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A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

nytimes.com

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Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#81

Post by semi-extrinsic »

dumb-saint wrote: post #71
confounded wrote: post #11

Growing up in the UK and living in the US has given me the odd distinction of being strongly against online surveillance of private space, and strongly in favor of regulated visual surveillance of public space. CCTV surveillance can protect the people I care about (especially women at night) from horrible violent crimes I'm actually scared of. It's surveillance of public space, so the privacy compromise seems kind of…

I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial. I would like to ask people who make the "you have no…

Regarding automatic face recognition: I believe most US/European citizens, at least those who travel on airplanes, are in the facial recognition corpus of the intelligence services by now. What they do (I'm guessing) is use the cameras at passport checkpoints in airports. There they get many thousands of frames of your face from various angles, and due to the strict ordering in the queue they can match all those to your ID when your passport is scanned/entered into the computer.

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#82

Post by joosters »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57
bediger4000 wrote: post #24

I'm led to believe that all that surveillance isn't for thief-catching. Surveillance is valuable, otherwise so many cameras wouldn't watch streets all over. I counted 15 cameras between my bus stop and my office 3 blocks away last winter. So what's the surveillance for? Probably preventing property damage, maybe keep hobos from whizzing in doorways and such. But please, let's stop pretending that the surveillance is…

> So what's the surveillance for? To prove to insurance you had something stolen as well as to give you "warm and fuzzies". (On surveillance being there to protect property, note the comment in this thread about a surveilled garage being burgled [1].) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217539

I've not heard of insurance policies that require video evidence of theft before they pay out. Have you any evidence of this claim?

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#83

Post by dumb-saint »

ciaranm wrote: post #78
dumb-saint wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial. I would like to ask people who make the "you have no…

I agree with the parent r.e. safety concerns though. It's a cheap, easy way to provide a relatively sure record of truth for public spaces. It helps prosecute people who enact violent or other crimes, and reduces the number of those in the first place. Do you disagree with that, or value being invisible in public higher?

I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before.

Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of having some police officers "keeping an eye on me" but in the new sense of using the full power of all of our current technology to track me.

I'll tell you what the cost is: spontaneity, randomness, street-level interaction, the right to be WEIRD. All this while crime rates have been naturally going down for decades. None of this stuff is about crime for the politicians, it's about control and business deals (I promise you someone sells all those cameras and related equipment to the cities, and it's not you or me).

I am not that old, but old enough to already see that historical lessons don't last long, and everything has to be learned over and over again :(

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#84

Post by ciaranm »

dumb-saint wrote: post #83
ciaranm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the parent r.e. safety concerns though. It's a cheap, easy way to provide a relatively sure record of truth for public spaces. It helps prosecute people who enact violent or other crimes, and reduces the number of those in the first place. Do you disagree with that, or value being invisible in public higher?

I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before. Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of havi…

Lots of CCTV isn't government-run. Some is, like local parks or whatever, but most is run by businesses who want to be able to catch folks who have broken in. In order to get access to the footage, police generally need a warrant.

I guess I disagree that "camera == authoritarian", but I totally get your concerns. I'd be more worried about the secret courts(US) and super-injunctions(England) that mean we can't talk about things, than I would about being on camera.

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#85

Post by dumb-saint »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #81
dumb-saint wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial. I would like to ask people who make the "you have no…

Regarding automatic face recognition: I believe most US/European citizens, at least those who travel on airplanes, are in the facial recognition corpus of the intelligence services by now. What they do (I'm guessing) is use the cameras at passport checkpoints in airports. There they get many thousands of frames of your face from various angles, and due to the strict ordering in the queue they can match all those to y…

Yes, I think modern airports are a good prototype for the sort of dystopian environments we can expect in the future. It will only get worse until the entire thing collapses, as it always does -- Stasi, McCarthyism, Gestapo, you name it. This time it's more scary because the technology is sci-fi compared to the previous iterations.

I am more and more convinced that the cyberpunk guys got it right in terms of predicting future trends :(

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#86

Post by tombrossman »

white-flame wrote: post #2

This is selective enforcement, not equality under the law. I understand the load police tend to be under, but I really wish they would have some lottery enforcement style that grabbed one random instance of "common" crime like this at a time, and went whole-hog with it. They do it for speeding, so they can make a bit of money with fines, and have the hope of finding connected crimes; what's different about theft like…

I had my car stolen a while ago in San Diego county. I was very low on fuel so I knew whoever did it would have had to fill up soon after the theft.

