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Comment by veryworried | Hacker News Reader

Under control from what? Committing crimes, breaking into homes, shooting people dead, raping women going out for a jog, planning terrorist activity? I welcome it.

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Voting for the wrong person? Attending 'subversive' meetings that criticize the current regime? Going to the wrong church?

How will a streetlight camera affect any of that?

By allowing tracking of every citizen to and from every other citizen's house, place of work or worship, park, street corner or alley 24 hours a day.

I guess that could have some marginal effect.

But I'd be much more worried about eavesdropping on my electronic communication. Which they apparently already do at will.

What?! Its the standard surveillance technique of security forces worldwide - tracking the movements of a suspect. I'm convinced somebody is trolling here, and it isn't me.

Define 'crimes' is the issue. Once it is in place, it only takes a slight change to the law, or a Government acting extra-judicially, to become a problem.

If you create a massive surveillance system for "good" purposes that doesn't mean someone can't later use it for nefarious purposes. One (rather primitive by modern standards) example is that Poland required people to list if they were Jewish for their national census, and then the Nazis used that list to round up and account for Jews in the holocaust.

Since the US routinely violates the constitution in the name of fighting "terrorism", I don't want to government to have arbitrarily strong and specific surveillance in case they later expand the definition of what it means to be a terrorist.

I think it was Netherlands, not Poland that had religion listed in national census, but I agree with your other points.

(I think you meant "can't")

good catch

It is crazy to suggest we should focus more on stopping the next Nazis rather than preemptively stopping the Polish census workers?

Who you think the "next Nazis" are is debatable. I think it's easier to just prevent the situation happening altogether. We don't need arbitrarily powerful surveillance to function as a society

>Who you think the "next Nazis" are is debatable.

It really don't think there is when it gets to "Nazi" level bad. But that isn't really a debate worth having.

>I think it's easier to just prevent the situation happening altogether.

Why is surveillance the line you are drawing? We are all fucked if the US government goes the route of the Nazis. Having the ability to tap into some extra municipal surveillance cameras isn't going to make or brake their control.

>We don't need arbitrarily powerful surveillance to function as a society

Sure, but no one is yet proposing arbitrarily powerful surveillance. You are going slippery slope here. Low level surveillance has value just like the Polish government having an accurate picture of their citizenry has value. The question is whether the present value of the information is outweighed by the remote possibility that the information can be abused by a corrupt power. That remote possibility alone shouldn't be the deciding factor or else we should be against any form of governmental power including having a military any more powerful than a local militia.

Yea, lets just figure out what sort of ideology leads to that. Then lets make a list somehow of people who are of that ideology or likely to fall to it.

Then we just ought to round em all up, maybe put them in camps where they can be reeducated on why they're wrong...and ones who are uncooperative could be put to work, and...oh shit we're the next nazis, woops!

Are you really going with the "the anti-Nazis are the real Nazis" trope? There are a few steps along the way between "let's try to stop Nazis" and "let's throw them in concentration camps".

Let me tell you something: No matter what you do, evil always finds a way. And when it does, do you really want to live with the regret that you could have done more, but chose not to for fear of some imaginary future evil?

The answer is yes.

We can estimate the severity of the negative consequences of mass surveillance and censorship across the entire country or globe and compare that to the smaller number of isolated, but perhaps more severe cases of evil. We can then choose which we predict will be the better state to live in.

Here in America we do that with guns. We do that with cars. We do that with natural gas accessible in the house. We do that with electrical lines that may sometimes get damaged and kill someone.

The answer is yes, we can say that the cost of mass surveillance and censorship is too high to pay for a little safety. If that means that someone I love is killed, or my home is broken into, then so be it. It will be tragic. It will hurt. But at least we will be free.

Hold on a minute. Today's society has vastly more surveillance than the society of say fifty years ago. Cameras are everywhere - in our phones, on buildings, on dashboards, on policemen. How has this affected our democracy?

I'd argue that so far, the cameras are working in our favor. Police abuse gets caught on tape and prosecuted. Political corruption is harder to hide. A white supremacist who murders someone with their car and speeds off is caught. The Saudis get busted murdering a journalist.

I'm not sure we can honestly estimate the negative consequences of mass surveillance. Certainly not if we lump every camera in to that category; I wouldn't want a camera in my living room, but I sure would like a camera pointed at my parked car. Streetlights? If it stopped my car from being broken into for the fourth time, I'd be pretty ok with it.

Here in the US, it's not for want of camera technology that we are not living in a police state. If anything, the cameras are helping keep our social institutions honest.

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