Comment by jamesbrownuhh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesbrownuhh | Hacker News Reader

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Very interesting article. I've been thinking about this more often recently (perhaps it's watching the 31C3 talks that do it) and I find that I'm becoming increasingly conflicted over the whole issue of surveillance.

On one level, my gut instinct is "mass surveillance of innocent people is wrong"... But the moment I think of it from the law enforcement point of view, I realise how desperately I'd want that bulk data and how damn useful it would be.

I can easily see myself, in another lifetime, being the one who said "Hey, you know if we stick a camera here, I can get a computer to read the number plates and beep if it sees a car we need to stop." - That's nothing other than a great use of technology to do what a human could do, but much more efficiently. A good hack, nothing not to like about it at all.

At first it'd seem only reasonable to use that technology ONLY to flag vehicles that were known to be of interest at the time. Keeping dates/times/plates of innocent vehicles might not be right. But then again... How seductive to sling all that data into a database. How powerful, how efficient, how god damned _useful_ it would be to be able to go back in time and, for any given number plate, rule a vehicle's presence in or out of suspicion. OK, clearly a possibility of "wrong place, wrong time" for the unlucky, but an equal chance of such historical information actually verifying an alibi, proving that a person of interest is as innocent as they claim.

The extent to which you could get a whole lot of law enforcement done, purely with a big database and some well-written SQL queries... It's seductive. If I were law enforcement, I'd want that /so/ bad.

I wasn't a fan of "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" before the Snowden revelations, or after. But today I find myself realising just how useful the results of such surveillance /could/ be. I wonder if I've just given in, taken the cowardly way out and somehow convinced myself to be comfortable with the idea of such intrusion because it's obviously never going to end, or whether my mind on the subject has been genuinely changed.

Quite a quandary. Still not sure where I stand on the issue now.

So why can't I see the stored number plate lists?

It's just doing "what a human could do, but much more efficiently" - I could go and stand by the roads and watch and take notes myself, so why is this obviously public information, collected by taxpayer funds, locked in closed databases?

Except it's not what a human could do; I couldn't practically do that; for one thing I can't be in more than one place at a time, and for another I can't dedicate my life to writing down registration plates with no breaks, no income, and no sleep. Similarly, the police could not do it on bulk scale - they can't fund enough people to track every major road junction.

Adding up ten numbers is something a person could do and a computer could do quicker. Adding up ten million numbers is something it feels like a person could do, at first thought, but they really couldn't. Not in a useful time, not without too much error. "Quantity has a quality all it's own", and all that.

It's not just the noting of series of number plates at one location, - it's at many locations simultaneously, and because it's always happening the system that "notices" that vehicle AB123CDE that passed point A at 10:26:32 must have been speeding (or jumping red lights - also under surveillance) to pass point B at 10:29:41 can flag up the relevant series of videos for a humans attention.

In an attempt to help you find out where you stand on the issue (that is, I don't expect a response):

80% of sexual abuse of minors happens within existing social contexts, that is "family and friends".

It would be useful to place cameras in every single private room and have them be automatically monitored and the live feed passed to some on-staff LEO when software considers anything suspect.

Are you at peace with that? If so, why? If not, why not?

(Yes, it's an extreme example. Both in terms of privacy intrusion and in the potential of helping law enforcement with a 'worthy cause'. It's why I think this example is particularly helpful to consider one's position)

This is not an extreme example. What is extreme is looking at the world from the law enforcement perspective. Why not just lock everybody in the prison already, perfect conditions for surveillance and control.

It is an extreme example in that everything more intense (at least of the scenarios that I can come up with) requires a qualitative shift, such as depriving people of additional basic freedoms (eg by locking them away), not merely a quantitative like moving cameras closer to home.

I can certainly outline why that's different, because those cameras would be in a private place and would be collecting /evidence/ in the form of moving pictures, which would need human review - and hence an invasion of privacy - to determine whether a crime did, or did not, occur. That's not a cool hack, that's purely snooping.

A video recording taken inside someone's private home is a world away from a single data point of a car's number plate being noted in a public location at a given date and time.

