Hello all,
Just had an interesting visit from one of our local beat policeman. The Police and the Borough Council are offering small bottles of Smart Water for free: SmartWater - Wikipedia
Essentially a liquid containing minute crystals photo etched,?, with a serial code which you apply to your valuables. When lit with UV the residue fluoresces and a samle can be taken and the owner traced.
I think the idea is ingenious and could prove extremely useful.
Trying and failing to find any downsides so I’d welcome your thoughts.
Very good!,
It sets rather like thin transparent nail polish and appears to be heartily disliked by Fences, those who buy and sell stolen goods.
Also sprayed on Bank robbers.
It’s free for me, the Police have no record of what my valuables are, only that if I report them stolen or they have doubts about goods in a Pawn Sop what have you they’re able to identify the serial number/registered owner.
Also potentially lower insurance premiums and a disincentive to a casual burglar with a sticker prominent on the front door
Win/win situation.
Eh? This is stuff that you voluntarily put on your own stuff so it can be returned to you if it gets stolen. Anyway, Britain has never really valued privacy or personal space. It’s a small, densely populated island. Most people live in terraced houses or flats. Britons have historically been pretty big on civil liberties, but not in a Daniel Boone-y or Jeffersonian way.
Cell phones, TV’s, computers, cars, etc. all have engraved serial numbers already, yet they are still stolen and fenced readily. And it’s a lot easier to read a serial number than use some special equipment to see the smart water, then take a sample and send to a lab, and wait for a result.
Seems to me that you could make more difference by removing the current law that fives pawn shops exemption from ‘receiving stolen goods’ charges.
Actually this is a point I raised with the Policeman, his reply was that the system for tracing the IMEI of a new phone with one owner who paid with a card generally works, if its paid in cash or bought second hand then the system breaks down somewhat.
The presence of the marking is evident using a portable UV torch, a tiny sample is needed and the turnaround is rapid through the lab, we are a small island after all!
I always pay for expensive kit with a credit card and e-mail myself the serial numbers for accessibility and my own propensity to lose paperwork.
The copper advised me to use the liquid on nooks and crannies as it might be possible to remove from a flat surface, isopropyl alcohol,?
But the concept is nightmare fuel. As are the hundreds of thousands of public surveillance cameras, postulated in V for Vendetta and subsequently blindsided by reality. This in a nation that had unarmed police and no requirement for carrying personal ID until quite recently.
Right - more Japanese-style, where your arse might be on my shoulder but what I’m doing is very pointedly none of your business, and you know it.
The idea of invisible tracking that can be casually brushed on any person, object or thing makes my hair stand on end… quite a sight, since it’s usually around my shoulder blades. The… complacency of Brits as these security measures get tighter and tighter, long after The Troubles and other valid reasons to stop being so damned English about it all, just staggers me.
OK,
firstly V for Vendetta was a novel, surveillance cameras existed long before it’s publication so the Comic hardly presaged them merely described them.
‘Some’ Police officers have always carried guns however I’d challenge you to compare deaths caused by the Police in the whole of the UK with deaths by the same cause in New York alone for an equivalent period.
You use the terms ‘Brits’ and ‘the English’ somewhat arbitrarily so can I assume you don’t actually live here?
I can’t see this as a violation of any liberties, indeed I’d go further and say it frees up money and Police time for other tasks.
I’m not quite getting it; this is to me, more like engraving your name onto something, albeit in a way that’s invisible to anyone who might steal it.
So rather than putting your name on something, you paint a little of this in some inconspicuous spot, and then when it’s recovered, you could prove it’s yours.
Seems like it would be damn near ideal for firearms.
We still have no requirement for carrying personal ID.
And this smart water stuff doesn’t seem any different to the UV marking pens and suchlike that are already freely available. I don’t get the ‘invasion of liberties’ angle, unless you’re suggesting that the Police are spraying it on people and… erm… doing something with that.
