It seems to me the question is to a large degree contingent on the development of the technology. Other posters have pointed out that ubiquitous surveillance is almost inevitable, in one form or another, if the technology to do it gets cheap enough. What no one has brought up, however, is what measures people might then take to preserve their anonymity, and whether or not there should be legal restrictions on them. Disguises? Jamming signals? Something more high-tech?
Delegate all you want, but if you do not maintain any sense of censure for those who violate the social contract then it is precisely people like you who both facilitate and necessitate the cameras we discuss here.
I prevent crime wherever I can, be it discouraging a shoplifter in a store, stopping a bully on a bus, helping catch a tagger, repeatedly serving as a witness against wrongdoing or lambasting some jerk who is being foulmouthed around women or children in public. Through admonition and bearing witness against criminal or accidental injury we all brace the protective bulwark of our constitutional rights. (How many criminals would be caught if people never called the police and relied solely upon their unsolicited investigations to ferret out crime?) The more we delegate this mutual duty we have to each other, the more we deconstruct the very engines of our survival as a race.
As is usually the case, in order to demonstrate the fallacious nature of an idea, it helps to take it to its logical conclusion. Would you support having all of your telephone conversations monitored by a supercomputer for keywords like “bomb”, “dynamite” or “contraband”? Even if you were just saying, “That band named ‘Contraband’ was da’ bomb last night. Their music was totally dynamite!”
Are we clear on this? For if you also support the monitoring of all phone conversations, it is probably safe to dismiss you from sane society. Again, if people relinquish their own duty to assist in the administration of the social contract, then they almost automatically facilitate tryanny. What I do, where I go and what I say is nobody’s d@mned business unless they are personally within earshot or watching distance of my activities. Try overtly carrying a running video camera with you wherever you go in public. Whether people do or do not have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, I think you’d find yourself getting physically assaulted more than a little often.
To live in a world where personal privacy is sacrificed on the altar of public safety is to forego the basic dignities of self-determination and free will that all people deserve and all thinking people hold dear.
PS: The NSA already uses supercomputer analysis of telecom traffic originating with known terrorists inside the United States.
I would argue that a camera in “public” does indeed infringe on our Constitutional rights. We have an expectation that our actions in public are not recorded forever. Besides, how does a camera “protect” me from being shot ? How does it “protect” me from being mugged ? What next, armed robots who are sent to the scene of a crime in progress ? I think by now we should all be aware that even a videotape cannot tell the whole story - the jurors in the Rodney King case certainly saw something different than what the public saw. Sorry but I cant resist the relevance of this:
*Up here in space
I’m looking down on you
My lasers trace
Everything you do
You think you’ve private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
I’m watching all the time
I’m made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I’m elected electric spy
I’m protected electric eye
Always in focus
You can’t feel my stare
I zoom into you
You don’t know I’m there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove
Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
There’s nothing you can do about it
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows
[nitpick] Orwell wrote 1984, not Bradbury. [/nitpick]
As far as the OP, I see very little difference between banning cameras from recording in public places and forbidding other forms of personal surveilance. If you are in public, then anyone and everyone should be able to watch, record, and eavesdrop on anything and everything you say or do. If you are at home, at work, or in any other non-public place, you should have complete and total privacy. That sounds like a very effective and sensible way to run things to me.
(I’ll leave the debate about phone taps and REAL invasion of privacy for another time)
Some of these posts are confusing (or not distinguishing between) surveillance by private citizens and/or companies and by the police. I think the two situations need to be treated differently, in line with our traditions of special restraints on the state, which holds a legal monopoly on the use of force.
So which are we talking about? I took the OP to be talking about police surveillance. Should different rules apply or not apply to private use of cameras?
Well, yeah, my OP is concerned with government surveillance.
Unrestrained government surveillance makes me uneasy. The Supreme Court has used the phrase “reasonable expectation of privacy” to delineate the bounds beyond which the government is not allowed to go. The government may not randomly monitor citizens in their homes because a citizen in his home has a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Once you step outside that front door, though, all bets are off. Your “reasonable expectation of privacy” drops from you like a cloak, and you are fair game for surveillance.
But should that be the case? Even in public places, isn’t there some expectation of…anonymity? And is that expectation of anonymity a species of privacy which should be protected by the Constitution? Or if not, should we amend the Constitution to make it so?
(As a side question, do European and American sensibilities differ on these questions? Are Europeans more tolerant of government involvement in their lives, or to turn it around, are Americans more paranoid than Europeans?)
Now if you’re talking about private surveillance, well that’s another question. A scarier one in some ways, because private surveillance doesn’t necessarily stop at your front door. It will soon be a simple matter to send a cockroach-sized robotic camera into someone’s home. Hell, that may already be possible for all I know, but if not, the technology is around the corner. Would that be legal? No, but those conducting private surveillance are not likely to be so concerned with the niceties of the law.
Well, suppose that your conversations were monitored, but, you had your own computer that would tell you exactly who was listening, their home addresses, social security numbers, and telephone numbers. Further, you are free to monitor (or have your computer monitor) those persons’ conversations.
Further, a complete record is maintained of all the conversations, which record is accessible to all, so there can be no dispute about taking things out of context.
Yes, it sounds so bad as to make me fear your degree of ignorance.
And how, exactly, do you assure that all of a given person’s telecom traffic is made available to this public record. What if a citizen chooses to build a private transmission device that is not traceable for certain conversations? This is much the same as with the camera scenario. People of means will simply drive most places to minimize their public exposure and the poor schmoes on foot will be regulated all the more.
Do you not see the implications? There is absolutely no way to assure that a person’s communications are all published in their entirety. Such tommyrot as this only allows for the comfortable thought that everyone is equally exposed when no such thing is possible.
Again, let’s cut to the chase. What about implanting all people with a location transponder so that their every move can be monitored? Would you like that? Shall we put them on all vehicles as well? Does that sound even more appealing? If you would like that, then again, I think it is safe to dismiss you from sane society. There is no such thing as equal exposure to such “safeguards”.
People of means will always have some ways to circumvent such measures and those who are not able to afford them will constitute a less privileged underclass. The very nature of anonymity is what assures at least some degree of equality in this society.
I will again state my fundamental belief that those who are willing to abdicate their own duties when it comes to enforcing the social contract are precisely those who facilitate tyranny. The suggested monitoring that is being bandied about here so blithely is also one of the most powerful tools of tyranny imaginable. Those of you who extoll its virtues are either madmen or so unaware of the implications that your naivety is nothing short of astounding.