Hacker News Reader

Comment by freyir | Hacker News Reader

> being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost because of indiscriminate surveillance

This seems like a bizarre way of thinking, that crimes should only be punished if the criminal happens to be caught in the act, or if law enforcement follows a trail of breadcrumbs involving unreliable eyewitness accounts and scraps of evidence.

How many people have been wrongfully convicted because the police needed to get the crime off the books, or evidence was misleading, or eyewitnesses gave false testimony?

You speak as if it's a forgone conclusion that this is the way things should be, but what's the basis?

View on HN

Limiting the exercise of power is the goal. The police by design are supposed to meet a high standard of evidence for the use of their power to be justified. The reason for this should be obvious: unrestrained power leads to very bad effects.

Before any technology or policy is used, it first needs to be considered as a weapon, because the historical record shows that this is how powerful tools end up being used regardless of how they were intended to be used. Denying law enforcement any evidence that doesn't meet specific standards isn't the way it "should be", it's the least worst way we know of having functional law enforcement without letting it devolve into various types of oppressive police states.

> what's the basis?

"Innocent until proven guilty."

> "Innocent until proven guilty."

Whose innocence being questioned here? The quote is a non-sequitur in this context, unless you consider "being on camera" a punishment reserved for the guilty. I have bad news for you, if you've ever set foot inside a supermarket, drugstore, fast-food restaurant, corporate office, etc.

> if you've ever set foot inside a supermarket, drugstore, fast-food restaurant, office, etc.

All of which require a warrant before they can be used as evidence against you.

You're conflating private recordings that are not generally available to the enforcement power of the state with the state regularly gathering evidence against you without cause. The entire point of "innocent until proven guilty" is that there must be an established due process of law in the application of the power of the state.

For supermarket cameras, that's the warrant requirement before police can look at the recording, which creates a legal paper trail documenting their justification for needing to see the recording (which can be challenged later in court), and limits the scope of seized recordings to those at lest theoretically involved with a specific incident.

All of which require a warrant before they can be used as evidence against you.

If you are talking about the US, I think you are mistaken. While a warrant would usually be required to compel the store to provide the videotape to the police against their will, the store can always choose to provide it voluntarily. Once the prosecution has a copy of the video, they can use it as evidence whether or not there was a warrant.

> All of which require a warrant before they can be used as evidence against you.

Only if law enforcement wants to seize them. If the owner or representative of the business shares them no warrant is needed.

Police only need a warrant (or other court order) to look at private camera recordings if the owner demands it. Most supermarket managers will happily hand over anything the police ask for.

I think it's more an issue that many of are laws are predicated on the fact that there cannot be 100% enforcement. Look at speeding laws. If those were enforced through complete surveillance practically everyone who drives would be receiving multiple tickets whenever they drove. This would be an undue burden on everyone that the laws didn't intend for.

If there was 100% enforcement of speed laws then everyone would simply stop speeding. We can argue about whether that's a good thing, but the reality is that people do react to deterrents.

Some UK highways have so many speed cameras now that enforcement is close to 100%. Drivers complain, but they mostly obey the limits.

The law says you go over X you get a ticket. Your speedometer is not as accurate as triangulating your speed from multiple static locations as would happen with cameras everywhere. This would lead to a need for much more accurate cameras or a reduction in speed by the margin of error for the average speedometer. Those affects were not intended and aren't even enforced now when police visibly see you going at X speed limit +/- 5 mph.

This is just an example, but improving the accuracy and coverage of surveillance materially changes the situation that the laws we're created in, in the first place

Actually speedometers are required never to under-report the speed. They are allowed something like a 10% margin for over-reporting, but no under-reporting, to solve exactly the problem you describe.

Required != what happens in reality

100% compliance of laws in a population of millions increases costs astronomicaly.

Assuming you are involved in building software if you are in, imagine it this way. It the difference in cost between Google garunteeing they have a 99.5% uptime vs Google garunteeing they have 100% uptime on a service.

That small difference in uptime percentage would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Foogle is not even close to a national scale

It is very easy for speedometers not to under-report speed, given the 10% margin for over-reporting. It's not at all comparable to trying to maintain 100% uptime.

Most of them deliberately over-report by about 8%. You can check this by comparing your car's indicated speed to the speed shown on your satnav.

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/pedantic

As others have pointed out, your example doesn't hold water: other countries have speeding cameras already, and our speedometers are already sufficiently accurate.

Do you have a better example?

"others" is one person who is being incredibly pedantic. Red light cameras or speeding cameras on a few areas !== all encompassing surveillance that implements 100% compliance with the laws.

If you guys are going to harp on speeding cameras existing as well to invalidate the argument, how do you handle the fact that they have been shown to increase accident rates and many communities have pushed to get rid of them as a result?

"One" person is two, and they made valid points that you refused to acknowledge.

> Red light cameras or speeding cameras on a few areas !== all encompassing surveillance that implements 100% compliance with the laws.

Who said there would be all-encompassing surveillance, or that 100% compliance with the laws would be enforced? That's a straw man that you created.

You're confusing red light cameras at intersections with speeding cameras. There has been no research showing that speeding cameras increase accident rates.

> How many people have been wrongfully convicted because the police needed to get the crime off the books, or evidence was misleading, or eyewitnesses gave false testimony?

There are numerous cases where people have been wrongfully convicted even though the police and the prosecutors had evidence indicating that they were innocent. This is especially true for prosecutors, and has been hashed out so many times I won't even bother linking to any specific article - just google for "prosecutor withheld evidence of innocence", and read a couple of stories that pop up in search results. Worse yet, the American legal system refuses to acknowledge this practice as unequivocally wrong and a miscarriage of justice

Of course, but this doesn't negate the fact that more evidence (and better evidence) is generally good.

Most crime doesn't happen in the view of streetlights. Fraud, wage theft, domestic violence… how do cameras help with any of that?

There were 30,000 car break-ins reported in San Francisco last year.

Just because fraud exists, this does not mean street crime does not exist. What a strange argument.

Where did I say street crime doesn't exist? My point is that most criminals are not going to be tracked down using streetlight cameras.

> Where did I say street crime doesn't exist?

Your argument is that if cameras don't help with fraud or wage theft or domestic violence, they serve no purpose.

Cameras may impact street crime, and street crime is rampant in many U.S. cities. White collar crime has no bearing on this, and it's irrelevant to the discussion.

Source?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com