You've actually made public surveillance sound entirely reasonable. This is not the answer I was hoping for! :)

> You've actually made public surveillance sound entirely reasonable.

A video camera in a private home would have a far higher chance of catching crimes in progress than a number plate camera ever did.

So he hasn't done anything to make public surveillance sound entirely reasonable but you're just getting out of it what you want to hear.

The scale:

- kill everybody (crimerate: 0)

- lock everybody up (only crimes committed in prison: probably pretty high)

- total surveillance (crimerate: pretty much what it is today but with a higher rate of solved crimes)

- moderate surveillance (crimerate: pretty much what it is today but with a lower rate of solved crimes)

- no surveillance (crimerate: pretty much what it is today but with an even lower rate of solved crimes, good old policework required to solve a crime, or stupidity on the part o the criminal (probably the majority))

I don't see much difference between total surveillance and no surveillance at all when it comes to the actual crime rate, only to the number of crimes solved and in what way they'll be solved.

Assuming that the majority of the crimes is committed by 'first offenders' is probably a mistake on my part so once all the criminals are safely locked up we can get rid of the surveillance, right?

Surveillance never was about crime. That's just how it is slowly pushed so you can't object against it, after all, who in their right mind wants more crime?

You're assuming that a higher chance of being caught has no deterrent effect. My understanding is that this is very much not the case.

On the flip side, you're also ignoring the opportunity for abuse of surveillance, which it may make sense to consider additional crime.

I don't subscribe to the view of humanity that we'd all be raging maniacs if we knew that we wouldn't get caught.

Most people are decent and most criminals are not smart enough to evaluate their chances of getting caught rationally, if they did then the prisons wouldn't be as full as they are.

The chances of getting caught if you're committing a crime are plenty high as it is, and yet we still have repeat offenders. As rule criminals are not capable of seeing the consequences of their actions, don't know the penalties for the crimes they commit and are frequently not even in control of what they're doing.

It's a complex situation, but surveillance does not seem - to me - to be a major factor. If it were then the crimerate in London would be around 0 today.

You make two errors of the same form. It need neither be the case that a zero chance of being caught means a 100% (or even "high") chance of committing crime, nor that a 100% chance of being caught means a zero chance of committing crime, for there to be a monotonic relationship between increased chance of being caught and decreased chance of crime.

Most of the issues could be fixed by proper social education. Proper and mandatory.

Like mandatory schooling, starting at school level, going through to public/national mandatory TV time. Lets say 10 minutes a day in public/national TV in prime time. Where 5 could be spent on science and teaching and another 5 on social schooling. Quick facts and information.

And not something like in Europe right now, where everyone is possible predator. Just proper education created by top specialists, not direct blaming and scaring, but using psychological tricks to make people understand what is wrong and where to look for help. There are countries that figured this out, where violence is not tolerated, like Sweden, Norway...

"Hi, my name is Mark Zuckerberg. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, social media is good for you. For example, you can "like" Khan Academy and get a feed of interesting problems to solve."

Lots of stuff is forbidden by the Geneva convention, not because it is not useful, but because it is too useful.

Cameras are cheap, networking is cheap and processing is cheap. The government is just the first mover, but there are many other parties that have the ability to build this kind of thing even just based on current technology.

Imagine if UPS placed cameras giving a 360 degree view on all of their vehicles, ran it through license place recognition to give a database of observations each having plate number, time, and location, and then allowed lookups or algorithms to be run for a price or subscription fee.

Any company with a large network of vehicles could do this, or it could be done less effectively but more cheaply with cameras on property. It would be easy to pool the data or sell it to anyone. In some ways it is similar to doing large scale face recognition, except it is much easier with current technology.

Mass surveillance has negligible impact on crime rates.

The UK is one of the most surveilled nations on earth, yet has one of the highest crime rates in western Europe.

If you want to truly impact crime rates, then put resources into fixing social problems.

Hehe, crime, kids, etc. are just excuses to grab more power and create a totalitarian surveillance state.

Of course it's useful, and that argument is pretty compelling.

But what you need to consider is not responsible use of the collected data, but the flipside, irresponsible, illegal use of the data by individuals who have access.

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