[jimmies]

I think one of the few really, really good things we have left in the US is that I _feel_ that I am trusted to do the right thing.

I was in Singapore, a rich, orderly state for an internship a couple of years ago. There were cameras everywhere: Cameras on the sidewalks, cameras on the staircases, cameras in residential apartments, cameras in the subway, cameras at the workplace. There were very few places I feel not watched. I have to hunt for them. This is very contrasted with the US, where mostly I feel that I have my privacy and trusted to do the right thing. That's a very powerful feeling.

But that is going away with smartphone cameras and surveillance cameras. They are getting cheaper, and no one is here to be fighting against them. Maybe that's a one-way road, there is not much we can do about it. Maybe that's for the better, but somehow I feel life is much more boring that way.

[crdb]

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable.

It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there's the thought of a traffic stop by a bored cop "degenerating"... it's tough to travel to countries like these when you're used to a polite government whose agents treat you, the foreigner, with consideration and like a customer.

For example, when I went to my PR interview, my medical checks had expired (and it was transparent I had hoped to get away with it); the lady very helpfully opened up a slot for me a few hours later and recommended me a range of clinics nearby to do the missing medical checks. A breath of fresh air after dealing with the French and other "first world" governments...

No CCTV in my street except for the hedge that borders the Istana 100m away. We do get the odd police car patrolling the perimeter, but since the President lives there and the Prime Minister works there, I can understand. As for the US, I've never been in a building with more than a couple storeys that did not have CCTV, so I'm curious about your frame of reference there (most of Singapore consists of 20+ storey buildings). I've never been in a US mall or office building without CCTV. The only reason my residential building in NYC did not have CCTV was because it was pre-war; it also didn't have working heating, and I'd rather have had both.

I do agree that Singapore is probably not the place to move if you enjoy a suburban lifestyle in a big house with a garden.

edit - here's something you can't do in the US: my friend and I bought a couple craft beers from a Japanese supermarket, then sat down on public benches in front of the Asian Civilisations Museum (opposite CBD and the Fullerton Hotel), cracked them open and sipped them slowly in front of the view.

[jimmies]

All you said is true.

Forget to mention, aside from that, I love Singapore in general and I have no illusion that the US is getting more hostile by the day. I have been in the US as a foreigner for 10 years. Last time I came back, I was hassled and treated like a piece of shit by a customs official, too (and I love how they ask for social accounts now, I hope they don't ask for HN?). Recently I was extremely upset having so much difficulties getting my driver's license renewed. I think the new Trump thing made it so much worse too, but I'd rather not dig into the Trump thing. In Singapore? Government officials did treat me like a human, I absolutely loved that.

However, once you're in in the US, you have NYC, Chicago, SF and you also have Smallville or Lancesterville in the middle of nowhere. In those supposedly backward, homophobic X-villes, you can see part of why some people love the US so much. It's still the life we love in the 80s-90s movies like Back in the future or Groundhog day. They have no cameras, people greet you on the street, and you can go for miles and miles by car, bike, or on foot and you wouldn't see any other person.

Yeah, I get it, it's not legal drinking a beer in the public. I used to live in a rented house downtown with other graduate students in a relatively big town that houses the state's biggest college. During the summertime weekends, we often just drank and smoked and played the guitar (and flute, and banged on broken guitar) all night long on the front porch and watched the cops patrolled by. The other day in X-ville, we smoked our asses out one night. The next morning, I jumped on my friend's 70s truck and saw a 6-pack of beers, some new, some empty. I asked whether we should move it back, and I quote his answer, "Have some man, it's X-ville, no one actually gives a fuck." We blasted an FM channel full of country songs, cranked the window down, and I rode shotgun in a glorious sunrise.

[ringaroundthetx]

Those villes are carcasses of society, they are small because nobody wants to live there

I’m glad you enjoy the choice

[amigoingtodie]

You don't sound glad about anything.

[gvurrdon]

Agreed about the customs officials - travel to the US is no longer pleasant.

Concerning government officials, for a few years I lived in the same town as the prime minister of the UK. I used to see them walking about town or in shops, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, but never with any security escort. The CCTV cameras there are mostly private ones in shops, as far as I can tell.

