LA Sheriffs launch a surveillance app that uses your photos and videos
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
'My kid was sure he was some kind of enemy agent -- might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes -- said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?'"
This app should make it _much_ easier to spot people with strange shoes.
I also really dislike OPs headline. It implies that they're doing something much more than they are.
Both are bad. But actively encouraging people to record and snitch other people is worse.
Gore Vidal: "Americans have been trained by the media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of the word "conspiracy," because for an American to believe in a conspiracy, he must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than one person was involved in the JFK murder".
>I'm sure you have links to sane, data-driven evidence of the "damage" of public schooling that you'd like to share?
That's a common "scientism" approach to social issues that's completely bogus. Issues that concern with the values of a society can not be measured like particles or IO rates, with "data-driven evidence".
For example, do you take a "data-driven" approach to determine if your project manager is a jerk, or if the way he pushes for a project leads to worse morale? Or do you, rather, use your general unquantifiable observation, and do a qualitative assessment of the situation, based on logical (in the common sense) analysis and arguments?
It's the same kind of broken logic that takes "data-driven" BS like "LOC commited" or "bugs squashed" as the real metrics for programmer productivity.
I see none of the logic you mention. Just some bogus implication in somebody else's words that "conspiracy" == "ufos/jfk".
The whole "Public schools are brainwashing!" thing fits nicely into the conspiracist mindset.
Actually, it's pretty much essential. Even for measuring quantifiable values, like the length of a rod, an opinion ("looks about 2 meters to me"), is pretty much a very valid first step. But for qualitative understanding of social issues, politics, etc, an opinion is not just a first step, it's indispensable. You just have to learn to hone one, instead of relying on mindless data gathering, as if it's a substitute for understanding.
>The whole "Public schools are brainwashing!" thing fits nicely into the conspiracist mindset.
Well, in its plain form (the purpose of public schools is to indoctrinate future citizens to the values and ideas of those running the state), this has been known and openly stated from both critics of the public school system and its creators alike.
So I don't get where you get the "conspiracist" vibe about such a thing. Public school is not about making open-minded citizens, it's about teaching a certain version of history, religion, social ideas etc, as favored by the ruling class.
Of course it's "brainwashing" -- the original purpose of the school system, when it was meant for the European elite, was to create functional and useful state employees (for the Prussian state, the British Empire, etc). Later, it was opened up to the masses because of a need of more office workers and higher ranking blue collar workers.
A true synomosophist will distinguish between conspiracies of effect and conspiracies of cause. American public education certainly seems like a conspiracy of effect; wasting massive amounts of human potential to marginal benefit of the few who profit most from the established order.
The "nosy neighbor" phenomenon isn't exactly rare - start doing work on a friend's house and there's a decent chance you'll get an inspector stopping by, accusing you of being paid, and generally treating you like a criminal.
For the mechanism, it's not really a stretch to figure that people bombarded with stories of omniscient "good guys" (real, fictitious, and imaginary) are likely to reflexively call the purported "good guys" whenever they see something they don't like.
If you actually want information about how some people think that traditional schooling damages people, I'd suggest googling "criticism of traditional schooling." It might help to think of the outlooks of the people you know, then think of the major elements of traditional schooling, then try to notice what obvious features of traditional schooling that people you know would probably object to.
This is meaningless pap. The app we're describing has one purpose, and that's letting you send things to the police if you want. It is not a remote surveillance application as the headline mischaracterizes it or you mischaracterize it by invoking the title of a book that comes up any time the subject is "police do something".
How is this any different from the ability to call/text the local police tip line?
I'm all for calling out overreach, but making it easy for people to send the police data voluntarily and on their own terms hardly seems like a bad idea.
It's not. That's Big Brotherish too -- including in the literal sense that snitching is a common practice in the book of that name.
Don't know about modern US, but there are societies with moral codes against snitching of any kind, including snitching the bad guys to the police. And even in the US, I'm aware that there at least used to be some old popular attitude against such a thing.
In fact, this notion that snitching is immoral in itself, even if it is to the "authorities", has been part of popular culture and lore for ages, from Zorro and Robin Hood to Batman. Heck, Judas himself was snitching to the authorities, and we all know the status he has in our cultural landscape.
Historically crimes were punished severely because it was hard to catch people and prove they did something so the expected value of committing a crime had to be lowered through strict punishments.
For example: If $1,000 in cash was in an envelope sitting on a table in an outdoor cafe with no visible video cameras, it would very likely be stolen if someone walked by who A) needed the money, B) didn't have a strong moral compass.
He would calculate like this: IS (Chance of not being caught X value gained by crime) more or less valuable than (Chance of being caught X Punishment).
The equation is balanced when it is just slightly less valuable to commit the crime. With the advent of cameras it appears that the % chance of being caught has gone way up, so I feel like we need to reduce the punishments to balance the equation.
