I see in public places in the UK are
> watching one another as well. And spraying the cameras is of course
> an offense -- vandalism!
>
I would think so. Sounds like it would require coordinated action.
>
> Also note that the majority of these cameras are private property, not
> government-owned -- many local councils won't grant planning permission
> to new retail or industrial establishments unless they promise to install
> CCTV surveillance. Many of them therefore farm these out to the same private
> security corporations that handle their store detectives and in some
> cases run privatised chunks of the prison service. The point to note is
> that the borderline between "state" and "private enterprise" is very blurry
> here, and one should not assume that a trend that starts in one will not
> spread to the other, or that they won't swap roles.
>
Sounds like a good reason to invest in security cameras, but little else. Typical
government shenanigans.
>
> > Does the government have an "opt-out" option? Ha ha, but seriously, the largest
> > portion of us are people who pay their taxes and do not commit violent crimes
> > thus largely upholding the social contract, that being most of the extent of a
> > legitimate one.
>
> Yup. "But if you're innocent you have nothing to hide!"
>
Supposedly being _presumed_ innocent, there should be no reason to look.
If some people ordering these things see some reason that there should be monitoring,
more than anything else it exposes their own paranoia.
There should be cameras on all the government before the people, and never on the
people.
I bet many of the people in the security camera business do not have security cameras
on them.
>
> Another really disquieting trend is the appearance of microcams. I've
> seen some on sale in electronics stores that are about the size of an
> old-time discrete transistor and cost about a fiver. These things are
> going to be ubiquitous -- there'll be a big black box on a wall bracket to
> distract the vandals, while the real surveillance will be carried out by
> a massively redundant array of flea-sized wireless sensors embedded in
> everything from the clothes hangars in shops to the screw heads that hold
> their glass doors in position -- and the sensors will be just smart enough
> to go online and snitch when they see something anomalous. (See last
> week's New Scientist feature on uses of neural networks for identifying
> suspicious behaviour in public for a taste of things to come.)
>
> -- Charlie
Well, the issue of private property and of the owner monitoring it is one thing, and
as long as purveyors of that property are informed of being monitored, then that is
not an invasion of privacy. If there is uninformed monitoring of a customer through
clandestine means, then that is an invasion of privacy, and likely damaging. There
should be required notice of monitoring.
This is totally more so with any notion of goverment monitoring, that is, notification
of monitoring.
This monitoring subject is one thing, yet only a glaring example of the more insidious
and pervasive collection of broad quantities of data and it's state of
non-protection. That is, government has data which it might rightly have and
unrightly shares it with others or itself. That is, there are cases where the left
hand has absolutely no American reason to know what the right hand is doing. It is
certainly so that driver information, for example, has no business falling into the
hands of the private sector, except to the extent of the value to the business of the
private sector. Financial information is largely privatized.
On the innovation of public area data collection, one thing that came about years ago
was technology to identify, triangulate, and pinpoint sounds from a variety of
listening devices attached to, for example, light posts. In terms of these sensitive
technologies, it is almost always the case that they will not be publicized. They
should be.
It is in the citizen's interest to promote privacy rights.
Ross Finlayson
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