Police Wrap - 30 October

Jimbo, I wasn’t advocating societal-surveillance, which if you’d bothered to read my posts in this thread (instead of just picking bits you didn’t like the look of), you’d possibly have seen without needing it pointed out.

To hopefully make it clearer to you:
Not all criticism is destructive, and RiotACT is nothing if not full of criticism.

I can probably make it even clearer for you still, but you probably wouldn’t like it, because I’d be using you as an example.

Yeah, and I acknowledge that the Stalin argument is lacking. My comments weren’t directed at Skid, and personally I don’t see anything wrong with the odd camera anyway – sadly, more often than not they’re useless. But a massive network of cameras (as has been proposed), on the other hand …

All of that said, it’s painfully clear that the argument “if you are doing the right thing, abiding by the law and going about your business – what do you have to hide or be worried about?” is absolutely ludicrous. There’s no justification for constant surveillance of the sort proposed here. Given the track record of organisations who put totalising systems of surveillance into practice there’s a hell of a lot to be worried about.

Read up Jim, Skidbladnir isn’t in favour of the proposal either, he’s just making the valid point that your Stalin argument is a bit lacking.

“Godwin and reductio ad Hitlerum are both immediate losses if used on a rational audience,”

Rational audience? Presumably you’re not referring to the idea that a network of cameras be installed that can track people wherever they go (‘to their front door’ was a phrase used early).

Do you really want any organisation (be it government or private) to have this sort of power? Haven’t you read any science fiction novels in the past 50 years or so?

Then I commend you for your commitment to a surveillance society (presuming, of course, that you don’t have blinds or drapes or similar either!).

Godwin and reductio ad Hitlerum are both immediate losses if used on a rational audience, but help you carry the emotionally susceptible ones.

They are little more than scorched earth arguments.

Still, it’s nice to know that there are Utopians out there who are convinced that the way to make the world a better place is to install cameras everywhere, introduce mandatory sentencing and ensure that prisons are as brutal as possible.

“You were only 1610km from a Godwin Event, watch out.”

Bugger, I should have said “Hitler used to use this argument’. That would be factually untrue, but would have given me the reductio ad Hitlerum for the win.

tylersmayhem: I presume you’ll be removing your curtains? After all, what do you have to hide?

I don’t have any curtains!

Jim Jones said :

Stalin used to use this argument.

You were only 1610km from a Godwin Event, watch out.

“if you are doing the right thing, abiding by the law and going about your business – what do you have to hide or be worried about? Nothing?”

Stalin used to use this argument.

tylersmayhem: I presume you’ll be removing your curtains? After all, what do you have to hide?

Indeed, caf.

Individual CCTV Cameras, I have no problems with as they are relatively harmless. Hell, where I used to work, I used them all the time, and occasionally helped to sell them.
(Helped, as in I helped to inform decisions, but I didn’t advise them or make the sale. that was a whole other licence condition)

Connect them to eachother, or receive multiple angles\viewpoints to your terminal, and they become a vastly more useful tool.
Connect those networks to eachother, and the power of that tool becomes a function of network size.
Still just a tool, but the person\people wielding it have more power at their disposal, and probably far less supervision.

By the way, saying “The law-abiding have nothing to fear from us so long as they comply.” is not an argument in a Privacy vs Security debate, you only get to use that argument in the other one.

And the crims end up all wearing hoodies and glasses and we’re back to square one at great expense.

…and with a wide enough network (London for instance), multiple CCTV camera’s track the crim’s movements using locations and time stamps to either a) when they take their disguise off, or b) when they hop in a car which has it’s number plates recorded, or c) until they are dumb enough to walk through their front door at home. All can and do lead to prosecutions.

As for the “nanny state” comments, if you are doing the right thing, abiding by the law and going about your business – what do you have to hide or be worried about? Nothing? If you are running around burning down buses, stabbing people, doing hit & runs etc, yes, be afraid…be very afraid.

In military terms, a WOFTAM.

And the crims end up all wearing hoodies and glasses and we’re back to square one at great expense.