[crdb]

Funny you should say that. I grew up in the UK (Central London, Cambridge) and found most interactions with the government difficult in their bureaucracy and sometimes sheer unpleasantness (airports being at the top of the list, until the merciful arrival of auto-gates).

But it is true that smaller towns are almost a different country. British big government has always been oppressive in nature, and rather unconcerned with the collateral damage to the average citizen - see the current NHS restructuring, or how the trains were privatised into the laughing stock of Europe, or remember how you felt when you received your first TV tax letter making you feel like a suspect about to have a SWAT team enter your bedroom... there is this assumption that the citizen is naughty, a feeling of nanny state in a 1984 way. I don't know if that's a recent phenomenon, but it is part of the reason I left for good. Love the Brits though.

The Hitchhiker's Guide is quite an accurate representation, I think, of how I felt about government there at the time. A recent letter from my empty, but extant Lloyd's account intimating me to surrender a ton of private information to HMRC just reinforced the feeling - meanwhile, the Singapore government auto-calculates my (low) taxes and thanks me for "contributing to nation building" with a heart warming picture of a child at school.

My point, which I admittedly did not make very clear, is that it is not about the CCTV but the government behind them. What is the relationship between the government and the people? Is it one of trust? Are words like "necessary evil" used? How do people feel when they see a cop, or a border agent?

The US was built on the idea that politicians are inherently untrustworthy, and the government should be weak and decentralised, with states having the freedom to do what they like (with some exceptions, c.f. the Civil War, eventually leading to the current strong Federal government situation) and competing with each other for residents and businesses. This sort of acts as a balancing mechanism avoiding the most egregious abuses of individual rights in the very long term, whilst leaving room for experimentation on what those rights actually mean in practice.

Singapore is the polar opposite - Lee Kuan Yew structured an immensely powerful and centralised government to solve a number of problems ranging from being invaded by neighbours and Mao's attempts at subversion, to opium gangs and a country so poor hawkers slept on the street behind their cart. However unlike most other new nations at the time, he specifically built a ton of safeguards and structurally made the government as impervious to corruption and meritocratically oriented to customer service as possible. The PAP walked in the streets dressed all in white to symbolise that philosophy when they were first elected. Whether it will last is an interesting question, but today, the government is trusted, so people don't mind seeing CCTV or a police patrol...

[darrenf]

AFAIK the vast, vast majority of CCTV in the UK is privately owned and has nothing to do with police or government.

[Reason077]

While it's no doubt true that the "vast majority" of CCTV in the UK is privately owned (pretty much every business premises will operate their own private CCTV), there are large numbers of police, local-government, and transport-agency operated CCTV cameras monitoring public spaces in the UK.

If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus, every train, etc has CCTV.

In 2002 there were estimated to be 500,000 public and private CCTV cameras in Greater London, and 4.2 million in the UK. That number is almost certainly much higher today.

[lmm]

> If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus, every train, etc has CCTV.

My experience as a londoner is that privately or quasiprivately operated spaces (including trains and buses) and roads do but public spaces like squares or parks don't. When I was mugged in a plaza there was no public CCTV coverage but the police requested CCTV footage from a private gym bordering the plaza. I think that's pretty normal for london.

[darrenf]

It was estimated that high, but using a flawed extrapolation from observations on just two streets in Putney:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080704145855/http://www.channel...

I'd be interested to know the source of your (almost) certainty.

[Diederich]

> there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely

Wow, so I've been hearing chatter about that for a while now, but I had no idea of how common it was.

I would like to ask you for some clarifications if you don't mind.

Do you think that such social media snooping as you described is fairly common? Do you think you might be in some classification of people that make it more likely? What do you think would happen if you refused? What do you think would happen if you legitimately deleted all of your social media accounts, thus making it impossible to comply?

Thank you kindly.

[refurb]

There are states where you can drink in public places. CT comes to mind. Not all public places, but most.

[crdb]

Yeah, the hard thing about commenting on the US is that it's really 50 separate countries which do a lot of regulation locally. Cannabis being the obvious example today - in some of the country, you can smoke it in front of the police station, in other parts, you can get jail terms of years...

[cr0sh]

Something to note about cameras in the US:

The vast majority of them are private, not government. Those that are private, many are misconfigured, aren't recording, are broken (either the camera or the backend), or are just plain fake cameras.

