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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

> though there are scores of such teams nationwide, police officials say none has ever found a camera – but perhaps that is not the point.

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> Last month, the province’s police force received about $267,000 (£203,000) to focus on the problem, according to local police official Chae Kyoung-deok.

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> despite the focus on hidden cameras, 90 per cent of the crimes involved filming with regular smartphones, statistics show.

This is seems to be similar to terrorism, in that the fear of the problem is much bigger than the problem itself, and because attacking the root causes is too difficult, most of the effort is spent on useless security theater.

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I was wondering the same thing. The focus seems to be on a small/virtually non-existing part of a bigger underlying issue.

Dealing with the issue of everyone always carrying a camera, disguise as a phone, and sometimes someone will take your picture without your approval is going to be extremely difficult.

You really shouldn't downplay the issue. From what I've read, the issue of peeping toms is a real issue in SK, especially given the gender norms there. That said, of course people should be mindful of unintended consequences or the co-opting of movements for women's right like these recent SK protests specifically to push in culturally conservative directions. SK has in the past been more receptive to a strong government in the private realm including censorship of satire and the like. This was under the previous government that was at the center of a corruption drama but those elements still exist of course.

I guess what I mean is both could and might be true: molka is a problem and it is being used to push the society in culturally conservative directions.

Sorry, I wasn't meaning to downplay the issue. What I am question is how the issue is handled. Going around looking for hidden cameras apparently haven't yielded any result, nor have it addressed the underlying issue.

Several women felt safer, that is a tangible result.

Aah, but that's the issue isn't it. They felt safer, but they're not. They are just as vulnerable as before, because the underlying issue wasn't address.

As someone else pointed out, it's "security theater". You haven't made the women safer. You're saying: See, we did something. It's just that the thing you attacked was never the problem.

I'm not sure it is security theatre, these sweeps may well be very capable of finding hidden cameras. Then their failure to find anything demonstrates that the danger has been severely overstated in several locations, that seems like valuable knowledge to me. Decreasing uncertainty is an important aspect of providing security.

Of course, the scans could be incapable, either by neglect or incompetence, and then they do provide only false security.

They were probably only scared because of the security theater in the first place.

If we follow your logic, fire safety inspections should be cancelled because they find no violations most of the time.

I'm pretty sure that fire safety inspections do find a lot of violations.

And they have the benefit of educating people -- for example, we didn't know that you shouldn't place a chimney cleaning door in a bedroom. It seems obvious in hindsight, but we just didn't question the guy who installed it.

While I fully believe you that you didn't intend this, but that exactly sounds like a men's complaint after enjoying years of "freedom". I feel that years of inappropriate handling of gender issues are gone and the debts are finally fighting back, sometimes in the unexpected ways. I do expect a lot of hiccups and unfortunate situations over the course but won't characterize them as "conservative" movements.

Even if they did find something, are they going to keep checking every single day forever? While it is good they are trying, problems like these can only be solved by changing the societal mindset and raising boys to be better men

Until someone posts a video of one of these teams missing a hidden camera they provide a real sense of security to women that can't really be provided in other ways.

Isn't it a false sense of security?

It's the opposite. A false sense of security is feeling safe when it isn't safe. In this case, it is safe, but people mistakenly feel unsafe.

The police are providing a real sense of security that both represents the actual security and the peoples' feeling of security.

You don't refuse painkillers because someone broke a leg and just needs it to heal. It's not problematic to treat symptoms of underlying cultural gender roles but cultural change of course should be an endgoal.

I mean I generally agree it may end up in a security theatre area, but if they do find hidden cameras used for molka, I think that's helpful, not useless.

I think they should definitely make it a much more serious crime with harsher penalities. It's too hard to catch everyone with a camera, but if you catch a few people and give extremely heavy fines and jail time, you will discourage others.

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