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Comment by JonSkeptic | Hacker News Reader

Actually, rather than a violation of privacy, this may be a great victory for accountability. I say this because I do not believe that anyone expects privacy for an action that they perform within the sight of a cop: if a cop is there, you can assume he will see you, it's kind of silly to think otherwise.

However, what it does do is provide accountability. It is no longer a matter of "the cop vs the criminal", now, in court, there will be video evidence for what actually happened. For law abiding citizens, there will be no difference, for the cops, it will mean that they will be forced to provide reasons for and accurate accounts of all their actions. This does not violate privacy, it protects the innocent from the wrong doings of thugs in cop uniforms. (not saying all cops are like this, most aren't, but there's always a few bad apples)

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This is also quite different than mass public surveillance.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/mar/02/cctv-cameras-watch...

Not to mention protecting cops from spurious lawsuits. It seems like a win-win for everybody.

"...I do not believe that anyone expects privacy for an action that they perform within the sight of a cop"

Perhaps my age is showing here, but I remember when the first rule of the internet is that there are no secrets on the internet. The assumption was that, if you didn't want it broadcast on the nightly news, you didn't say it on the internet. It didn't have anything to do with the NSA. The assumption was just that the sysadmin would read your e-mails and monitor your chats if she was bored. It came down to the whole "my hard drive is my property and I have the right to read any e-mails stored on my property". However, it's clear that societal mores have changed, so I'm not sure that it's any more unreasonable to expect privacy in front of a cop.

For instance, maybe I don't want the government to have video of me at a urinal. Of course, cops are human, so they're going to have to use the bathroom. When the cop enters the bathroom and stands waits in line for a toilet, did the government get a right to record my urination? Heck, can I record other people at the urinal, or are those surveillance rights reserved for just the government? Can stores setup bathroom cameras? Okay, I'm getting unreasonably sarcastic here, but I had thought the obvious solution would be to have the cops turn off their camera when they go to the bathroom. However, the public opinion seems clear that we don't want the cops to have an off switch, so I'm a little confused no about who gets to record me in the bathroom.

Anything the camera can record is something the cop could already see - in the open part of a bathroom you're already being watched by strangers. If you don't like other people watching you urinate surely you use a cubicle. If the cop busts down the door you've probably got bigger problems.

Not really. You're just going to enable micromanagement and reduce police effectiveness.

It means that you'll have denial-of-service for high crime minority neighborhoods or other areas where there's a higher risk of liability. It also makes neighborhood policing less effective -- who is going to talk to the beat cop when every interaction with him is going to be recorded and stored somewhere?

It also means that the policeman becomes a surveillance tool. Every time a cop steps into a building, everything is being filmed and recorded. The policeman's discretion to ignore petty things is going to be dramatically narrowed in scope.

It also means that we're going to waste billions of dollars on recording millions of hours of nonsensical video. The NYPD has 10,000 cops working at any given time, which would generate millions of hours of video every week -- video that would need to the kept if were to be useful in dealing with complaints. (In NY, you have several months to file a suit or complaint)

Sure, the policeman becomes a surveillance tool of sorts, but I'll trade the minuscule amount of time I'd ever be in view of such a camera for a guarantee that 100% of every officer's activity is recorded.

And what happens when these videos are leaked to the press, or some hair-brained politico wants to post them up on his mugshot website. Accountability is great, but so is innocent until proven guilty. Hopefully systems will be put in place to curb abuse, but I doubt it.

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