The government ones are usually not much better: I've had incidents where I've asked about CCTV footage at a post office, and I was told the camera wasn't hooked up (granted, maybe that's a standard line unless you are a cop with a warrant or something).

In a similar fashion, I've had something like that told to me by security at an office parking lot (I think my car was run into or something). Of course, maybe that was just a CYA response standard to keep the management company from being liable in some manner...

I have cameras at my house. They monitor my yard and doors, and store events on my ZoneMinder server (which also emails me the events). I try to keep it in working order.

Finally, those that are government and monitored, etc - just like everywhere else - none of that footage is looked at until long after the fact of something happening. The real fear is with various facial recognition, gate recognition, and "threat recognition" software being used - identifying people as false-positives for innocent things (while missing the identification of actual threats).

[nova22033]

> ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal,

Immigration agents aren't the most polite people in the world but how does the immigration agent know you are not a criminal? It's his job to figure that out without holding up the line.

>the thought of a traffic stop by a bored cop "degenerating"

Did that happen to you or is that something you'd imagine happening to you? Most encounters with the police for traffic violations are professional and dare I say courteous.

[ksk]

>Immigration agents aren't the most polite people in the world but how does the immigration agent know you are not a criminal?

I assume he already has a visa to enter the country. It would be easier to conduct the criminal check before granting the visa, and it can be done offline. They can take as long as they like. Or maybe the person came from a country with a visa-waiver program with the US. In which case, I'd agree that the questions could be warranted.

[kbos87]

I guess it’s all relative. I too feel like the US is a surveillance state on some level, but nothing compares to the UK - arriving at Heathrow feels downright dystopian. I guess it’s just what you are used to.

[hux_]

American beliefs about their freedom are just that - BELIEFS.

The underlying implication ALWAYS is the Chinese and Singaporeans or whoever can't think for themselves about what is good for their societies and therefore need American moral guidance and leadership.

This is the same tactic the British/French/Spanish etc used to justify colonization. They needed a reason cause by the 18th century, most of the local population had begun to wonder why their kids needed to get shipped off to get killed all over the planet.

Read the views of an Indian or and African or a Brazilian visiting Singapore from more unstable homelands and see what their views are on surveillance is.

Or better still pick up last month's natgeo on global happiness and ask yourself why Singapore tops the happiness index in Asia despite the surveillance. There is no one size fits all cultures solution to social problems.

[nate_meurer]

Oh really, just beliefs?

Is it merely my "belief" that I can publicly criticize our government in whatever way I want (short of threats) without fear of government reprisal?

Is it merely my belief that no transaction with any bureaucracy, government or otherwise, has ever required me to pay a bribe, and that being asked for one would be offensive and probably just inconceivable to any American?

Your defense of authoritarian regimes is a simple-minded rehash of "at least the trains ran on time". There's nothing clever or new about it; for all of history depots have used safety and convenience to justify stripping people of basic human rights.

[taobility]

You would also worry about be shoot when you walk on the street at night. You would also worry be bombed when you attend some concert, taking subway. Yes, you have your choice, and the other people also have their choice.

[nate_meurer]

There are some places in the U.S. where the violent crime rate is high by international standards. I've been to some of them, and while I'm happy (and fortunate) not to live there, I've never been afraid of being shot. Not even at night.

Your mention of the concert thing made me laugh. No, I'm not worried about being bombed at a concert. I'm far more likely to be struck by lightning.

I understand the necessity of safety. But safety is not incompatible with freedom from state oppression, and it's beyond tragic that so many people let their governments convince them that it is.

[nyolfen]

>This is the same tactic the British/French/Spanish etc used to justify colonization.

this is a little tired. you can say this to literally any criticism of a developing nation.

[zipwitch]

I also live in the US. I think your feeling is just that.

Two of my neighbors have internet-connected surveillance cameras around their homes. There are cameras at most street lights. The police have cameras in their cars, including ones that scan license plates automatically.

I live near a school, which is festooned with cameras (and has a constant police presence, too, with their car and body cameras). The stores I shop at have cameras mounted everywhere, mostly behind shaded plastic globes so they're not obvious. (Small businesses tend to have fewer cameras, but still have them.) ATMs have cameras, as do gas stations. My workplace has cameras at entrances, elevators, stairwells and hallways.

