Hacker News Reader

Comment by smithkl42 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what they mean by this?

> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”

The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.

View on HN

My best guess would be

[[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]]

It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify), while tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).

Letting automated surveillance systems judge people will inevitably influence our own collective judgement.

> tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language

Two people arguing in public, words only, is close to a legal non-event in the US. So I would hope so?

The threshold for a surveillance system to affect societal norms is not necessarily "legal event", and potentially even lower than any observable reaction (from self-censorship).

Just consider how algorithmic moderation can shape language (=> people using weird constructs like "to unalive", or weird metaphors in chinese), even in contexts where it would technically be unnecessary.

A close US equivalent is the "cant google that, I'll end up on a list" notion. This is all quite undesirable from my point of view.

Until one of them communicates a threat, then it is a criminal matter.

Perhaps, depending on specific intent, credibility, and the nature of harm threatened.

But since this is about surveillance, I hope that detection of verbal threats is not a goal of government surveillance because it's difficult to imagine how that could be accomplished without significant loss of privacy or other liberties.

I can see it in court now. Our AI monitoring system did indeed know about the threat to the building where 800 people died on Sunday.

It says: " Agent: Voice to text detected: I have everything ready - all the XXX chemicals are ready in the van and I'm going to park in the 900 S Crap St now"

Agent: Thread Level HIGH.

Agent: Looking up local codes.

Agent: Mayor signed SB-1238 in 2026 - no surveillance devices may be used for audio threat determination.

Agent: Threat silenced, but logged.

Judge: Oh, that makes sense. Make sure to bag and tag and bill the families for the bags.

City Employee: We also know who parked the van, should we arrest them.

Judge: No it looks like SB-1238 would forbid us from using this data for the purposes of arrest. I guess send them a thank you letter for testing our laws.

Oh, only 800? Maybe you can pick a larger imaginary number to make me feel really guilty about not wanting to give up my rights to live free of surveillance.

I mean yeah, but I don't need to. These cameras ARE already the result of 9/11.

Weird justification since 9/11 was a plane hijacking, not something on the streets.

They wrote a 600 page report about it and it included a ton of recommendations. Not many people remember at this point, but for months and even a few years after, the entire country was on edge about it happening again, in different means (trains, car wrecks on purpose, shootings). There is a reason they have called this a post-911 world ever since. That hasn't ended.

You forgot the paranoia after it. Along with surrendering anything in the name of anti-terrorist measures. And protecting children.

Appreciate the pushback, saltyoldman. Yes, we want to respond to credible threats. And, as always, courts and law enforcement can invade privacy when there's reason to believe someone is worth surveilling. But we're talking here about widespread, extremely cheap, technically easy surveillance of potentially everyone at all times. That's the endgame that some commercial and government interests have in mind.

Would you agree that sometimes an uptick in theoretical safety is not worth a downtick of definite lost liberties?

I used to be that way. However more recently I have come to prefer security over privacy, at least where I live. I do want to make sure human, drug and weapon traffickers are not exiting off my freeway ramp. I do get the issues with what you're saying, but let's think of ways to have both. The existence of a surveillance net with safegards. In other words yes let's have the conversation to make our country secure and also prosecute sherrifs spying on their girlfriends, make sure no API hole exists and some company isn't selling billions worth of data to China.

There is no way to have both. Surveillance is power and it corrupts in the same way as any other form of power. It's not just about patching some individual holes. You can't have too much of it for the same reason why you can't have a cop stationed at every single building in your city. For sure, doing that would make some people feel safer, but it would also make anyone doing something legal but disfavored by their government terrified, increase prosecutions for frivolous infractions and open the door for a future government to swoop in and make great use of all that free power lying around.

Besides, even if it was possible to do both (it's not), do you think this would ever actually happen? When it comes to surveillance, they only take and take and take and never give anything back, further encouraged by a terrified populace that wants more safety in a safer-than-ever world. It's a ratchet that only goes one way because it greatly benefits anyone vying for power in governments and businesses alike. Once you let them have it, you're not getting anything back.

I'm in Seattle and everyone knows exactly where human trafficking is happening and the police are doing nothing about it. Teenagers are being pimped out all along Aurora and literally nothing is happening despite literally years of public outcry.

The pimps get arrested again and again and then released without charges being filed.

Cameras aren't going to make a difference.

The interesting thing is how I was making a very contained point pertaining to cameras, and how cameras, which we were talking about in this thread, seeing a verbal confrontation, could not and should not make a call, because a verbal confrontation is not a legal event. You then took this into a totally different case involving ... what? hypothetical recording of a conversation between two hypothetical terrorists? To prove ... what? My point is that it is not a shortcoming of the camera that it is not making a judgement call on the thing OP was originally talking about. A verbal altercation between two people. I was not talking about a hypothetical bombing. I was not citing a specific law, I was not advocating that there should be a law, I was not advocating anything about whether or not we should ban collection of existing evidence. I was not making any of these moves. I was saying simply: a camera looking at two people in a verbal argument from far enough away that it cannot hear the conversation is not a failure of the technology. Not every negative interaction between two human beings is criminalizable.

You received a straw man and decided to engage it. You fell for the trap, and have already been put into a losing position. How are you supposed to recover from engaging this straw man.

alternatively, it turns out the voice to text ended up picking up on dialog from a movie the suspect was watching, and he opens the door to a SWAT team thinking that's his pizza being delivered.

This is essentially the Trolley Problem.

