Disclaimer: I am one of the most paranoid people I know and I know some pretty radical left-wing hippies.
I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be.
But if articles like this is what it will take to finally get mesh network projects off the ground then I'm happy to be outraged.
> Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be.
No it isn't. Please read up on GCHQ and their pals NSA and what they do, e.g. 'dragnets' and other mass surveillance which absolutely isn't 'by permission' but is happening at a massive scale.
Also, you can claim you're one of the most paranoid people you know, but your whole post sounds like a post written by one of the 'I have nothing to hide so nothing to fear' group. If you'd be even a little bit paranoid, you wouldn't be ok with whatever surveillance, CCTV cameras etc.
If you'd be even a little bit racist, you wouldn't be OK with miscegenation. Only someone starting from the premise that miscegenation is bad would conclude that this statement means that everyone should be at least a little bit racist.
They are in public spaces, substantial proportions of would be relatively secluded and private were it not for CCTV.
That is what I dislike about CCTV cameras. Without them, there would substantial parts even of London where you could walk around and feel alone and be reasonably sure you're not being observed. It is an odd feeling, e.g. walking down a relatively secluded part of the riverside with nobody around with a date and suddenly being face to face with a camera pointed right at you.
> 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it
If people are not fully aware they are giving it, it may still legally be permission (though in that case the laws need to change), but it certainly isn't morally permission. There's also a vast difference between surveillance by private entities locked in silos and subject to the Data Protection Act, and secret government surveillance.
I don't have any citations to back this up, but I had an interesting discussion with someone from one of the defense research labs in the UK regarding the accessibility of private CCTV cameras to the security services (I collaborate with them as part of my work). He said that what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies. Gaining access to their systems is obviously a much easier proposition than having to negotiate with the actual owners of the properties. Whether this happens already I don't know, but I think it's a relatively plausible way for a government to build up a worrying monitoring capability.
You can rest assured that the cameras are being used by the government. All over the West, they're clearly showing us they don't want us to have any privacy.
As for the article, it is, of course, some sort of propaganda. I guess they're just acclimating us to being aware that we're monitored all the time, everywhere.
That way we're easier to lead down the slippery slope all the way to where ever we're headed. But it's not good.
People need to wake up and start seeing that governments are obviously not working towards our interests. It's amazing how the masses still don't see it.
Do we want surveillance? No. Are we going to be surveilled anyway? Yes, of course. It's not about what we want - it's about what our rulers want.
They don't want us to have privacy because (duh) knowledge is power, and they want even more power. Maligning opting out is covered safely by the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" cliche (which is never challenged in the public channels) and allegations of surveillance are still shut down by the "conspiracy theory" smear.
They're ready for widespread rebellion and attacks on government installations. Many of the people-tracking systems that they have in place were tested against guerrilla IED networks in Iraq, and they've armed every government agency to the teeth-- even the US Department of Education has a SWAT team [0].
It's quite possible that a significant portion of the large scale CCTV installations are up for grabs, but they make up a relatively small portion of private CCTV overall. Most CCTV in the UK are non-networked installation in the local corner shop and the like.
and these large "private sector" companies, are they actually private sector or are they really just a front to make them look like they're private sector companies, when in reality are owned wholly or in part by entities specifically for the purpose of dragnet surveillance by intelligence services whilst selling their services "as a convenience" to other companies?
Given how we've been sold devices for convenience that it turns out are being used against us for many years, I would say that it's just as likely that this is happening on all levels.
With what we're gradually finding out since the Snowden Revelations, one can naturally assume: Any mass market product which appears to make life easier for a large enough percentage of the market whilst potentially compromising privacy/security is almost certain to be used in such a manner - that goes for consumer products as well as commercial.
It's a matter of scale; the power of surveillance scales non-linearly with the degree of coverage you have. What he is talking about is the case where CCTV cameras are pretty much everywhere. Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different.
> Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different.
That's more or less the situation with CCTV cameras though. Its not like there's some national control room where people sit and watch every camera in the country 24/7. Most CCTV cameras are being recorded to a hard disk or video in the premises their located, and for authorities to access it they'd have to turn up in person and ask to see the videos (assuming the storage hasn't been reused yet).
Your assertion contradicts this one made by anonymousDan above[0]:
> what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies.
Neither of you have offered evidence to back up the statements, and both are plausible. Does anyone have evidence pointing to which statement is more representative of reality?
It's not necessarily a contradiction. "Most" could mean 51% while "a significant portion" could mean 49%. Each person is emphasizing what they believe to be most important, but they might actually agree on the numbers.
I was thinking the other day how great it would be to just go out for the day without my phone, and then at night just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went at the time I went and voila, complete set of holiday photos.
