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Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

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101–110 of 132 posts

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#101
I live in Atlanta (most surveiled in America supposedly), and I have 2 contributions to this:

- in general, per capita statistics are wonky for our city due to the unconstrained sprawl. There is a huge portion of our population that uses Atlanta daily but does not live here.

- the cameras are almost entirely for traffic monitoring and preventing crime in midtown/downtown.

Where most people actually live, there is not much in way of surveillance. I am an ACLU member and feel constantly creeped out in London. Atlanta ain't it tho

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to be less informed? Such information shouldn't be sensationalized or exploited for profit, but nor should it be suppressed. If you choose to kept in the dark - which is not the same thing as choosing not to look - then you are inviting deception and exploitation.

The lack of presented evidence feeds theories and ideas about what actually happened, strengthens local anecdotal witness word of mouth stories. Epstein is a good example of this, more questions than answers and a sudden silence from the corporate media

There are no remotely mainstream conspiracy theories about the London Bridge attacks. There is enough trust in our police, government, legal and justice systems and journalists to assume they aren't making this up...

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#103
post #92

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

NYC is still not on the list by # of cameras. If you read the rest of the article you see Chicago is #1 in that category, with 35,000 total cameras.

the point of the parent comment was that the # of cameras doesn't matter. New york is small but dense. a single camera on a busy corner will see more people in a day than multiple cameras somewhere else.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#104
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all vehicle drivers must present a valid driver’s license to the military security officer stationed at the gate, and may be required to state their destination and reason for visiting. So, not just a town, then.

It is a normal town, just a town surrounded by federal facilities. They don't forbid entrance and, iirc, they don't ask for ID from people not driving a cars.

A town that you can't drive into without showing ID or getting a security once-over is not a normal town.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#106
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all vehicle drivers must present a valid driver’s license to the military security officer stationed at the gate, and may be required to state their destination and reason for visiting. So, not just a town, then.

It is a normal town, just a town surrounded by federal facilities. They don't forbid entrance and, iirc, they don't ask for ID from people not driving a cars.

I generally don’t need to state a reason why I want to visit a normal town.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a normal town, just a town surrounded by federal facilities. They don't forbid entrance and, iirc, they don't ask for ID from people not driving a cars.

A town that you can't drive into without showing ID or getting a security once-over is not a normal town.

It's a normal town, it just has its convenient access routes blocked by a military base.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#108
post #99

Here's what I find interesting, and maybe slightly disturbing: there was a time when if you took a highly techie focused site like this, and posted an article on this topic, a significant portion of the responses would include variations of: "how do we hack these things to disable them?" or "How can we avoid being spotted on camera", or "How about we get together and start physically destroying these things" or "Let'…

There's no place in the world for that kind of person. Most of them have probably given up in some way and new ones are rare.

Is that actually true? Or is it just that given their paranoia & interests, posting about it on a public message board might not be a good idea?

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people want to know what happened and how. Otherwise liberty, accountability, and self-determination go out the window.

We are fully informed of what happened and how, including through detailed accounts, not least because, under UK law, a public inquest took place. But, as said, I don't see the point of publicising videos of people being slaughtered.

What are "detailed accounts"? Do you mean witnesses? How many? Was it all of them? How do you know?

What information did the public inquest provide? Did it exclude anything? Did it exclude the camera footage? What else did they not provide?

Define "fully" because I am pretty sure it is quite "partial." Or do you mean "fully" in the Orwellian sense which only ever means "all you are allowed to know?"

>But, as said, I don't see the point of publicising videos of people being slaughtered.

So you don't see the point in allowing the public to fully inform themselves, if they so choose, by providing the entirety of known information surrounding this event, which would necessarily include all camera footage? Well, lets just hope they didn't fabricate those detailed accounts, wouldn't want to have to watch people getting slaughtered, the graphic nature of which we will have to take at the Government's word. Verifying the truth of Government statements, even as they use these events to justify vast expansions of power and broad limitations for civil liberties, is just not worth it.

>Nothing to see here, folks!

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it also conflates private/publicly owned cameras. As someone who lives in London, I think we get unfairly portrayed as a surveillance state, because really the vast majority of cameras are inside shops and businesses, not on the street, and not connected to any central databank. I personally don't find cameras like these troubling. Once you get out of central London, most streets don't have cameras on them.

> I personally don't find cameras like these troubling. It’s interesting to hear this difference. Here in Germany there are often cases where the courts forbid fake cameras because they "create an atmosphere of surveillance".

Berlin has made that list too, though.
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