Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The watchers and the end of the zone of privacy
I have to admit, stories like this, which are amplified and made scarier by blog posts like this, disturb my inner libertarian. No, I do not think the prevention of mere crime is reason enough to monitor our daily lives, and I believe I would be willing to endure at least some amount of actual domestic terrorism before I would sign up for Richard's surveillance "swarm." (Of course, I would prefer not to face that choice, which is why I want to fight them "over there," but you knew that already.)
CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Jan 14, 12:33:00 PM:
I wouldn't be concerned for some time to come. First off, the network needed to tie intelligent sensors together in any sort of meaningful way probably only exists in a very constrained physical area today, like on the battlefield, if it does exist even there. The computing power necessary to deal with many billions of input points in a larger pyhsical space and the software used to discern any sort of meaningful information from the massive flowws of information would be huger than huge. So network is an issue, software to filter and interpret is an issue, and computing power to deal with massive data loads is an issue.
I went to the ACLU site thinking they were going to pinpoint camera locations, but instead it seems like a scare site aggregating old news articles. I know the UK uses this sort of camera technology combined with facial recognition software to moniter their population, and the city of NY has talked about doing much the same downtown, around the NYSE, but is it really a big enough effort in the rest of the country to be concerned? The SF city cameras really seem like video to be used after there has been a crime, to aid the police in finding perpetrators, and the study suggests results aren't good with only a few investigations helped along. So that idea probably won't spread. And, sooner or later someone will be wrongly identified and any cities using these cameras will have to justify them to the taxpaying public who pay out the ensuing legal settlement. With all the other challenges the country is facing I'm having trouble seeing a threat here.
By , at
Sun Jan 18, 01:45:00 AM:
The surveilance system is not, and I believe, never was for public safety. It is primarily a method of watching citizens and keeping tabs on what is going on. The government could protect us if it wanted to by putting more police on the streets, but that isn't going to happen.
