Right now cops can (and do!) legally drop by your house and have a quick look-around. They just need to get a search warrant first.
Or might not even do that if the tool is only used re-actively (eg. after a crime is committed).
And, there, too, you have a possibility of a corrupt government intruding on our rights. The cops might have one “pet” judge who always approves search warrants on whatever flimsy grounds. (Like the FISA court always approving wiretaps.)
If the government is corrupt enough, they’ll do it without a warrant at all. If a bad cop walked in on me right now and waved a copy of his dental insurance policy in front of my face, and claimed it was a warrant…how would I know?
All of this debate really only works in the context of a government that’s only partially corrupt. If it’s wholly corrupt…they’ll do whatever they want, no matter what the law is. There’d be no such thing as free elections, because the people who count the votes are part of the corruption.
At this point, the system isn’t wholly corrupt. Most police really do obey the law, and most judges really are honest.
Still, it is not wrong to look at “worse case” scenarios, if not the absolute “worst case” situations.
My contention is that, yes, worst case situations should be discussed. However it needs to be weighed against its utility. Our society has decided that even though warrants can be easily abused (and sometimes are) they are an important part of crime prevention. I believe Skyeye to be similar.
This sort of surveillance is inevitable, I think, and the record-keeping that allows someone to search backwards to trace wrong-doers is also inevitable, in the fairly near future. But one thing that gives me hope is that the police won’t own most of these spyeyes; most of them will be owned by private individuals and companies. If the police or government want to have access to these records they’ll need to subpoena them.
Having private individuals with the capacity to record events is a move towards sousveillance, the monitoring of events by private individuals to prevent abuses of power. The police might not like it if they are recorded performing illegal or repressive acts, but if these recordings can be placed on social media within minutes of occurring, they will think twice before acting.
Which tells us that you have no respect for our constitutional rights.
Well, I’m not an American nor do I live in the US. But, I don’t see how recording activity done outside normally protected areas violates your constitution. If it is illegal to do this, then it is moot isn’t it? I think the benefits outweigh the supposed violation, though. Frankly, from what I’ve seen of random polices stops, no knock entries, etc., in your country, I don’t think many Americans are too keen on that piece of paper, either.
I wonder what impact that will have on divorce rates…
-VM
This is a pretty dismissive response to a very well-thought-out post in answer to your questions about why people are objecting to the idea.
If you’re going to just casually dismiss the other side’s argument as irrelevant, why should anyone pay any attention to your arguments?
-VM
Irreparable business damage to wafer makers, providers of Virgin Mary tchotchkes, kosher/halal butchers or mohels. Why do you hate capitalism ? 
[QUOTE=Uzi]
Well, I’m not an American nor do I live in the US. But, I don’t see how recording activity done outside normally protected areas violates your constitution.
[/QUOTE]
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.
Fourth 'mendment, dawg.
But if that doesn’t do it for you, there’s article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights : “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
Emphasis mine (but available to **you **for only $9.99 ! Ask your doctor if emphasis is right for you.)
[URL=“Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia”]](Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia)
Is a prescription required? Because I really want some emphasis right now, and $9.99 is a steal.
-VM
I was trying to figure out if you have any respect for generally accepted civil rights. I think I have my answer.
I think I saw something on TV about the tech the OP is talking about. Basically it’s something like 10,000 regular cell-phone camera’s daisy-chained together that can take a giant super high res image of a 25 square mile area from a Predator drone.
Anyhow, I’m sort of inclined to think “what’s one more camera or sensor passively tracking my movement”? From the time I wake up, I’m already being tracked by whatever information Google, Yahoo, Optimum/Cablevision, and Verizon pull from my various electronic devices, the security cameras in my condo building, my MTA Metrocard or NY Waterway app (depending if I take the PATH or ferry to work), the cameras in the PATH station, any street cameras or other security sensors around the World Trade Center (which I’m sure there are a shitload), my office’s security camera, my work ID badge, whatever information is stored by my company’s email and file servers, my credit card whenever I purchase anything, Uber, Zip Car, Metro North, Seamless.com/GrubHub.com, Facebook, OpenTable, PayPal, my health provider’s database, so on and so forth.
It’s not difficult to imagine some point in the future where all these systems are linked together into some massive cloud, tied in with voice and facial recognition software and highly advanced predictive analytics programs. Where you then have this sort of “Person of Interest” / “Minority Report” scenario where powerful computers constantly monitor and analyze your various habits and behaviors and run various predictive models and scenarios to anticipate criminal activity.