Having longer punishments is not positive for society, it is expensive, doesn't help the person doing the time and doesn't help the victims. Reducing punishments as we can catch a higher number of crimes makes sense.
I hope that the discussion about crime and punishment shifts to reduce sentences to help balance that equation. I'm sure there are better ways of putting what I said, but hopefully people get the idea.
My point is that the thing we need to change first is lowering sentences since they are just absurdly long given that it is so easy to catch people committing crimes relative to just 20 years ago.
Take the Boston Marathon bombing - an event they cite as something where this would be useful. Even without it, their was a ton of news video and surveillance video, thousands of images from the attack taken right after or before the bomb going off. Within days, they had video footage of the suspects and a few more days they had killed one and arrested the other suspect.
I'm not convinced having this software would've helped shorten that time frame. Too me, it's more about mass surveillance and going after protesters. Seems to me there could be a whole bunch of innocent people getting swept up with this tool as well.
Or use it to record police misbehavior and send in footage of that that would probably get it canned real fast.
> (...) until there is solid evidence that it won't work.
Why should we need evidence that such an Orwellian program will work? Of course it will work. It will work - for those in power - against the people.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
"the people involved" -> pro government city council members and police administrators. Those are the people with the purse strings, and money is what ultimately makes something like this happen.
They will be looking at this as an opportunity to 'positively involve citizens' in security efforts, without paying any mind to the likelihood that they will get ~100% noise and ~0% actionable information.
edit: swapped in 'likelihood' for 'fact'
just take care to live your life so that you're never worth the trouble to dig through it.
If I am a defendants lawyer, hell yes I might be attempting to identify the person taking the image or taking the video to get testimony to the context of said image or vidoe
"There’s no cost to the law enforcement agency to use LEEDIR if the emergency affects more than 5,000 people or covers five square miles and at least two public safety agencies respond."
"this week the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department is using LEEDIR to gather photos and videos from eyewitnesses of a chaotic street party in Isla Vista that led to over 100 arrests. Sheriff's investigators hope the images they receive will allow them to ID more suspects."
I wonder how much this is going to cost taxpayers and who the shareholders are in this company.
This isn't a data-snarfing app along the lines of what we hate the NSA for, this is a tool put out there so people who want to send things in to the police have a quick way to do so. Less like Carnivore/PRISM and more local police tip line, but on the internet.
There is no coercion happening here. There is no "surveillance" happening here, at least not in the loaded way that term in used nowadays.
I see absolutely no problem with this. Normal people willingly participating in law enforcement is a Good Thing.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm no state fanboy, but you can't have it both ways.
You very much can. Wanting something does not mean you have to accept it wholesale, in any quantity, by any entity and in extreme doses.
The notion behind your argument makes everything a false dichotomy, between "not wanting something at all" and "fully wanting it 1000%".
We are very much capable of wanting something in moderation and with certain provisions.
And we are very much capable of wanting open internet and personal freedoms, and, at the same time, not want people give full access to information to the state.
I'm not even sure where this notion that personal freedoms and not wanting anybody to assist a police state are incompatible comes from.
And we're back to square one.
Edit: And freedom is a binary choice unless you restrict the problem domain from 'life' to some subset of life, in which case all such subsets must be 'free' in order so say one is free. If one is not free there logically must be oppressors. You see? All we've done is reshuffle things.
Yes, and this is what civilization has done since time immemorial. Where did I argued against this as a practice?
What I said boild down to that people that recognize this need for "policing" can also recognize a need to restrict the powers and information given to those doing the policing, and that there's nothing contradictory about it.
>And freedom is a binary choice unless you restrict the problem domain from 'life' to some subset of life, in which case all such subsets must be 'free' in order so say one is free.
I don't think it's a binary choice. In some ontological, philosophical way maybe you're right, but people understand that it's perfectly fine to call you "free" is you are not a slave and can say whatever you want, even if you're free to, say, drink and drive.
This "restricting the problem domain from life to a subset" has always been the case for freedom. You don't have the freedom to come and kill me, for example.
>If one is not free there logically must be oppressors. You see? All we've done is reshuffle things.
What we did is far more impactful that reshuffling, we changed the scale of constaints. And quantitative change also brings qualitative change at some point (like water after some temperature starts to become vapor). In this case, we went from 20% freedom (say in medieval times), to 70% freedom. Suddenly, you got something there.
True freedom is not about keeping down the oppressors forever - that's just a power inversion. Freedom is about having choices, and there's no restriction of that here.
It doesn't actually help do any sort of immediate surveillance (right now, anyways, thank god). But, it does mean that any gathering of people with phones out is potentially spying.
This specifically is excellent discouragement against perhaps the biggest threat the establishment faces today: peaceful gathering and protests.
This is (intentionally or not) targeted almost perfectly at Millenials and more tech-savvy folks, because those are the ones who'll recognize the threat most clearly.