And that's before we get into cellphones, Facebook and government surveillance, or the advertising- and data-mining-driven stalkerware that haunts you on the internet.

It is not that you are trusted to do the right thing. It's just that until you somehow gain the attention of some persons or powers with access to all that surveillance, they don't care what you do.

[nova22033]

From the article

>The faces and ID cards of Xinjiang residents are scanned. >Near the Xinjiang University campus in Urumqi, police sat at a wooden table recently, ordering some people walking by to hand over their phones.

Yeah...life in the US is exactly like that..

[JoeAltmaier]

Hm. I live in the US. Our police have no cameras. None on the streets, none around the vast majority of homes. None in the schools. Shops have fake ones behind plastic globes (that's why the globes are there; so you don't know that all but 1 or two by the door are fake). Businesses have none.

[fellellor]

Isn't it the same in UK? I read somewhere there 1 cctv camera for every 10 citizens in that country.

[Steve44]

I read recently that figure was done by extrapolating the cameras visible in one section of a street in London to the UK as a whole. I've had a look and can't find that particular link.

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveilla...

> Britain has a CCTV camera for every 11 people, a security industry report disclosed, as privacy campaigners criticised the growth of the “surveillance state”.

> The survey’s maximum estimate works out at one for every 11 people in the UK, although the BSIA said the most likely figure was 4.9 million cameras in total, or one for every 14 people.

> “Because there is no single reliable source of data no number can ever be held as truly accurate however the middle of our range suggests that there are around five million cameras.”

and also from 2008 :-

> http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/factcheck+how+...

> The Claim : > "A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens." David Davis, resignation statement, 12 June 2008

> The basis comes from a survey of the number of CCTV cameras in two busy south London streets, Putney High Street and Upper Richmond Road.

> The researchers sampled 211 "premises" - banks, estate agents, pubs, shops and office blocks - and found that 41 per cent had CCTV systems, with an average of 4.1 cameras per system.

> By assuming this is "broadly representative" of CCTV coverage across the whole of London, the authors estimate that 41 per cent, or 102,910, of the 251,000 VAT-registered businesses registered in London would have a CCTV system. Multiply this by 4.1 and there would be 421,931 cameras.

> Bingo - there's the claim, but we've got to it based on two London streets, multiplied out to reflect the whole of London, and then multiplied again to reflect the whole country.

> When counting cameras, he reckons it's also important to look at what exactly they are monitoring. "Some may be in a private business such as a corner shop, some may be one camera outside a pub that isn't actually monitored, something like a building society may have more cameras 'back of house' which are not actually on the public," he said.

[kurtisc]

Usually pointing at private land or with signs if they can move. There's also number plate recognition on major roads and services. I don't really get the fuss, it's more private than having a security guard watch you. And they work at preventing crime and tracking people who commit them.

I'm surprised people from other countries aren't more turned off by our speeding cameras. I don't like them.

[yadongwen]

Didn't know Singapore has so many cams as well. But then it's one of the safest countries and in the US i dare not walking alone in many places not worrying about being robbed..

[darklajid]

Singapore just looks/looked at Malaysia the last couple days because a man was killed in a rather spectacular fashion - and everything's on camera..

(I live in Singapore. I'm not a fan of CCTVs, not at all. Locals all seem to be fine with them so far, even happily quoting that they make life saver as a consequence and therefor are a Good Thing)

[agorabinary]

Whether your wallet or your privacy, you are being robbed regardless.

[stickfigure]

When someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you will reconsider this equivocation.

[sgt101]

Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others.

Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing!

Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.

[Jyaif]

Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach.

Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

[bryananderson]

History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same?

We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”).

We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch.

The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.

[smcl]

Not disclosing your religion or sexuality to the government isn’t living a closeted life. I could be out and proud to my friends and family, but have little desire to allow some nasty actor in the government to include me in a query like

    select * from citizens where sexuality != ‘straight’

[Miredly]

This is as asinine as the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" trope. People use guns to kill people. People use privacy breaches to kill people.

People also use ideology to justify killing people, so you're not wrong there.

[tomc1985]

People who got the idea to kill her after breaching her privacy... this is like basic cause-and-effect.

