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Comment by 4ndr3vv | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the comments here are about the benefits of CCTV generally and not addressing the meat of the article (imo) regarding to the system wide automated recording and storage of personal data by government organisations without any justification.

Quoting the article: "Surveillance images attain the status of evidence for unknown crimes the moment they are created, and merely await the identification of the moment they were created for."

Ofcourse a plod watching a CCTV camera is a good thing. A network of cameras that tracks my car as it passes down every street, and stores that data in police database forever without any suspicion against me? That is a totally different thing.

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As your quote implies, just because no justification exists now doesn't mean none will exist in the future. And when that happens, you will often wish you had historical data rather than having to start recording going forward. For example, if someone stole your car from the airport parking lot while you were away on a trip, and you returned 4 days later, it would be too late to help you if you start watching for your car on local cameras immediately. If you can go back in time and look at what happened, not just in your town, but when your car turned up in the big city 50 miles away, your chances of recovering your property are much better.

So whole societies should sacrifice their privacy so someone can have a hypothetical chance at recovering a stolen car more quickly?

You don't have a right to privacy in a public space.

You do have a right not to be followed everywhere you go. Ubiquitous ANPR is essentially a police officer/power broker tailing every car without suspicion. This is more than a violation of visible privacy.

Why is tracking if done by the police in a "slow" way (ie: cops sitting at major intersections or keeping an eye out for a flagged vehicle) OK, but if it is done automatically somehow bad?

Should all of your server logs be manually reviewed by hand for intrusion detection vs. allowing software to do it? You are both trying to track down and also stop criminals...

It isn't tracking that is bad but suspicionless, ubiquitous tracking.

Your server analogy is badly flawed because it is analogous to your cop/intersection example. A more appropriate analogy would be universal connection/request logging at the ISP level. It's not OK to have all of your society's unencrypted Web requests recorded and correlated by your government. Do you think it's OK? Why? What benefit does it confer to the people?

So is universal tracking of everyone who walks in/out of a gas station / store also bad?

No one cares or looks at the tape of you walking around the store unless there is a reason to do so. Should all passive recording cams also be stopped?

You're still not paying attention to the words I have written. The word you are missing is ubiquitous. It's not about a single location -- it's about all locations.

The law disagrees with you in most jurisdictions.

You will not have the same expectation of privacy as in a private location, but most legal systems recognise that walking out your front door does not mean you automatically give up all expectation of privacy.

You are conflating two clearly distinct uses of "privacy".

Or maybe if you feel that this is sacrificing your right to privacy, your definition of privacy has expanded way beyond reasonable limits. It honestly reminds me of the people who complain about legalizing gay marriage as a violation of their religious freedom.

What's a reasonable limit of government surveillance to you?

The level at which the public good being served does not outweigh the psychological damage done to citizens.

These are automated _systems_, not individual note books. They don't operate in silos.

If no historical data is recorded, I report car stolen, my Car registration is added to a "Something has actually happened to this car" list. Cameras start actively looking for my car's reg, cameras find my car. Done?

Not done. By then good chance the car has been completely dismantled and sold as parts.

Criminals adapt.

Exactly. Criminals know about how to circumvent the law; it serves no purpose mass collecting this data at all if it's pretence is to stop organised crime.

In the case of a chop shop the criminals might know they'll be picked up by cameras straight away, so when they steal the car they whack some fake plates on it, and we're back to not knowing anything.

What it is good at doing is tracking individuals, without any suspicion attributed to them.

Surely you can recognize that being able to go back and review records taken before the report happened is more effective. Arguing that another "less effective but possibly still okay" solution only makes sense if you present a reason not to use the more effective solution instead.

Hopefully you agree with every law that will ever be created in your lifetime.

Of course I won't. However, I recognize that repealing bad laws is the right solution to bad laws, not an indiscriminate weakening of all law enforcement.

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