Are the concepts; security and privacy mutually exclusive? Can we have secure and safe places to live without surveillance and invasion of privacy?
As far as everyday crime goes, I suspect a social safety net would take care of most of it. Most people aren't bad, but they will do bad things when they need help but don't get it. Once you get past that point, the cost of crime is probably less than the cost of trying to get perfect enforcement.
1. Security is usually a knee jerk reaction to something that has happened and rarely correctly addresses the full problem scope, just one specific edge case that was experienced. This typically happens because people over weight the probability of such an event happening to them, due to the short nature of it and lack of control. In contrast to 9/11, you won't see nearly the funding or awareness of some of the largest killers, such as obesity, cancer, US-based violence, alcohol, opioids, etc.
2. Anybody correctly motivated can bypass said security, because it is never well thought out and doesn't cover all possible scenarios. With some time and some know-how, any individual could defeat TSA (or any other Countries) security. At the moment the only benefit is those who seek to terrorize Western society are usually desperate or ill funded.
3. Security tends to lure people into a false sense of security, so people in general are just as secure as they were, because they stop being aware of insecurities. There is a study showing that Countries with and without bicycle helmets have roughly the same number of deaths - the reason being that drivers recognize cyclists without helmets as being more vulnerable, hence going to greater lengths to avoid collision.
To the point, all of these cameras are unlikely to make us more secure. What they will do on the other hand is lend themselves to abuse by government or corporate entities to any extent they think they can get away with.
I'm not sure I'm for surveillance per se, but I do believe painting CCTV as useless and inefficient is wrong. It can be efficient in aiding high-level investigations if applied properly.
I couldn't possibly imagine a scenario where you just forget that you're carrying a gun...
For the record, I agree with you, but this isn't really an appropriate place to soapbox about it.
Also, the whole thing is just mind boggling. Forgetting a killing machine (please don't even start the automobile/edc knife comparisons, killing people is the sole purpose of a gun) on the bottom of a purse. There is something deeply flawed in the whole system if that can happen
This is just it. Carrying a gun is so normalised in the US that people are admitting that they forget that they are carrying a device which has the sole purpose of killing or injuring.
This is not ok in my opinion, but apparently everyone is ok with living in an environment where you all believe you need a gun for protection (which, if it's buried at the bottom of your bag, is going to be hopeless). I can't fathom that a person could be happy with this, but there you go.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/05/sports/switzer-arrested-o...
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I have a friend who carries a pistol in a backpack. I'm sure he forgets about it at times as well.
A year or so ago when walking out of a big box home improvement store and guys says to me "you got a knife?", I slowed and turned and thought and said no.
As I thought about how I don't carry knives, they are sharp objects that cut things, possibly including me, and I can't afford the anti-hemophilia factor treatments, and I don't need a knife 364 days of the year or so, so no.
I looked around, seeing the guy holding the tie down string the store provided at the exit, and looking around for something to cut it with. I scanned and looked, and even tried to rub the string on a metal piece that was protruding from the string roll holder itself.
The metal did not cut it. As I rubbed it I noticed the keys in my hand. A key could probably cut it better, and even better than that - the multi-tool I added to my keychain a few years ago actually has a small knife in it.
So then I had to change my assertion, I did have a knife, I handed it over to the guy, he cut his string and all was well.
I forgot I had this weapon, and have before when going to places with metal detectors (which don't care if you take it off your keychain and hide it in the bushes next to the front door ). I forgot I had it a lot, even when asked about it, even when it was actually useful.
I hope it's not that hard to imagine, as we move throughout the days we get so much on our mind about past and future, we, or I at least, often forget what I have in the present, and I try not to be like that.
It's fair to say an individual would want both security and privacy (for example, as with your home). Like many things, it's about finding the right balance. I'm sure if you look to the extremes of security and privacy you could find a bunch of crazy examples.
The wildcard is the who. That is what throws off the scales, as the security/privacy relationship moves from a micro to a macro level, and suddenly a person's real autonomy comes into question.
What has severely muddied the water is the term "security" has been bandied about by governments (and other large centralized entities) to refer to their own security, often at at the expense of our security. In order to sell the lie, we're encouraged to think that their security implies our security, which is obviously bullshit when you look at the positions their various security measures actually put us in - eg bunched up, undressed, split up, and disassembled in the airport groping line.
The real problem, and why drawing the distinction is important even there, is that the government is choosing to do things that may or may not make government/group security slightly better because they/it cannot see a downside. When in reality it/they is hurting all the individuals' ability to take care of ourselves (eg my above description), even with respect to utterly banal threats like theft.
Violent crime is certainly down in general, but is that because of increased surveillance? Terror and postal episodes are more frequent, so the surveillance certainly didn’t prevent that. Some surveillance is arguably helping prevent terror without us knowing, but we’re not even having a debate on what works and what doesn’t.
Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context.
Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing.
Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off?
The only way to win is not to play.
In short, you can pretty much avoid or conceal all the activities you posted above, not a CCTV installation though. If it is near your home or work, you can definitely forget even trying to avoid it, except for reconstructive surgery.
>> Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI.
Well, I heard lots of claims to this, but never seen a reasonable POC. Most of these claims turn out to be mere geospatial statistics and analysis. Interesting to do, but it won't give you more information, than your local police precinct already knows (where are the 'troubled' neighbourhoods). Given time, more people (even bureucrats) will develop a bit of scrutiny against "AI solves everything" approaches. At least I hope they do...
Surveillance of society as a whole has increased on a very sharp exponential scale, yet there's been no clear causal connection to a decline in crime. If surveillance was useful, let alone necessary, to a society being made as safe as it could we would have expected to see a proportional decline in crime with some reasonably decent evidence of a causal link. But that is not present, at all. So we're really just submitting to surveillance and sacrificing ever greater swaths of personal privacy for no real gains.