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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

I put privacy over ending crime. That’s the unspoken stance everyone needs to decide on. Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime but do we want that if the cost is our privacy?

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The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. We can "catch all criminals" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.

People are going to need to accept some amount of crime if they want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

You can't even fix broken laws without crime. Alcohol prohibition wouldn't have ended if everyone followed it.

> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime

It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.

Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.

Yeah, and notice all the critical surveillance footage that happens to conveniently disappear? I could start a list, but anyone who knows it won't need one.

Even the Secret Service - once considered a fairly reputable organization - deleted text messages related to the Jan 6 insurrection, after they had received a preservation request.

And the video gap for the Epstein suicide is just too ridiculous.

Someone should start an investigation into why records gaps so often occur right around the time they're most needed. Maybe it's aliens.

I was beginning to fear none concurred. We've named a pittance of the many examples. We are even seeing it with the Tyler Robinson (C Kirk) case, where the rooftop footage is null and the responding officer lost his body-cam footage, because the battery failed in the first 20 minutes. This shit goes on and on. And it is not only with cameras; even the Pulse Nightclub, where broadcastify went down during the most critical part of the event, and no public records were retained. The London bombing of 2007, on and on.

I know it seems unfair to boast an abundance and give only a few examples, but it seems nearly everyone has their own unique memory of a significant example and I gave up cataloging things long ago.

We seem to have enough integrity issues to warrant a little extra caution in our panoptiprudence.

That's a HUGE assumption about the ability of surveillance to succeed, and it goes against the evidence of the most surveillance-heavy states in the present and history. There are flaws in systems that go beyond collecting evidence, for example corruption can undermine any technical approach as we see in places like China where surveillance is omnipresent.

Hell if "total surveillance" was the secret to ending crime, prisons would paradise. The panopticon would have been a great success. In reality the only way to make it work is to assign people two-by-two to watch each other 24/7, and that only works if they're both honest, attentive, and incorruptible.

Total surveillance would be watching people all the time, indoors too aka Fahrenheit. It would absolutely end 95% of crime.

Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.

Prisons don’t have cameras in cells where most “bad” stuff happens. It’s a also a manpower problem but that’s probably going to go away with LLMs being able to auto review videos at some point.

“Most bad stuff happens” in cells? That seems like it could use more than assertion, and in fact plenty of prisons have cameras inside of cells.

> It would absolutely end 95% of crime

It might solve much of existing crime, but that’s not the same as a net reduction in crime.

Bribery, blackmail, and coercion would just fill the crime vacuum.

It would only solve crime if the police actually followed up on all areas where surveillance pointed out crime. Surveillance itself can't arrest a criminal.

This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders.

To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.

I've heard the chances of being put on that list for that infraction is less that getting an STD from a toilet seat.

If you know people who say they've gotten put on a lost for peeing in public, you know someone who is a sex pest but won't admit it.

You're describing a (dystopian) fantasy. We're taking about the reality of such systems when deployed in the real world and operated by real people.

> if the cost is our privacy?

If the cost is freedom. Privacy is an abstract technicality to many, but it's necessary for freedom, and freedom rings everywhere.

> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime

How, praytell, will surveillance end wage theft?

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