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San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

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Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could begin in dense districts to have a more pronounced reaction.

So, you don't do that... You start in the burbs. Out on the periphery. "Huh ... camera 20179 doesn't work. Put in a trouble ticket." Trouble ticket goes to the bottom of the stack. Too far away for anyone to bother driving too. Eventually they see a pile of these at the bottom of the stack. If you're lucky, they decide to take a pass on option years for the project because they massively under-budgeted the maintenanc…

That just sounds like it’ll encourage criminals to operate in the burbs because there’s less surveillance.

What’s so bad about cameras in public spaces anyway?

Speaking as someone who had his phone stolen in a public space, I regret that there weren’t cameras around so they could’ve caught the guy.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#142
post #41

It's just a matter of time until we have country-wide full surveillance. It will be the perfect tool for anyone who wants to create a dictatorship. The thought police and the telescreens in 1984 will look primitive and weak in comparison. I think there is no way around it. Add to that drones to keep the population under control and there is huge danger we'll have a pretty bleak future.

Everyone's already walking around with a device that can hear everything they hear, and see much of what they see, track location, etc. They even bring these devices into their private spaces.

This info may be owned by Google or Apple, but fascism is about control, not ownership. No warrant required for LEO to see that data.

The government putting devices on lights that are owned by the government, in public places - that's small potatoes in comparison.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#143
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The narrative is frequently, "Tech company X's CEO was running secret, morally-questionable project. Rest of the company's engineers upset to find out about it." So far that dissatisfaction has been mostly inert, unfortunately. But I like to think that the typical engineer's morals haven't been as corroded by money as the typical CEO, and that we'll eventually reach a breaking point where things will get so b…

Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Jobs are not easily replaceable for them to be able to take a stand. This means that even highly skilled and highly specialized engineers can't afford to have a problem working on censorship and surveillance tech, they probably find it exciting given all that cutting edge high performance packet processing or m…

> Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build.

Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks. Maybe it won't always be that way, but being a programmer right now feels like being the prettiest girl at the ball. That's a good climate in which to quit your job out of principle.

> Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence.

It sounds like you've just succumbed to general defeatism, which to me seems like a waste of time and energy.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#144
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improvements to what? Serious question.

Traffic congestion by studying the build-up of traffic at certain lights

Thing is, that really isn't much of a problem in downtown SD where most of these cameras are.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#145
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Jobs are not easily replaceable for them to be able to take a stand. This means that even highly skilled and highly specialized engineers can't afford to have a problem working on censorship and surveillance tech, they probably find it exciting given all that cutting edge high performance packet processing or m…

> Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks. Maybe it won't always be that way, but being a programmer right now feels like being the prettiest girl at the b…

> Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks.

It's not like that for almost anyone in the world.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#146
post #130
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is crazy to suggest we should focus more on stopping the next Nazis rather than preemptively stopping the Polish census workers?

Yea, lets just figure out what sort of ideology leads to that. Then lets make a list somehow of people who are of that ideology or likely to fall to it. Then we just ought to round em all up, maybe put them in camps where they can be reeducated on why they're wrong...and ones who are uncooperative could be put to work, and...oh shit we're the next nazis, woops!

Are you really going with the "the anti-Nazis are the real Nazis" trope? There are a few steps along the way between "let's try to stop Nazis" and "let's throw them in concentration camps".

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither votes nor courts enabled this - governments just did it, and will just do things like this without asking (nor sometimes checking). The challenge in a way is how can we ever vote for or fight against (in court) things we don't even know exist sometimes?

To be fair, the people of San Diego voted their government in. So in my view, they got what they deserved. I'm not sitting on a high horse or anything. I mean hey, I'm from Wisconsin. We're literally the nation's corruption measuring stick . But we voted our politicians in, so we deserve what's happening to us. I'm just holding San Diego to the same standard. If you hadn't voted them in, this wouldn't be happening to…

1. the folks who did this weren’t unanimously voted in by san diego residents

2. the folks who did this did it secretly, without consent

deserves? i’d rather push for what ought to be than justify the current mess.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither votes nor courts enabled this - governments just did it, and will just do things like this without asking (nor sometimes checking). The challenge in a way is how can we ever vote for or fight against (in court) things we don't even know exist sometimes?

To be fair, the people of San Diego voted their government in. So in my view, they got what they deserved. I'm not sitting on a high horse or anything. I mean hey, I'm from Wisconsin. We're literally the nation's corruption measuring stick . But we voted our politicians in, so we deserve what's happening to us. I'm just holding San Diego to the same standard. If you hadn't voted them in, this wouldn't be happening to…

The idea that people deserve what politicians do to them because voting has occurred is a smug easy answer, but it's ultimately just baseless victim blaming.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#149
post #46

Has anyone else read the novel Golden State by Ben H. Winters? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39599913-golden-state He describes an extrapolation of our world's recent history, one in which "reality" is captured for posterity by omnipresent cameras. Citizens record the details of each day by taking written notes of encounters, in addition to stamping pages of their day book with "conversation stamps". These stam…

As someone who has OCD related to this ("Citizens record the details of each day by taking written notes of encounters" could almost describe me), I'd be interested to know if he addresses the downsides that could result from this. You become more worried about capturing the moment, so you can't live _in_ the moment. It's almost self-defeating -- because you are worried that if you have this interaction, you will forget to make a record of it, you end up not having the interaction at all (you limit interactions to things that will fit in short term memory). Regardless of how highly you value reality, you end up missing out on it, losing the very thing you valued in the first place.

Re: San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance

#150
post #54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of defeatism isn't helpful. Surveillance technology doesn't sprout up from nothingness; it's built on a culture and a political/economic environment which can be changed.

This isn't defeatism. I just think there is a wave coming that's really hard to stop and I don't see anything in the current political structure that's willing to stop it.

More articles like this to raise awareness and importance of issues.

Getting younger people who give a shit to vote, and to become immune to the bogus fear mongering.

Hope the baby boomers die off of old age before the panopticon is built.

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