Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

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Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable.

It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there's the thought of a traffic stop by a bored cop "degenerating"... it's tough to travel to countries like these when you're used to a polite government whose agents treat you, the foreigner, with consideration and like a customer.

For example, when I went to my PR interview, my medical checks had expired (and it was transparent I had hoped to get away with it); the lady very helpfully opened up a slot for me a few hours later and recommended me a range of clinics nearby to do the missing medical checks. A breath of fresh air after dealing with the French and other "first world" governments...

No CCTV in my street except for the hedge that borders the Istana 100m away. We do get the odd police car patrolling the perimeter, but since the President lives there and the Prime Minister works there, I can understand. As for the US, I've never been in a building with more than a couple storeys that did not have CCTV, so I'm curious about your frame of reference there (most of Singapore consists of 20+ storey buildings). I've never been in a US mall or office building without CCTV. The only reason my residential building in NYC did not have CCTV was because it was pre-war; it also didn't have working heating, and I'd rather have had both.

I do agree that Singapore is probably not the place to move if you enjoy a suburban lifestyle in a big house with a garden.

edit - here's something you can't do in the US: my friend and I bought a couple craft beers from a Japanese supermarket, then sat down on public benches in front of the Asian Civilisations Museum (opposite CBD and the Fullerton Hotel), cracked them open and sipped them slowly in front of the view.

All you said is true.

Forget to mention, aside from that, I love Singapore in general and I have no illusion that the US is getting more hostile by the day. I have been in the US as a foreigner for 10 years. Last time I came back, I was hassled and treated like a piece of shit by a customs official, too (and I love how they ask for social accounts now, I hope they don't ask for HN?). Recently I was extremely upset having so much difficulties getting my driver's license renewed. I think the new Trump thing made it so much worse too, but I'd rather not dig into the Trump thing. In Singapore? Government officials did treat me like a human, I absolutely loved that.

However, once you're in in the US, you have NYC, Chicago, SF and you also have Smallville or Lancesterville in the middle of nowhere. In those supposedly backward, homophobic X-villes, you can see part of why some people love the US so much. It's still the life we love in the 80s-90s movies like Back in the future or Groundhog day. They have no cameras, people greet you on the street, and you can go for miles and miles by car, bike, or on foot and you wouldn't see any other person.

Yeah, I get it, it's not legal drinking a beer in the public. I used to live in a rented house downtown with other graduate students in a relatively big town that houses the state's biggest college. During the summertime weekends, we often just drank and smoked and played the guitar (and flute, and banged on broken guitar) all night long on the front porch and watched the cops patrolled by. The other day in X-ville, we smoked our asses out one night. The next morning, I jumped on my friend's 70s truck and saw a 6-pack of beers, some new, some empty. I asked whether we should move it back, and I quote his answer, "Have some man, it's X-ville, no one actually gives a fuck." We blasted an FM channel full of country songs, cranked the window down, and I rode shotgun in a glorious sunrise.

Those villes are carcasses of society, they are small because nobody wants to live there

I’m glad you enjoy the choice

You don't sound glad about anything.

Agreed about the customs officials - travel to the US is no longer pleasant.

Concerning government officials, for a few years I lived in the same town as the prime minister of the UK. I used to see them walking about town or in shops, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, but never with any security escort. The CCTV cameras there are mostly private ones in shops, as far as I can tell.

Funny you should say that. I grew up in the UK (Central London, Cambridge) and found most interactions with the government difficult in their bureaucracy and sometimes sheer unpleasantness (airports being at the top of the list, until the merciful arrival of auto-gates).

But it is true that smaller towns are almost a different country. British big government has always been oppressive in nature, and rather unconcerned with the collateral damage to the average citizen - see the current NHS restructuring, or how the trains were privatised into the laughing stock of Europe, or remember how you felt when you received your first TV tax letter making you feel like a suspect about to have a SWAT team enter your bedroom... there is this assumption that the citizen is naughty, a feeling of nanny state in a 1984 way. I don't know if that's a recent phenomenon, but it is part of the reason I left for good. Love the Brits though.

The Hitchhiker's Guide is quite an accurate representation, I think, of how I felt about government there at the time. A recent letter from my empty, but extant Lloyd's account intimating me to surrender a ton of private information to HMRC just reinforced the feeling - meanwhile, the Singapore government auto-calculates my (low) taxes and thanks me for "contributing to nation building" with a heart warming picture of a child at school.

My point, which I admittedly did not make very clear, is that it is not about the CCTV but the government behind them. What is the relationship between the government and the people? Is it one of trust? Are words like "necessary evil" used? How do people feel when they see a cop, or a border agent?