Like all technology, it’s a double-edged sword. It can be extremely useful in allocating limited law enforcement resources to where they will be needed most to prevent crime or head off a terrorist attack. Or it can be very Orwellian, enabling authorities to identify potential malcontents so they can be rounded up and neutralized.
Like anything, it will all depend on making sure proper checks and balances and oversight are in place.
No, no, and NO. When do we stop the progression toward a police state? I’m not interested in surveillance by a government that cares more about perpetuating itself than ensuring the liberty of its citizens. If I had wanted to live in the USSR, I’d have moved there.
No snark against you personally, but…I don’t trust said government to institute or follow checks, balances, and oversight.
”He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.”
–Benjamin Franklin
I think your analogy goes too far. I said that if regular people can do it, referring to taking pictures of public areas, it wouldn’t make sense for law enforcement to be denied that right.
In your analogy, regular people can’t force anyone else to wear a device. That’s the action we’re talking about, not simply listening in to public conversations.
I think as technology gets better, we must accept and get used to some degree of privacy loss in order to benefit from all that technology is capable of. Taking pictures of the public is something I cannot bar anyone from doing, not regular citizens nor law enforcement. There are degrees of intrusion, sure, like cases where law enforcement was sued for putting off-the-shelf GPS devices on someone’s car. I think, but I’m not sure, that the SCOTUS ruled that while the guy was traveling in public on public streets, the cumulative information gathered from having that GPS device was an intrusion.
I would be against having cops tail someone while filming them. That seems to be harassment and an intrusion. Regular people doing that to others can possibly face harassment charges. But if it was of a wide area and taken from the sky where nobody knows they are being photographed? I can’t see how that’s an intrusion. Demonize Orwell all you want, but not every surveillance needs to be fought tooth and nail and sometimes the benefits we reap from technology is much more than we lose in privacy
That is completely true, but is not a valid argument to use to try to persuade us to pay even less attention to it.
Germany under the Nazis were a damn sight worse than Spain under Franco…but that isn’t a persuasive argument to anyone that Spain under Franco was admirable enough to be emulated. Cancer is worse than a smashed large toe…but I don’t see people lining up to have their toe smashed.
Actually, “No Knock” entries are fine…with a warrant. They’re used when there is an expectation of armed resistance. If I’m serving a warrant on a bunch of KKK members…or Cliven Bundy…or the Baltimore Gun Club… I would ask for a “no knock” clause in the warrant.
I’m less happy with random sobriety checkpoints on public streets. Ideally, I would wish that the police would wait for observable grounds for a stop – weaving driving, unsteady acceleration and braking, and so on. The courts have ruled that these stops are not violations of the 4th Amendment, and my opinion has no standing against those rulings. So my country is less free than I would like.
Damn poor argument for making it even less yet.
I think it’s going to be difficult to do any meaningful cost-benefit analysis of these technologies if one side won’t even acknowledge that there are any drawbacks.
(And again: Why would random warrantless searches of houses infringe upon anyone’s “abstract concept of ‘dignity’”–beyond just that we’ve all been saying it would for at least several centuries?)
I think what those of us on the anti-panopticon side are trying to express, is that there is a difference between some guy snapping a photo of a street scene that happens to include me, and a comprehensive system that produces a permanent record of every place I’ve ever been and every observable action I’ve ever taken (except for stuff that I do in my own house, but with that exception probably not including anything I do on the Internet). The cops have had the power to take pictures of people for well over a century, but we’re no longer just talking about a police officer standing there with a camera (across the street from the park where the hippies congregate or the no-tell motel or whatever). Again, sheer practicality would tend to at least somewhat rein in the ability of the authorities to implement universal surveillance so long as we’re talking about needing to send some guy in a trenchcoat and a fedora to stand across the street with a camera. But now we’re talking about systems that might in principle track and monitor everyone, everywhere, and all the time.
(It is also true that the ubiquity of cameras in private hands–almost everyone walks around with a camera/video camera in their pocket these days–shifts the contours of anonymity somewhat. But most people don’t actually record everything on their smartphones–at least not yet–and those pictures and videos that are taken are still scattered about in the hands of the owners of said smartphones, not aggregated in a single searchable database someplace–again at least not yet. Or as far as we know.)
I should also say that my faith in warrants and judges is very, very far from perfect. But, multiple centuries of the notion that “a man’s home is his castle” being deeply ingrained in our culture and legal system; combined with the fact that even with a compliant judge willing to sign off on any old warrant that he or she gets, in order to search your house cops still have to go around and physically bash your door in (which is a labor-intensive process); combine to make the Fourth Amendment as applied to private homes…at least not completely meaningless.