[Reason077]

Are you worried that imagery from CCTV cameras will be used to identify homosexuals?

https://newatlas.com/ai-detects-gay-faces-criticisms-study/5...

[vixen99]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

[kelnos]

Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions.

If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people got scared.

You know what also reduces gun-related incidents: denying people the ability to have guns. It won't eliminate them (there's always a black market for everything), but it'll damn well reduce them, probably to a point that reasonable people would believe is an acceptable number.

[tzahola]

As if you couldn’t rob someone with a knife.

[kelnos]

What's your point? I was specifically responding to a claim about gun-related robberies.

Knives are also short-range weapons and are arguably a ton less dangerous than guns. If someone brandishes a knife at me and doesn't have an accomplice to surround me, I've got pretty good odds if I simply turn around and run. The equation changes if they have a gun.

[Simon_says]

The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.

More people will die of murder and suicide in an armed society, but it's the price we pay to protect against an existential threat to our culture's way of life, which in aggregate is more important than the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence. It's not good enough to just say that a disarmed society is safer. You have to show how we can have equal protection against a government run amok without guns. So far as I know, there's nothing equal. Human history is quite long. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own. Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check. This isn't some abstract fear. It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.

[_9rq6]

I agree with your thoughts on this. In feudal India, landlords oppressed the common peasants out of which local Naxalism was formed. Today, these guys are effective and in many ways protect local forests and tribals depended on it through guns from local communities with political and economic power.

I wouldn't say that's good but it is reality.

[Simon_says]

I'm honestly a little surprised this comment is so unpopular. My understanding is that this is the rationale behind the USA's second amendment, not personal safety, and not hunting.

[kelnos]

> The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic.

The US military is far too well-trained and well-equipped for any local civilian militia to have even a remote chance of winning a fight with them. That probably wasn't the case in 1800, but that ship sailed long ago.

> To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.

So what? The public having guns won't stop that from happening. Having or not having guns makes it equally bad. Actually, civilian gun ownership might make it worse: you end up with a lot more deaths on both sides, but the US military still wins.

> I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own.

That's a pretty extraordinary claim that requires some research and evidence.

> Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check.

Even if we blithely ignore reality and assume that civilian gun ownership keeps the US government in check, what's keeping all those other democratic governments in check where civilian gun ownership is either not the norm or is mostly or completely outlawed? They seem to be doing just fine, and as a bonus have levels of gun violence that are much, much lower than that in the US.

> It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.

To whom? I don't see regular revolutions happening in the vast majority of present-day democracies. Even if it's the case that legal civilian gun ownership was necessary hundreds of years ago to get us to a point where those democracies were able to be formed (I don't really buy that, but let's just give you that for a second), clearly civilian gun ownership is not necessary to maintain those democracies today. We have clear empirical evidence that it's not necessary if you just look at (nearly?) every other (actual) democracy in the world.

But still, all of this presupposes that an organized, armed, civilian militia could realistically win against the US military and overthrow the US government. That's laughable.

[thunderbong]

This can happen even with cameras being there, no? In which case, you've lost both

[kercker]

Everything can happen to anyone.

I think stickfigure is trying to say that, with cameras above head, which will result in higher probability of being caught if someone commits a crime, the one who would commit a crime if there was no camera will refrain from committing a crime.

With cameras, the probability of losing life will be smaller than without them.

[yadongwen]

exactly.. i've been robbed a few times with knifes etc but never guns in countries not discussed here. i really hoped there were cams

[chrischen]

There is no expectation of privacy in a public place, or on someone else’s property.

[StreamBright]

Not really. Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death. Look how many times robbery goes wrong resulting in the victims death.

[kelnos]

> Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death.

I submit that that statement is false, and removing someone's privacy rights can indeed result in their death.

And that's not even really the point: I am ok with there being a price to privacy, even if that is some amount of deaths that might otherwise be reduced.

[krick]

I would question living a life like that being worth it. It horrifies me to think I would't even know otherwise should I be born in a country like that.

[olalonde]

> I _feel_ that I am trusted to do the right thing.

The cameras aren't there for you...

[oh_sigh]

Think of it this way: The cameras are there to prevent people who aren't doing the right thing from hurting you or other innocents.

[chrischen]

Tell that to a black guy.

[profalseidol]

lol, haven't you heard of Snowden?