Since we are on the whole CCTV = nanny state argument.

Out in public I can have no expectation of privacy. Anyone can see me, anyone can listen in on my conversation, anyone can follow me and see where I’m going. This includes coppers without a warrant.

The arguments that anti CCTV groups are sprouting seem to be based more on “government control” than anything else. Now whilst I believe that governments of late haven’t done anything to make us trust them, and have been eroding our rights at whim under the “terrorists are bad” dogma, if they want to spy on you they are not going to bother relying on CCTV camera’s which may or may not track you, they are going to put hired goons onto you.

Passive CCTV needs to achieve society-level-saturation to be as effective as London’s was.
Once they became ubiquitous, just network them and you have a very effective domestic surveillance tool, paid for by private firms, but with community privacy being sacrified early on to Help Fight Terrorism.

Once an idea like that gains some momentum, it becomes less and less about Privacy vs Security, and more about Freedom vs Control, and you have a spectacular nanny state.

Passive CCTV is what I;m referring to Skid, which is what the majority of London’s network uses. It was invaluable when identifying the London Bombers, and their group during the investigation.

In the UK, CCTV is also responsible for evidence against a huge number of criminals.

I realise both the initial and on-going cost, but I think it would be a good investment.

Public CCTV is either:

Active Security,
which is incredibly labour intensive (being only as good as the people watching, making and accurate judgement of what they are seing, dispatching an appropriate reaction to what they see, and either using speakers to tell them off, or getting the responding unit\s onsite in time)
or Passive Security,
which is only a deterrent for future crime, when news spreads that the collected footage gets used as evidenciary submission (provided the angles are good enough to show the act being committed, and the video quality high enough to prove identity beyond reasonable doubt, and if your video maintenance people 1) do regular checks to make sure it works, and 2)that archives are not easily ‘lost’ or ‘corrupted’).

Both would require large-scale deployment to be as useful across the CBD as those who advocate it want, which wouldn’t be cheap to install, let alone operate & maintain.
And you’d need some kind of body willing to investigate claims of abuse of the system, which currently doesn’t seem to happen in the ACT.

None would appeal to civil rights types, until they’re a victim.

The coverage area probably includes that end of city walk IIRC.

The problem is the maintenance contract never gets enforced so at any given time no-one knows what cameras are working.

Proper CCTV might work but this is Canberra.

We have CCTV. It doesn’t work.

Yeah, but how much JB? Obviously not enough for any kind of footage to be caught of this bus fire. Because we have a handful of CCTV camera’s doesn’t mean “we have CCTV…it doesn’t work”.

harvyk1 said :

peterh said :

tylersmayhem said :

When will we consider putting CCTV in and around Canberra FFS?!

when the “it’s an invasion of my privacy” brigade get mugged.

Can I do the mugging??? please please pick me to do the mugging….

It’s not like I’m worried about getting caught (lack of CCTV, even though it’s a public place) and if I do get caught it’s not like I was behind the wheel of a car, so I’ll probably be told I was very naughty and don’t do it again.

(Gee I have a positive view of law enforcement in this town)

LOL!

johnboy said :

We have CCTV.

It doesn’t work.

That’s an outrage. Everybody out to be locked up.

peterh said :

tylersmayhem said :

When will we consider putting CCTV in and around Canberra FFS?!

when the “it’s an invasion of my privacy” brigade get mugged.

Can I do the mugging??? please please pick me to do the mugging….

It’s not like I’m worried about getting caught (lack of CCTV, even though it’s a public place) and if I do get caught it’s not like I was behind the wheel of a car, so I’ll probably be told I was very naughty and don’t do it again.

(Gee I have a positive view of law enforcement in this town)

We have CCTV.

It doesn’t work.

When we want to sell the footage to cable television networks to incite tourism.

tylersmayhem said :

When will we consider putting CCTV in and around Canberra FFS?!

when the “it’s an invasion of my privacy” brigade get mugged.

When will we consider putting CCTV in and around Canberra FFS?!