In the UK you can submit a Subject Access Request and describe what you looked liked and when you were there (and provide ID) to anyone whose CCTV you believe you'd have gotten caught on, and pay a fee to have them attempt to retrieve the footage (the fee, though limited by statute, will quickly make it the most expensive set of low resolution horrible quality holiday photos ever)
E.g. here's a form for Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council [1] but anyone holding personally identifiable information in the UK are required to handle subject access requests (and there are similar mechanism required in all EU countries to comply with the relevant EU directive)
Just because somewhere is public does not mean that it is expected (or ok) to be under blanket surveillance there.
People can film you in public places, but they can't follow you around all day filming constantly from multiple angles. That would be harassment and invasion of privacy. This is however, the real situation in large parts of the UK.
It's now impossible in most of London to meet with political activists or journalists without being surveilled.
>> I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private.
Until relatively recently there was no expectation of being filmed anywhere, ever.
This idea that we're fair game for recording anywhere outside our own homes is a recent one. I just don't agree that being out in public means I'm fair game to be recorded and monitored constantly.
>> 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission
No, it's not. Implicit permission and default browser behaviour do not constitute permission.
It's about correlation, potential risk, and the relationship of the citizen and the state.
Bottom line, we citizens should be able to tell the state, in theory our servant and not our master, to do or not do whatever we want. That does not seem to be the case with surveillance, to the extant that we don't even really know what they're doing, modulo Snowden and the like.
The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use. And they can't arrest you for questioning or jail you, particularly if you point out to people that the correlation between the two cameras and the telecom companies has merely been done.
> The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use.
I think I just described how tracking advertising works today, except for the cameras.
How soon before businesses' cameras are money makers in advertising networks? Maybe we'll all have them in our cars. Maybe Google glass or whatever fills in that void.
Glance at a Slim Jim and see ads for bulk purchases from Amazon for the next few days. "Get the Variety Pak! Beef. Pork. Llama. A surprise Mystery Meat in every Pak!"
> permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it).
That's not really permission - proper permission requires informed consent. We're back to the data protection principles here.
There's also a big difference between a CCTV system which stores to a set of local VHS tapes which are generally overwritten after a short while, and a CCTV system which is online and capable of face recognition and tracking.
The extent to which the CCTV system can be used against 'innocent' people is unclear and there aren't any clear abuses to point to. The Metropolitan Police "FIT" camera teams that go around filming protestors are another matter.
I can take your picture in public, that's fine. If I follow you around every time you go in public and photograph you, I think you could make a strong case I'm stalking or harassing you.
>> they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time.
> Except when they're pointing at your private property.
My understanding in the UK is that (apart from some "special buildings") if I'm on public land (eg a road) I can film anything visible from that spot, even if it is your private property.
Edit: Have just realised that we're talking about CCTV cameras rather than me romping around taking photos with my camera.
With regard to CCTV, I believe it has to be properly signposted with contact details, but I'd have to go read up again before I could properly comment.
This is my understanding too. Before EU human rights were written into law in 1998 there wasn't even anything providing a "right to privacy" and it's still not completely clear.
The libel laws on the other hand are quite strong, so filming someone privately in their own home and publishing it could land you in trouble with those.
A camera at a place is fine. Cameras that watch your every move when in public are very bad. Not a hard concept if you think about it and hardly hyperbole.
People can already watch your every move in public. Cameras don't change that, they just make it more efficient.
If the only reason we're comfortable with the police having a particular power is that they don't have the resources to use it in a way we don't like, then maybe we should reconsider letting them have that power?
I see two main differences between traditional and cctv-enabled surveillance, the first being that traditional surveillance requires participation and the second being that traditional surveillance is deployed after suspicion.
These are not minor differences; participation means equal opportunity and "fair play", and it can't be stored for future use and retroactively used against people for future perceived transgressions. There is a limit to the traditional surveillance that a society would bear, while the latter is nearly invisible. It is a powerful tool to be able to track your political enemies at any point in the past.
There's a big difference between "for everything you do in public, at least one person witnesses it, but any one person only sees you for a short while" and "for everything you do in public, a specific person is aggregating that information".
The police can already do the latter by having officers follow you. As long as we're talking about individuals, I don't have a problem with letting them use cameras in the same way.
The real thing we object to is dragnet surveillance, and we should think about how we limit police power accordingly. It might be the case that there's no effective way to prevent abuse of cameras in this way, and the only thing we can do is remove them. But if we reach that conclusion, it should be argued from principles, not kneejerk objection to cameras.
But they're not using cameras in the same way. The cameras are always there. If police followed you 24/7 without sufficient justification you could sue for harassment. You have no recourse against the cameras.
I'm not sure about that harrasment question; the case against the long-term embedded undercover police in the environmental direct action movement is still ongoing, I think.
Many of these CCTV services are outsourced, which means private entities are recording you, me, and everybody else in public places. I don't know how paranoid are those friends of you, but you'd better be concerned.