Fast forward two weeks and my car was found. When I got it back, a credit card receipt for fuel at a nearby gas station was sitting in a tray in the center console. The date and time were the same night as the theft, after I had parked for the night. I first rang the station to explain and they confirmed they had CCTV and would hold it for the police, then I rang the detective assigned to handle vehicle thefts locally. He seemed interested and said he'd send a uniformed police officer over to follow up.

While waiting, I checked the trunk and found some trash neatly tied up in plastic bags with more receipts. The officer showed up and could not have been more openly hostile and bored with the whole thing. Big sighs, complaining that he was wasting his time while he dusted for fingerprints and collected the receipts. I waited a few more days and rang the gas station to see if the police had followed up - nope.

Years later I was on a jury for a car thief and I was really impressed by the professionalism of the police in tracking down the thief, and the extra efforts they made. They were all over the CCTV footage and tracking the usage of a particular store's membership card that the victim had left in the car. Same county, different police department though.

I guess the point is that the tools are there for law enforcement when they need them. But there is still no technical solution for when someone is a lazy fuck and can't be bothered to do their job.

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#87

Post by rasz_pl »

sandworm101 wrote: post #47
anexprogrammer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably mainly smoke and mirrors. I've lost count of the number of UK stories where some terrorist or criminal was known to authorities, or already on a watch list. They never manage to catch or prevent despite all these huge surveillance programmes. Then the news almost inevitably follows up that they've found out there were public exchanges of messages on Twitter 2 days before the incident or some such. It would b…

>> I see no war on ladders. Have you tried to buy a large ladder lately? They come covered in so many warning stickers you'd think you were buying pesticide. Snowmobiles come with fewer warnings.

in US maybe, the land of "do not swallow" stickers on baseball bats

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#88

Post by quanticle »

SeanDav wrote: post #68

We are not many years away from facial recognition cameras tracking everyone in public spaces in real time with updates to a centralized database system. Anyone hiding their face, or not being recognized by the system would be flagged for investigation by on-the-ground units. At this point, almost all non white-collar crime would be prevented, or the culprits quickly caught - which leads to prevention.

>At this point, almost all non white-collar crime would be prevented, or the culprits quickly caught - which leads to prevention.

As others have stated, it depends entirely on how seriously the police takes these crimes. If the police actually get the footage and investigate, sure, crime can be stopped. But, at this point, the limiting factor isn't collecting the footage. It's getting police resources to find the crime, and publicize the various film and video footage.

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#89

Post by chx »

manarth wrote: post #67
callalex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber drivers are severely punished for not accepting a hail

I presume this is punished by Uber , rather than any regulatory body?

Well, yes but as long as people don't boycott one of the most evil of companies what does that matter to the driver? You have a company which builds its entire business on ignoring some legislation (namely, taxi legislation) in every market it enters and yet y'all are supporting it with money. What would remain of society if every company would just pick which laws they don't like? Not to mention Uber pushing for indentured servitude. Just how evil a company needs to be before people stop supporting it with their money? And, with all this destruction wrought they are not profitable, not even close.

Re: A World of Surveillance Doesn’t Always Help to Catch a Thief

#90

Post by lostboys67 »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #45
confounded wrote: post #11

Growing up in the UK and living in the US has given me the odd distinction of being strongly against online surveillance of private space, and strongly in favor of regulated visual surveillance of public space. CCTV surveillance can protect the people I care about (especially women at night) from horrible violent crimes I'm actually scared of. It's surveillance of public space, so the privacy compromise seems kind of…

Probably mainly smoke and mirrors. I've lost count of the number of UK stories where some terrorist or criminal was known to authorities, or already on a watch list. They never manage to catch or prevent despite all these huge surveillance programmes. Then the news almost inevitably follows up that they've found out there were public exchanges of messages on Twitter 2 days before the incident or some such. It would b…

"known to " can mean anything from:

They went to Syria and stared in a beheading video

to:

Went to a couple of sermons by a dodgy cleric

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