I don't think you're advocating to have our personal conversations continuously monitored whenever outside, but in the context of this thread, that's what it sounds like.

No, in the context of the thread it sounds like they're illustrating myrmidon's point about how the selective enforcement of crimes that are easy to catch on camera means that the police have less time (and less inclination, training, norms) for addressing more serious crimes, like interpersonal violence.

More broadly, they're not saying that we should make the cameras better to catch more crime, they're saying that when you make cameras the main way you catch crime, you shift the social definition of what crime is to "what cameras can catch".

> then it is a criminal matter.

In very limited and clearly defined ways only: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...

Pretty much everything is a crime if you do it while blacker or trashier than the local baseline.

> tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).

Almost all of these cameras have microphones as well. Not as difficult to detect as you may believe

Once you have road noise and a distance of 10+ metres, that audio is unlikely to be useful.

The thousands of viral ring videos, and flock itself, would beg to differ. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flocks-gunshot-detecti...

Seems like a fundamental problem if we dont want the laws we passed to be enforced.

"we" didn't pass them --- i don't think changing the severity of law enforcement alone can achieve what i wish for in society, but the existence of many laws (and severity of their punishment) i disagree with and thus do not want enforced

I think it's clear what it means but indeed it's formulated in a critical theory framework (see also "male gaze" in feminist theory) that makes it seem more complicated.

Yes, they take camera images and videos and there is value judgment regarding the behaviors.

Reading between the lines, the authors criticize the approach of law enforcement around drug use and dealing, living on the street in tents etc.

But the language makes it sound like special academic expert language and hence automatically right and high prestige.

> acting bizarre and dangerous

The problem with surveillance like this becomes "who gets to decide what is bizarre and dangerous?"

Until we have robot police officers, there will always be a human in the loop. But right now, there's a whole category of "drunk and disorderly" / "breach of the peace" kinds of laws that are ~100% up to the discretion of a police officer to enforce. I won't say you CAN'T have it any other way, because I can imagine alternatives like "don't have those laws", but I will say that you don't WANT to have it any other way.

there was a recent case of a lady who spent at least a month in jail because an ai said it was her. She had physical evidence indicating she wasn't and hadn't been to the state at all during the crime. There was a human in that loop too and she still sat in jail and had her life ruined.

Elected lawmakers and courts.

It’s actually the arbitrary whims of police officers

The ones bought and paid for by billion dollar corporations and industries?

The entire city of Seattle seems to have been bought and paid for by basically 2 - 4 companies. Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, ...Starbucks in year's past maybe?

If that was the case, it seems like those companies would have forced the city to clean up 10th and Jackson.

Why would they? None of the major tech companies have offices in the international district, it doesn't directly impact them. They are however at least partially responsible for the rapid gentrification and cost of living crisis in Seattle and have displaced and priced out local residents causing and continuing to worsen the problem.

They could at least address that the man and woman on the street would easily identify as people who need to be put in a paddy wagon. Leave the unsure cases alone. Get the obvious ones.

What came to mind is a camera pointed at the cash register tells a very different story than the camera pointed at the ATM, or pointing from the ATM for that matter. Placement and the stories behind them offer interesting perspectives on what the observers are trying to catch or deter.

Do you mean trying to catch employee theft vs theft by externals? Why can't you write plainly instead of in riddles?

You are asking me why I can't write plainly, but I believe you're confusing me for the author, but I'll answer you anyways. "Plain" language removes nuance. Example: "She sat on the chair". The number of ways that action can be described are as innumerable as the ways it can be done, and then some - as different people may describe an act in different ways. Communication in all forms is lossy, but you can convey more than just direct ideas by adding subtext or using language that draws the reader to make comparisons new comparisons. Perhaps the author used gaze to anthropomorphize the camera to add on the layer of judgement or shame that the camera conveys, perhaps to an employee that is not trusted to manage a till.

I asked about your comment that I replied to. The "stories" you see in the camera positioning would need elaboration. To me the concept sounds quite mundane. It's pointed at something they want to see. Cash register: see if someone steals, possibly an employee. ATM: See if it gets robbed. Camera built into the atm: capture photo of robber. Not sure what deeper story or insight lies in it and you gave no example.

The "stories" I reference are the wide ranges of events, decisions, and conversations that went into the camera's placement. Are the cameras just for show? Have they recently modernized? Were there discussions and arguments around employee or patron privacy? Are the videos watched incessantly or left to molder? Cameras are rarely mundane, they are a very visible representation of controls related to trust and privacy.

Thanks, that makes sense.

There's a PG essay related to this: https://paulgraham.com/orth.html

I wonder which opinion inspired him to write this. Given the date, maybe it was something about race politics or coronavirus.

Agreed. I have a read a lot of social/political theory and I am sick of this language. These are academic/philosophical tropes presented as if they were scientific findings. Even when the ideas are interesting, the Theoretical baggage gets in the way and the result is at best clumsy and at worst insufferably pompous.

I try to make a habit of gently reminding academics I know how badly this gets in the way of communication with non-academic people and ends up hindering the transmission of their ideas. To be honest, I think quite a lot of academics wind up communicating this way because they're subconsciously looking for positive feedback from their colleagues and so slip into the abstruse language of the classroom without realizing it.

Reminds me of Winston in 1984 doing his best to look like he doesn't have thought crimes in his head. What are we doing here?

>> enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”

> What a normal person sees here

The post is talking about you.

Gaze language needed to be fleshed out perhaps

Reply on news.ycombinator.com