With public mass surveillance, on the other hand: The psychological and cultural barrier to abuse seems much lower, with a large segment of the population basically refusing to admit there could even be anything wrong with the notion of tracking and monitoring everyone, everywhere, and all the time (except inside their own homes, as long as they’re not doing anything on the Internet). And the practical barriers seem lower too: Granted, as long as the information is just in a database, any harm is still latent, and having people actually watch all the recordings is still labor-intensive. But, some guy sitting in a cubicle pushing buttons or entering commands or selecting “[highlight subject]” and “Provide map of highlighted subject’s position for [last one hour][last 24 hours][last year][last two years] at [one minute][one hour][one day] intervals” from a menu is a hell of a lot less labor-intensive than sending teams of people to tail you or kick your door in or steam open all your snail-mail. That in turn increases the possibility that such a system will be misused or abused. As well as just being kind of creepy in principle.
Gee, thanks!
I doubt many were paying attention to my full posts. I still have people asking me about why can’t the government just enter your house without a warrant when I have clearly stated that the system would require warrants to access. Nothing vague about that. Vague is saying your dignity would be violated by general surveillance with no explanation on how it would be or why. Why would walking down the street and having that street under surveillance cause anyone any loss of dignity?
It isn’t unreasonable as you are not being interfered with. The whole area is under surveillance, not you specifically. The system would be used to justify a warrant being issued which answers the last part of the question. You’d have a video of the place to be searched.
Nothing arbitrary about this.
There is a chance that it could be abused. I’ve acknowledged that and put forward a scenario on how potential abuses could be avoided.
I agree, but we’re not talking about your home. And I have to raise an important point here. Data mining the system can show you which judges issued warrants and all the pertinent information related to it. Another check on those judges who might be a little lenient in trusting the police.
We know the cameras are there and don’t pick our noses without using a kleenex. “Oh, no! My liberties have been violated!”
Creepy, dignity, privacy. Very qualitative terms. What’s the value of your comfort?
What I posted previously, "In the US, roughly 84,000 people missing at of the later part of 2014. Over 200,000 homicides remain unsolved and clearance rates are currently at 64% ". Very quantitative. What’s the value of potentially finding these missing people or moving that clearance rate into the high 90’s?
How do you expect a cost - benefits analysis to be done when you can’t quantify your position?
You don’t even seem to accept the concept of dignity, and you want us to quantify it?
Fine. One person’s dignity is worth a billion dollars. It’s up to you to decide how many dollars a street crime is worth.
I see. And you’re punishing MEBuckner for that? I hope he learns his lesson and starts doing a better job of policing the other posters.
This is the part of your debating style that is annoying people right out of the discussion. For the record, it is possible argue against another person’s position without deliberately misrepresenting it. It’s just more difficult.
To start you off, I would ask that you consider that people do many things out in public, most of which are more personal than just “walking down the street.” For example, they flirt, go on dates (same-sex / different-sex), get in arguments, entertain their children, discipline their children, pray to their gods, perform their jobs, eat their meals, hang out with their friends, paint graffiti, dig around in garbage cans, beg for money, do goofy exercises, play games/sports, trip over their own feet, meet the person who’s trying to lure them away from their current employer, meet the person who’s trying to lure them away from their current spouse, and sometimes wander aimlessly.
None of these activities are illegal, but that doesn’t mean that people want them recorded and archived. Privacy is not about keeping people from seeing how you walk; it’s about keeping people from knowing your business. The fact that no one has perfect privacy does not mean that is of no value. Dignity is not about whether someone knows what route you take to the store. It’s about not being embarrassed or humiliated for no good reason. If your spouse is cheating on you, you probably don’t want strangers to have access to video evidence of it (or to your reaction when you find out).
My most charitable interpretation is that maybe you just haven’t thought about the sheer breadth of human activity that can fall under the watchful eye of Sauron. However, the fact that you keep reducing it down to “having someone record you walking down the street” suggests to me that you’re deliberately trying to make the other side look childish by mischaracterizing what we’re saying.
My comfort is of a great deal more value to me than your comfort is to me. And vice versa, I’m sure. To pretend that it might have some objective “value” that can be assigned a cost is to miss a great deal of the point. And to pretend that privacy and dignity can be equated to “comfort” is to miss pretty much the rest of it. There are a great many people–other than you, obviously–who would say that being stripped of privacy and dignity would leave them with little to nothing else of value.
-VM