Of course cameras have been around a long, long time, particularly in banks and other high-security/high risk locations. However, at what point did it become assumed that every urban streetcorner would be under police camera surveillance? How many cameras are in the greater London area alone, and when were the majority of them installed? I know the number is in the hundred-thousands, and I am pretty sure that the majority are less than ten years old. I am also pretty sure the curve goes something close to vertical in that time frame.
I am not arguing/not prepared to argue the latter, and it wasn’t my point. My point is that the UK as a whole has gone so overarching, invasive security crazy I would find it startling even in a more ‘totalitarian’ nation like Japan or even France. My perspective is that UK citizens, especially the English, prized their individual privacy far higher than even most Americans, and seem to have willingly, cheerfully tossed it on the scrap heap of “security.”
Sheer sloppiness of writing on my part, which none of my Commonwealth, UK, GB, English or Irish friends would be very tolerant of.
I may have misunderstood recent debates. In theory, US citizens are not required to have ID on their person in most situations; in practice, it can be a hassle to be stopped by a cop in your own neighborhood if your wallet is in your other hat.
Writing something with a UV pen takes time, effort and has indifferent results - it might be visible (as shiny markings), it might rub off, the actual markings might not stand up to investigation/evidence rules, whatever. We can go back to the colonial era with such things and the same problems - any colonial era, pick one.
But when crafty evil me can walk by and - pffft - spray you with an invisible marker that can’t be brushed or rubbed off, might even linger after washing or laundering, and contains a detailed and unchangeable ID or marker code that can be matched to any record I care to use with it… if no conceivable use of that bothers you, it must be because Americans are paranoid.
I think you make a reasonable point, in reply to Amateur Barbarian, about CCTV in the UK, however I’m afraid I still can’t see the link between that valid argument and the use of Smart Water.
Living in London I’m more interested/concerned about the data mining of my travel habits using my Oyster Card, pre-paid Tube,Train and Bus card. Or whether I can really trust my ISP or Google with my browsing history. You get my drift, there are far more important battles to fight.
I’m if anything more anti-spying and anti-warrentless searches than you and I also think cops in general are out of control, abusive, manipulative and harmful. But I’m not seeing the issue with smart water. You choose to put it on your own stuff. It can’t be tracked or identified remotely like a cell phone, or anything online for that matter. It’s not much different than squirting drops of your own blood on stuff to later analyze the DNA and claim it as your own. It’s just easier and less bloody.
I do worry about squirting it on other people’s things to frame them for theft, and I’d like to see some mitigating framework in place for that possibility. But otherwise, it’s voluntary, offline and helpful, with (as far as I can see) little potential for government abuse. Which is far better than you can say for ubiquitous security cameras. Or for that matter, email.
It seems pretty clear to me that Amateur Barbarian’s objection to Smartwater is not in the usage presupposed by the OP: marking your own possessions for post-theft identification. It’s in all the nefarious ways the technology can be abused by the government and other powers to the detriment of the individual citizens.
Those are two very different issues and are legitimately able to support two very different points of view.
IMO …
The Smartwater technology is inherently dangerous to civil liberties. As is widespread automated facial recognition, widespread online activity tracking, and most manifestations of Big Data. We as free people in a free society ought to be paying a lot more attention to how these innovations can be, are being, and ever-increasingly will be used against us.
Preventing this stuff from getting out of hand will be far easier than stuffing the genie back in the bottle.
Maybe it’s my cynical nature. But what prevents you from bringing some smart water into a pawn shop and covertly spraying some valuable items there? And then returning with a police officer to “reclaim” your stolen property?
Give me more detail about the next step, here, because I’m not seeing it. I spray some unsuspecting passerby with smart water, and then… What? I drag them into the police station and say “Officer, this person belongs to me”? I lure them underneath a microscope, so I can see what name I put in the water I sprayed on them? It’s not enough to just say “Well, there are probably some nefarious uses”. You can say that about absolutely anything. Tell us what those uses are.