The US was built on the idea that politicians are inherently untrustworthy, and the government should be weak and decentralised, with states having the freedom to do what they like (with some exceptions, c.f. the Civil War, eventually leading to the current strong Federal government situation) and competing with each other for residents and businesses. This sort of acts as a balancing mechanism avoiding the most egregious abuses of individual rights in the very long term, whilst leaving room for experimentation on what those rights actually mean in practice.

Singapore is the polar opposite - Lee Kuan Yew structured an immensely powerful and centralised government to solve a number of problems ranging from being invaded by neighbours and Mao's attempts at subversion, to opium gangs and a country so poor hawkers slept on the street behind their cart. However unlike most other new nations at the time, he specifically built a ton of safeguards and structurally made the government as impervious to corruption and meritocratically oriented to customer service as possible. The PAP walked in the streets dressed all in white to symbolise that philosophy when they were first elected. Whether it will last is an interesting question, but today, the government is trusted, so people don't mind seeing CCTV or a police patrol...

AFAIK the vast, vast majority of CCTV in the UK is privately owned and has nothing to do with police or government.

While it's no doubt true that the "vast majority" of CCTV in the UK is privately owned (pretty much every business premises will operate their own private CCTV), there are large numbers of police, local-government, and transport-agency operated CCTV cameras monitoring public spaces in the UK.

If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus, every train, etc has CCTV.

In 2002 there were estimated to be 500,000 public and private CCTV cameras in Greater London, and 4.2 million in the UK. That number is almost certainly much higher today.

It was estimated that high, but using a flawed extrapolation from observations on just two streets in Putney:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080704145855/http://www.channel...

I'd be interested to know the source of your (almost) certainty.

> If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus, every train, etc has CCTV.

My experience as a londoner is that privately or quasiprivately operated spaces (including trains and buses) and roads do but public spaces like squares or parks don't. When I was mugged in a plaza there was no public CCTV coverage but the police requested CCTV footage from a private gym bordering the plaza. I think that's pretty normal for london.

> there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely

Wow, so I've been hearing chatter about that for a while now, but I had no idea of how common it was.

I would like to ask you for some clarifications if you don't mind.

Do you think that such social media snooping as you described is fairly common? Do you think you might be in some classification of people that make it more likely? What do you think would happen if you refused? What do you think would happen if you legitimately deleted all of your social media accounts, thus making it impossible to comply?

Thank you kindly.

There are states where you can drink in public places. CT comes to mind. Not all public places, but most.

Yeah, the hard thing about commenting on the US is that it's really 50 separate countries which do a lot of regulation locally. Cannabis being the obvious example today - in some of the country, you can smoke it in front of the police station, in other parts, you can get jail terms of years...

Something to note about cameras in the US:

The vast majority of them are private, not government. Those that are private, many are misconfigured, aren't recording, are broken (either the camera or the backend), or are just plain fake cameras.

The government ones are usually not much better: I've had incidents where I've asked about CCTV footage at a post office, and I was told the camera wasn't hooked up (granted, maybe that's a standard line unless you are a cop with a warrant or something).

In a similar fashion, I've had something like that told to me by security at an office parking lot (I think my car was run into or something). Of course, maybe that was just a CYA response standard to keep the management company from being liable in some manner...

I have cameras at my house. They monitor my yard and doors, and store events on my ZoneMinder server (which also emails me the events). I try to keep it in working order.

Finally, those that are government and monitored, etc - just like everywhere else - none of that footage is looked at until long after the fact of something happening. The real fear is with various facial recognition, gate recognition, and "threat recognition" software being used - identifying people as false-positives for innocent things (while missing the identification of actual threats).

> ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal,

Immigration agents aren't the most polite people in the world but how does the immigration agent know you are not a criminal? It's his job to figure that out without holding up the line.

>the thought of a traffic stop by a bored cop "degenerating"

Did that happen to you or is that something you'd imagine happening to you? Most encounters with the police for traffic violations are professional and dare I say courteous.

>Immigration agents aren't the most polite people in the world but how does the immigration agent know you are not a criminal?

I assume he already has a visa to enter the country. It would be easier to conduct the criminal check before granting the visa, and it can be done offline. They can take as long as they like. Or maybe the person came from a country with a visa-waiver program with the US. In which case, I'd agree that the questions could be warranted.

I guess it’s all relative. I too feel like the US is a surveillance state on some level, but nothing compares to the UK - arriving at Heathrow feels downright dystopian. I guess it’s just what you are used to.

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