[gaius]

I'll tell you a true story a few years ago while I was supervising a training session for divers at the swimming pool, someone broke into a some of our lockers. He got away with phones, tablets, credit cards, cash. Stupid crime because we can remote-brick devices now, cancel credit cards, and the money he stole from my wallet was actually Mexican. Anyway, he was captured on CCTV inside the building and outside, but all you can tell from the footage, that the police showed me, was that he was a black guy about 6 feet tall, and that's it. So when people worry about the surveillance state I just smirk. None of it actually works in any useful way, it's all security theatre.

Oh, wait, it is useful for extorting motorists who stray into an unmarked "bus lane", but that's about it.

[crdoconnor]

>So when people worry about the surveillance state I just smirk. None of it actually works in any useful way, it's all security theatre.

This was what I always suspected pre-Snowden: that the government simply wasn't capable of creating a system to effectively monitor all internet traffic because they didn't have the technical chops. Which, in, say, 2001, might have been true.

Turned out all they needed was time and money and they had both and then once it was revealed that they could do it and actually do it rather well it came as a shock (to me, at least).

Two years ago was a long time in camera and facial recognition technology.

[DanBC]

> When it does happen, you'll barely notice it either. You'll wake up one day, read the news and discover that somebody was caught using facial recognition technology that the police has been using for a year and it only came out because some court docket had to be made public.

The police is pretty open about the legal powers they have and the technology they use.

And people have already been caught by facial recognition - the submitted article talks about it.

[crdoconnor]

Yeah, I just realized it was about more than human recognizers. The future arrived a little early. Hence the edit.

[hahainternet]

Allow me to also tell you a true story.

A woman was found stabbed to death outside her house, everyone who would have any reason to mean her harm had a reliable alibi.

Until the CCTV footage was analysed properly, and a suspicious car was found to have unique identifying marks. Further research of phone records revealed that in fact her husband was the primary architect of her murder and had orchestrated it with others.

CCTV was pivotal in detection and conviction. Nobody gives a shit about your phone or your tablet. People's lives matter, and one murderer caught is worth a thousand fines which would be overturned on appeal.

[ffadfaafdf]

^ The mentality that brought us the security theater at the TSA, the incredibly invasive surveillance of the internet by simply collecting everything on it, and continued reduction of personal rights in favor of "security". Enjoy your fallacious arguments folks: hasty generalization, cherry picking, anecdotes, appeals to emotion and fear; some of them shown in the parent comment, ... until you wake up.

[scrollaway]

I take it you've never heard the quote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"?

Or have you heard it and are merely blind to how you are giving up essential liberty to purchase little temporary safety? "One good thing is worth a thousand bad things". How about that. I've never heard someone so elegantly crap all over their own argument.

[noonespecial]

>People's lives matter, and one murderer caught is worth a thousand fines which would be overturned on appeal.

You do know that these "appeals" aren't free, right? Or guaranteed. If you happen to be of a paler complexion and of modest means, they can be had for the low, low cost of merely your job and everything you have. If you happen to be a poor minority, however...

[ctz]

An appeal is free, merely filling in a form and waiting for the PCN adjudicator to make a judgement.

[coldtea]

Nobody in power gives a shit about that woman. Having the society at large contained and docile is what matters.

[JupiterMoon]

How long ago was this? The quality of the images from CCTV has increased a lot in recent years. See for example the number of people convicted after the London riots. And combined with gait analysis (did you know that most people's walk is fairly unique) and tracking of their cellphones its even more effective.

[Cthulhu_]

That's what I've always wondered really, why are CCTV's often so bad? The old systems (from what I've seen on TV anyway) seemed to put the image of four cameras onto one video tape, reducing quality even more.

Of course, a million cameras running 24/7 produce an enormous amount of data, that just increases exponentially as quality improves. They can probably easily discard 90% of the footage with basic checks (is there anything besides the background visible), and use a smart compression algorithm, but still.

[JupiterMoon]

Even for home systems it is possible to set up a system that only records when there is movement present.

[gaius]

3-4 years maybe

[JupiterMoon]

How old were the cameras?

[gaius]

No idea. The ones outside tho' I'd guess were normal, unless they upgrade every one of those million cameras every few years.

[DanBC]

> None of it actually works in any useful way,

I'm generally okay with surveillance, but people should know the capabilities of what's already in place, and your comment seems to trivialise the powers they have.

If it had been a more serious crime (murder, rape) they would have looked for all the other security cameras in the area, and then worked out the route the criminal took to get to the crime scene and to get away from the crime scene.

The images they showed you were not good - but with a million cameras there's going to be variability in image quality and length of data storage.

[coldtea]

>None of it actually works in any useful way, it's all security theatre.

It's more about the population feeling surveilled, as a means to not question power etc, than about helping solve crimes.