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

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

#111

Post by bpchaps »

marcosdumay wrote: post #98
bpchaps wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back I was mugged in Chicago at a busy intersection very close to a train station. Being the FOIA nerd I am, I submitted a FOIA request for the footage of the spot I was mugged at. It came back saying that no footage exists. Probing the investigator, I was told that the camera rotates randomly, and wasn't pointed in my direction. It's very difficult for me to think of Chicago's surveillance with any sort…

> Chicago's city hall has a retention period of zero days on its cameras. Does it mean that they have people watching the camera, warning the street police if they find anything, but do no recording?

That's my understanding, yes.

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

#112

Post by hatchershoes »

olivermarks wrote: post #27

'Surveilled' by who is the bigger question, and what public access and rights do we have around the data produced, and is it being fed to some sort of Stasi style panopticon? It's remarkable to me the lack of public surveillance video produced after major events - the Epstein NY 'suicide' is the latest example, the 2017 UK London Bridge event another. (The latter had video from a mile away filmed with 90's technology…

Surveilled by who: everyone. Have you considered how many corporations "work with the government"? The DMV itself sells your data. Everyone is spying, hacking, and selling your data. They're watching, identifying, tabulating, and tracking. You are not free to move around without your government knowing about it.

What rights do we have? None. 9/11. Terror. How many buildings fell that day?

Panopticon: We've been talking about the NSA, evidence in hand, since 2013, after Clapper lied, under oath, on public television.

Epstein 'suicide': the people who work behind the scenes are beholden to nobody except on paper. "Intelligence" is a free pass to do anything you want.

Overdue for legislation around citizen rights: Of course, in a "free world". Do you expect anything to change? What happens when our cities are covered in drones? One for each person maybe. The CIA had dragonfly drones in the 1970s. In the last five years, we have erected surveillance cameras and tracking sensors absolutely everywhere, in plain sight, and most people somehow simply aren't aware. Others ignore or make excuses. We call politicians "public servants" but government doesn't work "for the people". Government works for government, and it get bigger every day, its budget gets bigger every day, and its power increases because its eyes see farther. Soon there will be no private space left, and people will accept it. It will be suspicious to desire privacy. We still hear a chorus of out-of-touch masses bellowing the programmed refrain "Well, I have nothing to hide". We are reminded that "If you see something, say something". Report anything that does not conform to your idea of normalcy. Get a doorbell cam and connect it with the police. Trust your government. We are entering the end of the road.

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

#113

Post by anigbrowl »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #85
anigbrowl wrote: post #79

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.

There are numerous examples of public inquiries failing to provide a full picture of the truth which then came out many years later, eg in Northern Ireland. There's a documentary running on the BBC right now about the Troubles featuring lots of photographs and footage that were suppressed at the time.

I don't care whether you see the point; if I wish to investigate a matter of public or historic interest, why should I be bound by your preferences?

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

#114

Post by Hoasi »

> Kenneth Johnson, police commander of the Englewood district in Chicago, said that residents shouldn’t be concerned about privacy because the cameras are out in the open in public places. “This isn’t a secret. This isn’t an Orwellian ‘Big Brother,’” he told the New York Times last year.

This quote tells us Kenneth Johnson either did not read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or doesn't remember it well enough to talk about it.

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

#115

Post by godelski »

omarhaneef wrote: post #5

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…

They also say

> Chicago had the highest number of individual cameras amongst U.S. cities, at 35,000.

So we at least have an upper bound.

Actually if you dig in you can find a spreadsheet [0] with all the info. NY has 11k cameras total. If you sort it by just number of cameras NY ranks as #38 (as opposed to #58 by cameras/1k people)

Also digging in, they don't have data on LA. Though they do mention that there are 300-400k private cameras. Though the top 3 cities (all in China) have well over a million.

What's also interesting is the correlation between the crime and safety indices. Some of those cities have low crime indices (under 20 is good, above 60 is high[2]) and high safety indices (higher == better). The correlation is really off here.

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bKBFiVXNzrgtW95j66Tp...

[1] https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

[2] https://www.numbeo.com/crime/indices_explained.jsp

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

#116

Post by godelski »

r00fus wrote: post #61
sandworm101 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters more than the number of cameras is how/if the cameras are integrated. I don't much care that the local gas station has cameras tied to a 30-day DVR. I expect that. I don't expect them to be connected to facial-recognition AI, networked to the national police, and be feeding my movements into a citizenship score system that will impact my future job prospects.

How would one calculate that score?

You can ask Alibaba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhima_Credit

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

#117

Post by godelski »

testplzignore wrote: post #45
greggman2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of comparing apples to oranges 3. Shanghai, China – 2,985,984 cameras for 26,317,104 people = 113.46 cameras per 1,000 people 76. Tokyo, Japan - 24,500 cameras for 37,435,191 people = 0.65 cameras per 1,000 people Well, first off what are we comparing? They list 26.3 million people for Shanghai and 37.4 million for Tokyo. That's comparing the metropolitian area of Tokyo (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba)…

The original article - https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv... - explains the source of the data. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bKBFiVXNzrgtW95j66Tp... shows the source of the camera counts. The population counts came from http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/ . Just the fact that the counts came from two different places make this data pretty dubious. A better methodology w…

> Just the fact that the counts came from two different places make this data pretty dubious.

Why? Multiple sources shouldn't matter, it is the quality of sources. If you're gathering data you shouldn't expect it to all come from one place. There's no single source that tracks every single thing. At some point you're going to have to gather data from multiple sources, especially if you're trying to make comparisons that others haven't.

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

#118

Post by logfromblammo »

bpchaps wrote: post #111
marcosdumay wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chicago's city hall has a retention period of zero days on its cameras. Does it mean that they have people watching the camera, warning the street police if they find anything, but do no recording?

That's my understanding, yes.

Given that it's Chicago, my understanding would be that the officer handling the FOIA request fed you a line, and they probably didn't even look at any recorded video to see if the camera was pointed in the correct direction.

Did you do a follow up request for whatever that camera actually recorded while you were getting mugged?

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

#119

Post by mgraczyk »

Since moving to San Francisco 5 years ago I have been attacked on the street 4 times and had property stolen from my home 3 times. In only 1 of these cases was there a witnessing camera.

I think there is a very real tradeoff between safety and privacy, and I personally feel like my city would be better off sacrificing privacy in favor of more safety.

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

#120

Post by habosa »

Sometimes I think about theoretically committing a crime. Just running it through in my head. I feel like in every single situation I'd have to pull some seriously Mission Impossible stuff not to get caught on some camera. I realize most crimes are not thought through very rationally, but this feels like a rational deterrent to crime.

So in that sense I don't mind cameras. What would bother me is:

a) Excessive video retention. It's useful in the short term as a form of evidence but in the long term it's just creepy. b) Proactive video analysis (rather than only reacting when something bad happens).

I guess with how cheap storage and compute are now, (a) and (b) are inevitable. So I guess I land on the anti-camera side of things. But I know that if a crime was ever committed against me I'd really hope there was video footage!

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