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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

Completely unneeded and seems like more police state tactics.

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.

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I think it is the sort of thing you have to try before you can convince the people involved that it isn't worth doing.

Yeah, it'll be way easier to get rid of once the program is established and there are people who's jobs depend on it.

I could see a good public protest of this would be for everyone to download the app take some video of something disgusting like a dog taking a dump and then sending that to the cops.

Or use it to record police misbehavior and send in footage of that that would probably get it canned real fast.

Well, you can't force people to upload to it. So if they don't want to, they won't.

This isn't a response to what I said. I didn't say I thought it was a good idea. I said that I don't think the people involved will stop until there is solid evidence that it won't work. Even then, who knows.

Your posts sound like Government sockpuppetry [1] [2].

> (...) 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

You must have strange ears.

"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'

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