Is there any research that proves the causal relationship between surveillance and crime rate ? I've been constantly shut up with this statement "Don't you want your country to be safe" when I talk about privacy intrusion by Govt .
What the question is really asking is this: "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?"
No, I do not. I want my country to be a place where I am proud of living. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have traditions that are important to me that stay the same over time and try to get better over time.
I want my country to stay a place I am happy living in. I can live with some danger much easier than I can a surveillance state. Danger is a situation that is stable over time. Operating a panopticon is not.
The second premise is that it is possible to make some universal rules that will make everybody safe. Throughout history we have lots of examples of places where large groups of people were "completely" controlled. Modern prisons in the U.S. are a good contemporary example.
These places are not safe. In fact, the tighter we grip a population in order to make them safe, the more we create criminals who are part of the surveillance system itself. These criminals are in many cases impossible to discover. So now you have a lot of control and surveillance with criminals you can't identify or catch. The Chinese deal with this by every now and then sacrificing some of the party apparatchiks to the mob. The jury is still out on whether that actually works over several decades or not. I doubt it. But even if it did, it's still an unstable system.
Nations don't exist to extol one virtue over all others. "Safety" is a great thing, but it's not the end of the conversation when it comes to decision-making. It's a complex balance that should dynamically change over time as conditions force. When you systematize things like massive surveillance, you actually hurt the cause of public safety. It gets better for a short while -- then the rebound happens. And it's not pretty.
What's really happening when you agree to surveillance, is you're agreeing to give power in the form of information asymmetry to people you don't know. You assume those people will use that power for your benefit. In reality, there is very little guarantee that that's true - though there is some statistical likelihood that it's true.
At the end of the day, there is no such thing as law and order, no such thing as values and ethics, no such thing as society and civilization. All there really is is groups of people with varying levels of power and cohesion, varying overlap of shared interests, rather predictable human nature, and game theory. If you lose sight of that, you do so at your own peril.
It seems to me that most of the justification for surveillance systems is focused on edge cases, terrorism and paedophilia which are statistically unlikely of affect the vast majority of people.
If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people.
Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.
Do you have a citation for this?
It’s race to the bottom policing that’s approaching the US model. Assume everyone is a criminal (when crime is at an all tome low), dress police officers up in tactical gear, and turn them into enforcers rather than protectors.
[0] https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/23/photographers-pro...
Of course no data, purely observational.
I couldn't find London's murder rate further back than 1990 for some reason, but for England, the murder rate is higher now than it's been since at least 1900.
We don't know if CCTV surveillance, gun bans, and silverware purchasing restrictions have had an effect reducing violent crime, but at the very least it hasn't been enough to counter the increase.
> Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.
I'm pretty skeptical that this would decrease violent crime and/or murders. Do you have any evidence for this?
The fact is that the homocide rate has utterly collapsed[0]. It’s difficult to compare the murder rate today with 1900 due to economic and cultural shifts. We may as well compare the execution rate, the domestic violence rate and the sexual assault rate too.
Drunk people getting in fights is categorically different from violent crime committed for material gain (robbery, carjacking, etc). The causes for the problem and the way to go about solving the problem are totally different. Keeping people from getting angry drunk is not going to stop a home invasion. Stopping a home invasion is not going to improve crime stats because it's a single instance of violent crime. It's very possible to have a society relatively devoid of "violent crime" in which drunken brawls are fairly common. It's also possible to live in a society with lots of violent crime but no bar fights.
Including or excluding drunks to make the crime stats look how you want them to is no more honest than using gang violence to make the "mass shooting" statistics look how you want them to.
You can't just paint with a broad brush when it comes to violent crime (well you can but it's stupid and counterproductive if your goal is to understand crime for the purpose of advocating for public policy that reduces it). A drunk guy getting in a fight is different from domestic violence is different from robbing a delivery driver but they'll all show up when you "select * where includes_assault = true;"
Watch out for "exceptions" causing confusing numbers, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig... : "The official figures [for 2017] also show a 26% rise to 723 in the homicide rate, which includes the 96 cases of manslaughter at Hillsborough in 1989."
This article also mentions consistently falling police numbers. The police and court services are stretched very thin.
However, you don't really need research on this, it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits. I think the problem some people have with surveillance is that its costs may outweigh its benefits.
For example surveillance can be used to shift political system in the authoritarian direction, by suppressing political opposition. It can be used to sustain inequality since it provides those with money or power a powerful leverage to entrench their positions. It can be used by corrupt officials and hackers to commit serious crimes (partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits). Finally, even if surveillance isn't abused, it can be uncomfortable to some people who just don't like being watched.
No, potentially outweighing them. There is no reason to think surveillance cannot enable more crime than it solves, and the more surveillance you have the more likely that gets.
Although if I have to guess, the new crimes it enables are less destructive than the ones it catches. As an example, a mugger has a risk of killing or seriously injuring the person. On the other hand, someone who steals surveillance data for blackmail purposes will not cause nearly as much harm.
Is it, though? As far as I know, most crime is of the "spur of the moment" type, decided on the stop, without much regard for the consequences. Thus, I'd expect more surveillance to be able to increase the odds of getting caught, but to not actually reduce the amount of crime.
I'd also be ware for increased surveillance to hamper the ability to correct "wrong" laws.
Still, I suppose if the probability of being caught goes from 1% to over 50%, it might be enough to scare off even the spur of the moment criminals.
Also, a decent fraction of crimes are at least somewhat planned or even repeated, and those should be affected by the chance of being caught.
On the other hand, there are also more things I didn't think about. Suppose surveillance actually catches all car thieves. Will most of them go get a job? Or will they just switch to crimes that are harder to detect with surveillance? My guess is that most criminals will either stop committing crimes or spend most of their life in jail. But I may underestimate the creativity and capability of criminals.
And on the other hand, what makes you feel safer: no news at all, or "1000 potential terrorist threats thwarted through surveillance". The former is dull, but dull is good right? The latter is stressful on both sides, on the one hand that apparently there are at least 1000 terrorists active - and what about the ones they didn't catch - and on the other that the government is listening.
So that's my theory; if government surveillance is effective, it's kept under wraps so it remains effective.
Between the police fighting for funding, media fighting for content (Florida man), and police force for recognition (police posing with stashes of money/drugs/guns), I'm not sure there's much strategic hiding going on.
But it will not inhibit white collar crime (such as corruption or fraud etc). It won't inhibit crimes of passion. And it won't inhibit premeditated crimes that require lots of planning and hardcore execution (like drug/human trafficking etc).
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/10/the-cardboard-c...
Based on that surveillance does work.
The question is rather at what level surveillance does not meaningfully reduce crime anymore but becomes a (political) control tool.
I do believe surveillance and the threat of surveillance does heavily undermine public trust in a society and its institutions and that this can be easily deduced by reasoning. Good thing trust is not an issue in 2019...
Ever wondered why so many constitutions around the world forbid surveillance?
I believe the studies about people becoming dumber...