| This reminds me a bit of the recent discussion here about networked security cameras using cloud storage. Many people seem to have a very simplistic idea about how the law, law enforcement, and courts work. Laws are always selectively enforced. Police, prosecutors, and courts are not going to simply round up petty criminals such as serial package thieves just because victims suddenly have HD video footage of the (countless) perpetrators. They have other priorities. Political crime is back with a vengeance, even in the 'liberal' west, and pursuing threats to the existing socio-political and economic order will always take priority. The main issue with pervasive surveillance systems isn't that they are used to detect and prosecute ordinary street crime or nuisance infractions (though the latter can become burdensome). The problem is that these systems will be used to pursue 'special' categories of crime such as political activism. (Expect those categories to creep and expand just as flimsy justifications such as 'conspiracy' and 'incitement' proliferate.) Expect the full force of the surveillance and control systems being constructed now to be used extensively to maintain public order and pursue threats to public order. Remember, the primary role of the police is to maintain order. Everything else they might do is secondary to that. I hate to bring up Julian Assange as he is such a polarizing and widely reviled character - but it is clear now that several governments saw him as a sufficiently dire threat to that they felt justified pouring gargantuan resources into neutralizing him. This never happens with ordinary criminals except in sensational cases where the public is out for blood. I do not know if Assange himself was ever considered such a big threat, but I suspect the systemic risk threatening the whole system was great enough to justify making an example of him to deter others (at least from the perspective of the US and UK governments). In a slightly unrelated aside, I might also remind some of you of this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kennedy_(police_officer) And back to the networked cameras. Your own surveillance system is ultimately spying on you and creating records of your activities that probably should not exist - and should you store your data locally, and some of it happens to conveniently go missing, it could incriminate you, whereas this would not be an issue if it never existed in the first place. It brings up the old 'if you have nothing to hide' argument. Yet here we see evidence that largely benign political activities are deemed sufficiently threatening to justify closer scrutiny. Pardon the sloppiness of this comment. I posted it piecemeal with many edits. |
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/06/julian-assange-trial-ext...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-off...