So? Private company may very well put a camera in a public space and record everyone for any reason whatsoever, that's why we call it "public". How is it conceptually different from you taking photo of Eiffel tower (and every tourist around it)?
Being in public has never before meant that everything you did in public was stored in a format that will eventually be mined which private and public companies can get access to.
If you don't see the problem with this, wait til the mining software can detect homosexuals and is deployed in a country where you can be killed for being such.
"But I have nothing to hide." Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Even if you are good and the government is good right now, that still doesn't make you safe in the future. And it is quite clear there are already bad actors in the government. Perhaps you are the one about to expose another child abuse scandal... do you want the guy you are about to expose to have access to everything you've ever done in public, because I'm sure they can find a few minor crimes that they can then twist to silence you. Even if you are Jesus incarnate and have behaved perfectly while in public, they can still just edit it some misbehavior to silence you.
But as long as we can't put in an easy to check, precise limit to the "amount" of "data" that we allow collected, we'll never be able to effectively enforce that limit.
If there is no sensible, enforceable limit between "none" and "as much as you want" (arguable), and if the latter is worse than the former (also arguable) then we'd naturally conclude that we should ban all of it.
Perhaps there are "strange" compromises, though -- what if a business owner had to seek permission to view the footage of their permanent camera if it were in a public place?
Entertainingly, the operators of the light-show[1] around the Eiffel tower are claiming any photo taken at night (when the lights are operating) is required to obtain a licence[2][3]
He isn't putting his camera up there 24/7, that's how it is conceptually different.
Even up in the Eiffel Tower there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras, and on the ground around it you can be pretty much alone at times - even the hordes of tourists do not manage to reduce the level of relative privacy as much as the CCTV.
> there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras
Yes, but I think it's strange to consider that as a necessary requirement. First of all, can you even formulate this requirement precisely? Because "in any public space, there should be up to 10 seconds a day where a person would find himself not observed by anybody" sounds a little bit ridiculous.
I think you have it backward. The original claim is that there was never privacy in public. The next comment refuted that claim by giving counterexamples.
Can you demonstrate that a lack of privacy is a requirement?
> I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places.
If the police found out about a meeting to discuss police corruption, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting.
There is a long history of harassment of activists and whistleblowers.
This assumes that the police knew the time, whereabouts and subject of the meeting and there happened to be a functioning security camera right outside.
Frankly, there were easier ways of identifying activists and whistleblowers to harass even before the internet.
If the police found out about a meeting to discuss a bank robbery, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting.
There is a long history of arresting bank robbers.
Because bank robberies are something that happens often enough and affects enough people that we should allow people in power (who are never, ever corrupt!) to have the capability to do something where the potential for abuse is incredibly easy to imagine.
East Germany and the Stasi are a pretty good example of what happens when mass surveillance goes wrong. That wasn't very long ago.
I think the issue is the sheer scale of the CCTV network.
When combined with facial recognition and the unsavoury characters at GCHC/Langley/Fort Meade, it means you can be tracked all over the country, and the complete history of everywhere you ever go can be archived.
The infrastructure to connect them is widespread available. It is a relatively little step to connect them with each other. That might happen faster than you'd expect.
While I used to think similarly about CCTV, I think facial recognition software changes the game. Without it, I don't see CCTV as significantly different from the targeted monitoring of individuals we're mostly comfortable with, other than its potential to be used retroactively. But it becomes a lot more sinister when software allows the same system to track everyone at once wherever they go in public.
Someone filming you in a public place won't immediately commit the recording into a centralised storage accessible to dozens of (potentially corrupt) government agencies, alongside with the face recognition data.
I have mixed feelings towards blank CCTV in a public setting at least owned by the government. When it comes to private entities I know they're there to protect themselves from theft, property damage, and etc. But what business does the government have with constant surveillance? I know that some studies have indicated that even broken or disconnected CCTV cameras does curtail crime, but wouldn't adding police patrols to troubled areas be better (especially well trained and communicative officers in said patrols)?
I feel that CCTV is just a lazy approach to a deeper problem when it comes to crime. If you want to prevent it then figure out the root cause. If you want to curtail it then hire more competent police officers. They both work and they're both easier to hold accountable (imo).
I'm not sure I'd feel more liberated in a shopping precinct lined with police officers rather than cameras, even if I wasn't paying any more taxes for the increased police presence.
(I'll concede I felt happier with armed guards outside every building in Quito, but the threat they were supposed to be combating was also a tad more obvious)
This is totally offtopic, but one cannot reply to old comments on hacker news and you made me read HPMOR, so I have to went now:
> Ironically, most of the better bits, and indeed the overarching plot thread of HPMOR are largely down to the huge gaps in various characters' rational thought. If Harry had made the obvious "let's not trust the sinister guy that's obviously manipulative and definitely more experienced at it than me" leap right at the beginning it might have been a much shorter series.
