Fujitsu's Citywide Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Fujitsu's Citywide Surveillance

fujitsu.com

74 pointsAndrewDucker38 comments

> Currently, urban infrastructure is increasingly getting more complex as we face many social challenges, such as complicated crimes and unexpected natural disasters. This situation requires that the establishment of a safe and secure society become a global concern.

Where to begin... if you're looking for social challenges, don't look further than people who can't think on an adult level being fed marketing materials by people who are just as lost, and no longer seem to even feel the need to hide it.

I wonder if this is expressing the culture inherited from the Japanese historical experience? An island culture, homogenous, inward-centered, idolizing the emperor, crushed in WW2, and then relying on the post war rise of the corporate welfare state. This "lost" and dystopian corporate communication from Japanese companies seems typical. Certainly the one I worked for tended to be this way.

What exactly is your criticism of this?

You know, part of me just wants to mirror that, and ask "what is your actual question?", but okay.

Just in the sentence I quoted, "complicated" crimes is just padding, but of course, you can't sell "getting more complex" with the argument of "crime still exists". Then there's "unexpected" natural disasters, which is padding, too. Of course, natural disasters aren't social challenges. "This situation" -- of which there is nothing left other than "crime exists" -- always existed, and what is a "global concern"? People all over the world have been concerned with their personal safety for longer than history exists, so what changed?

Nothing changed, and if I had to guess, based on what we know about corporations and governments monitoring people who care about the environment in the least I'd say they want to peddle total control to prevent uprisings that will come when the natural disasters (we can predict to get worse, since we keep destroying our environment) get out of hand. But that's just a bonus, without that it's just marketing gibberish, and that I needed to point any of this out further eroded my faith in humanity.

>"Nothing changed"

I disagree. The most important thing that has changed and is applicable here is that technology makes it absolutely feasible to prevent "crime exists". At least the really bad ones.

The only things preventing it are: big brother scare mongering, privacy "concerns" and funding.

E.g. you could near-eliminate car accidents due to drunk driving with a tech solution. Same goes for gang violence, domestic abuse and bathroom rapes. Just stick a camera in every stall, street corner and household room. Oh and send police if the view gets obstructed or the camera damaged. A while of that and people getting caught, and they'll quickly learn to not do it. Problem solved.

I suppose this is obvious, but evidently not to everyone: There is no example of what you describe. In fact there are counterexamples of putting cameras everywhere and still having crime. Places where there is little crime don't have, and don't need cameras everywhere.

Singapour has put cameras everywhere and has a very low crime rate as a consequence. While I don't want to live in such a society the model certainly seems to work.

I'm not convinced that Singapore's cameras are the magic ingredient preventing all crime.

> Just stick a camera in every stall, street corner and household room.

At the same time paving the way to crush dissent (and in the more extreme case independent thought altogether) against the government, and providing perfect material for the blackmail of future politicians etc. (I'm sure _everyone_ has done/said things, even if perfectly legal/normal, in the privacy of their own home they'd rather not be made public).

And that's not even considering the case where a third-party gains access and uses it for economic/industrial espionage, blackmail, etc.

Hm, so what about all the places with a plethora of cameras (convenience stores, for example) that still get robbed?

You have the causality backwards. Places with a high risk of robbery tend to install security measures such as cameras. This doesn't eliminate robberies, but it does reduce them.

This is too blatantly obvious to be a Modest Proposal piece of devil's advocacy.

I'd be worried, but given my experience with Fujitsu enterprise solutions, we'll all be in the grave before tech support responds to Big Brother's ticket.

I like this cartoon: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/Use-case-in-an-airport-...

It looks innocent, makes the impression of a childlike idea how to make the world better. The isometric Legoland country airport supports this feeling even more. The whole picture speaks one language: We don't harm.

Detection of suspicious individuals by clothing color, of course. Evildoers always wear a particular shade of purple.

Yes but if the deep learning model says it it’s probably true.

We're going to have so much bitter fun in the future..

"By clothing color, etc. " I wonder what's in the etc. Age, sex, skin color, religion, tattoos, walking pace, gait, facial recognition ?

The picture is so small I initially read it as "Detection of Suspicious Individuals (by clothing, color, etc.)"

> It looks innocent, makes the impression of a childlike idea how to make the world better.

It answer's Richard Scarry's question, "What do people do all day?" [1]

They watch each other.

[1] Still one of my favorite books.

It's revealing it offers Enhanced Security as well as Strengthened Marketing. This points out how hard "the lords" are trying to make everything predictable.

If they had it their way, we'd all be like chickens in cages - always producing for them and completely unable to deviate from today's accepted norms.

In practice and in principle, this is horrifying. I don't trust the people buying these systems, and I especially don't trust the engineers building them. Nor do they give me any reason to trust them.

Is this sort of thing what we became engineers for? To facilitate the end of privacy? Cmon, we're better than this.

Used to work in the industry. I could have missed something but none of this, feels new or novel. Systems like this have already been in operation in places like Dubai and Singapore for years

The industry also has issues which may or may not have been resolved by now:

1. It's not an industry that attracts creative or innovative talent.

2. They're not willing to pay well for AI talent (this may have changed)

The end result is that you get mediocre implementations with horrible or mediocre UX. Depending on how you feel about surveillance this is either a good or bad thing.

The marketing department must've been asleep at the wheels on this one.

I don't know, this probably sells it pretty well to the kind of people who would want to buy it.

We just have to remember that there are people out there who legitimately think deploying surveillance technology like this is a good thing.

Anyone watching police series on tv knows how useful total surveillance is.

"Enhance"

My biggest problems with things like this are that everyone is subjected to it, but not everyone has access to it. In seems almost dystopian that our surveillance applies to the people paying for it, but not the people deciding on it. I can't watch a live stream of a politician's meetings, but governments have access to where everyone goes with their car at all times.

>I can't watch a live stream of a politician's meetings, but governments have access to where everyone goes with their car at all times.

access via phones?

I think it's more banal than that. There are people out there who are always looking for something more to sell, and there are people out there who are always looking for more program to be associated with who will buy it.

Detection of suspicious individuals by clothing color. Sounds like Fujitsu is using the TSA training manual to train this system.

I'm sure "by skin color" will be an option as well.

Also note "strengthened marketing" and "customer counting" being listed as selling points on the airport scenario of a "citywide surveillance" system.

Maybe they just missed a comma between "clothing" and "color".

> Detection of suspicious individuals by clothing color.

Police seems a crime and reports that suspect is wearing a green shirt. Surveillance system reports everybody that is wearing a green shirt on walking distance of the occurrence.

A dozen people are arrested, one of whom is shot. Meanwhile, the suspect changes into a yellow t-shirt in a phone booth and makes his getaway. He is caught several days later, of course, as he would have been without the cameras. Total licensing fees to the city are $12,000.

Surveillance case studies in urban environment have shown to decrease crime rates and more importantly violent crimes. Under the proper circumstances this type of citywide surveillance can be a benefit to modern societies.

What studies are you referring to?

Oh? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-danger...

The fact that London's crime rates are not significantly lower than comparable cities makes me doubt this.

Even so, the question is larger than that - a) how well does it work (i.e. would the money be better spent on traditional policing) and b) is it worth what we are giving up (the ability to go about your business without being monitored, tracked, etc.)?

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