Oh God, yes! After 2500 pages finishing, uff, I have to say it was not uninteresting, but is way overdone how singular awesome that Harry there is. I also disliked that he "solves" death. I get that transhumanists/futurists are pretty scared by it, but the story ending with everyone in the magical world getting virtually immortal and forever young? Apart from the wish fulfillment by the author, how would that even work with population growth?
I am also a bit wary now about fanfiction in general, because after so much time invested reading such a long story, it does change your imagination/interpretation of the original story.
I agree with you. When balancing risk vs reward I'm happy for their to be surveillance cameras everywhere in public.
I might think differently if I was a high profile person as then there's the possibility the government could be watching your moves to use as blackmail or for nefarious purposes. But as an every day citizen I believe it's much more likely that I'm going to get mugged in an alleyway than have big brother mess with my life. I'd rather have that increased safety from everyday criminals than worry about the government.
On the internet I believe the opposite, because there is such a low chance of intelligence services catching anyone trying to harm me. I feel like gathering peoples public unencrypted information will do almost nothing to stop online criminals.
1) Public places /used/ to be private! In practice, anyway, because CCTV wasn't ubiquitous, and constant recording by every passerby wasn't the norm. It's a public space, but 24/7 recording by a dozen private parties at a time is NOT the norm historically.
2) If most of our surveillance online is "by consent" but no one reads the EULA or signs anything, is it really consent? Just because people are ignorant to the problems, or do not feel immediate impact of online surveillance, doesn't make it right or consensual.
The division between private and public space is very much political, just as perhaps more famously free contra paid time is.
Public space is not owned by the watchers (in most jurisdictions). Even if it was, ownership does not translate well to physical space. There are lots of things you're not allowed to do with a place you "own", including building there.
Regarding permissions for surveillance, it's far from clear how such a contract works and what you even can be said to agree to. In some places, both parties in the conversation need to agree to recording a telephone conversation for example, and the same principle should hold true for email.
Then consider that a team of 1.000 people monitors you and you alone, everywhere you go, everything you do.
Then imagine what that says about you. About where you work, where you shop, what you buy, which friends you keep, who you bring home etc.
Then think about whether you're cool with this 1.000 man team recording this in a database, to be potentially used by the government. Consider your familiarity with historical and current governments who have abused this for purposes ranging from ethnic cleansing to political oppression.
And then consider that in the world of computers, that 1000 man team costs a few dollars of computing power at some point. Facial recognition combined with a whole range of data (from your cellphone being registered, to your financial accounts making transactions being registered, to your car being registered, obviously your home and workplace, and social media networks detailing your network, and your communications being monitored).
The combination of this all is incredibly dangerous. Should we worry and fear? Well it depends on one question, which is 'do you think your government will ever shift so incredibly to actually abuse this'. If the answer is yes, then there's no escape and our lives in relation to tech as we know it today is incredibly dangerous. If the answer is no, and you also don't fear individual gov users illegally abusing their privileges, nor hackers abusing the gov systems, then you're good.
But again that question has nothing to do with whether we should hate CCTV or not. The question is do you think it'll be abused. If the answer is yes, then CCTV is incredibly dangerous.
Now about the question of the chance for abuse... Well I'm totally not paranoid, indeed I generally feel quite optimistic about these things. I live in the Netherlands and I don't think we'll make such a shift towards abuse on a large scale. At the same time I live in a city that commemorates the 'terrorist' attacks on the civil registry during WWII by the resistance movement, because jews were being processed for genocide with these records which detailed where ethnicities lived in Amsterdam, and the resistance sought to destroy the registry to prevent it. They succeeded but unfortunately they held a copy in another city. And that's relatively recent history, in my parents' lifetimes, in one of the otherwise freest societies on earth.
It's largely because of this reason that many countries don't have a civil registry. For example here in the Netherlands we don't hold a census because you can simply pull the information from a database, it's like Facebook doing a census on the age of their users, it'd be silly. For the same reasons one may wonder whether CCTV cameras which can help track people in similar ways, combined with other information, makes sense.
That doesn't mean I don't think the cameras' benefits outweigh the risks, but for me to say they're completely harmless would be myopic, too.
The 'it's public space' I think is a weak argument against mass surveillance. Humans can't live without participating in public spaces, you can't remain in private space and live a full life, so we must ensure high levels of privacy in public spaces, too. Just because a space is open to the public doesn't mean your privacy is.
> That question has nothing to do with whether we should hate CCTV or not. The question is is do you think it'll be abused. If the answer is yes, then CCTV is incredibly dangerous.
You've made several great points, but I would invert your question. What value does systematic CCTV offer? If we have no strong evidence then perhaps we should dismantle the network.
I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be.
But if articles like this is what it will take to finally get mesh network projects off the ground then I'm happy to be outraged.