[lordnacho]

I think I may have a minority view about surveillance. At least I need someone to explain something to me.

Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?

Because if I thought someone would actually use the cameras to enforce the law, that's not actually such a bad outcome. You aren't supposed to speed, you aren't supposed to let your dog poop without cleaning up after it, and there's a bunch of other offences as well.

Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules? Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine. Enforcing a social norm, cheaply. There seems to be evidence that it works with speeding: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250402181306.h...

The kind of story that I've actually come across is that someone with access to the public database abuses it. They peek into their ex girlfriend's records, that kind of thing. Obviously nobody thinks that's ok, and I can understand if the main pushback people have is that none of the first thing will happen and lots of the second thing will happen. But that doesn't seem to address the principle itself.

So what exactly is the argument for why we shouldn't have cameras catching people who break the law? Presumably we would have no issue with a cop seeing someone breaking the law, and enforcing. The issue comes up when we replace the policeman with a system that is always on and way cheaper to run than a cop.

EDIT

Just to be clear, I understand it if people don't trust the government. What I'm looking for is an argument other than that. Thus far every response has been along the lines of "you can't trust the government to use this fairly/correctly".

That's known, everybody can see that argument.

I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.

[eldridgea]

This answer might be US specific but one significant reason for the pushback (at least from me) is the centralizing force.

Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.

Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.

A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.

Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.

I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.

All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.

[dvdkon]

Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time.

Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.

Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.

[cucumber3732842]

>antisocial

God I hate this word.

Maybe you just picked it up from "those people" but the correlation it has with downright authoritarian and statist tendencies is too damn high for me. Like I expect it to be followed by a rant about how anyone who doesn't pull permits and call dig safe before installing a mailbox deserves to lose their house or whatever.

I mostly agree with everything else you wrote.

[dvdkon]

Sorry about your connotations. I just needed a simple term to express "actions that are against the implicit social contract and harm the rest of society".

Of course pinning down what exactly this should encompass is hard, which is where my general distrust comes in.

[nitwit005]

Real world results are poor. I've gotten a ticket for not coming to a "full and complete stop" at an empty intersection at 2AM. I drove up to the corner extremely slowly instead. A $500 fine.

That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.

They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.

[SXX]

  > I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.

I'm not from US, but you dont have to mistrust specifically your current government in order to not accept mass surveillance.

Mass surveillance like Flock is basically one of systems you need to create low trust authoritarian country.

If you build it, they will come. Except this time it's gonna be authoritarian leaders.

[Vinnl]

Laws are not perfectly moral, and future laws might be even less so. Same goes for governments - their power should not outweigh the governed's.

[Verdex]

At least for me, the technical chops to be able to program a computer was always just table stakes for software engineering.

The majority of my job more or less reduces to mitigating the consequences of having all the stakeholders dreams come true. Most normal people consider rules as run by people. They expect them to ignore rules that don't make sense, apply rule of thumb, get the gist, and do what it takes to achieve success.

When you take these sorts of rules and try to put them into silicon, the end result is often an undesirable result despite all the rules being successful implemented.

The law are these sorts of rules. They're designed to be "executed" by people using judgement. Part of the reason why the law works is specifically because we don't have a bunch of computers watching everyone all the time. Secure in your person and papers is literally right there in the constitution. Like they didn't know about computer surveillance when they added that amendment but they knew that without privacy the law doesn't work as intended.

[cucumber3732842]

>When you take these sorts of rules and try to put them into silicon, the end result is often an undesirable result despite all the rules being successful implemented. The law are these sorts of rules. They're designed to be "executed" by people using judgement.

And yet, HN is filled with examples of people who work in this exact capacity yet advocate for laws to be enforced in silicone. Ignorance beyond a point becomes malice IMO.

[BoxwoodSeed]

You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason.

It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.

[Barrin92]

>It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.

Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.

Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.

[BoxwoodSeed]

There's a small but important difference between surveillance in certain settings (like a prison) and surveillance around the clock. There's also a difference between keeping records forever and not keeping records at all.

The Panopticon was designed in a way that inmates would not know whether they were watched or not and there was no camera to record everything to be reviewed later by AI agents, either. It also wasn't something that caught on.

Personally, I don't mind surveillance in certain public spaces, as long as the public has access to everything that is recorded in real time and whatever archives are kept. If it's a camera in a public space you'd think it would be better if not everyone had access, then it's probably a camera that it would be better no one had access to.

[jjav]

> Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules?

Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.

Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.

So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.

[ornornor]

I think this is reason enough. The US (and others) are turning a little more despotic and totalitarian every day. Imagine what they can do with such tools?

Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.

It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.

[anakaine]

I'd like to point of the recent case where a women crossed state lines for reproductive healthcare and the local police used flock to track those movements and prosecute.

The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.

[wat10000]

There's a social norm that it's rude to follow someone around watching everything they do, and that the state shouldn't do it unless they have good reason to suspect that person of a crime.

[inigyou]

The effort necessary to do it used to act as a check on state power. Only the Stasi could follow everyone all the time. Other countries had to be selective.

[Telaneo]

> Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?

Both.

Even if a hypothetical perfect police force could serve justice better with a panopticon, that is A.) not the police force that exists today, and 2.) who's to day that there won't be a worse government in X years that will use that panopticon and police force to be dicks?

The benefit of minor crimes being addressed today is very small compared to the potential disaster of tomorrow.

[trinsic2]

Its really about priorities. Public surveillance is something that is distracting from the real problem: Government/Corporate corruption. That needs to be handled before anything else. The fact that we are focusing on them putting in surveillance cameras instead of us working together to bring these criminal to justice proves that the distraction its working.

[anigbrowl]

There are many things that are technically illegal but arguably should not be.

For example, there's a small local park near me that serves as a handy shortcut between two different neighborhoods, but technically nobody is allowed to enter it between 11pm and 6am. The assumption is that if you're in a park during these hours, it must be for some nefarious purpose.

The problem with arguments like yours is the implied premise everyone must be surveilled because they are potential criminals who just haven't been caught yet, the exact opposite of the legal presumption of innocence and the founding values of the US (other countries' mores about the default moral state of humanity vary, of course). It's only a short leap from arguing that if everyone needs to be surveilled for everyone else's safety, then being surveillable by being out and about at the wrong time of day is itself suspicious, and that curfew should be the default.

Surprisingly, some 70-80% of US cities have curfew rules of some kind (usually against minors) and they're often ramped up significantly in response emergencies. Most other developed countries just don't have curfews. European countries have business regulations like barring minors from some businesses such as nightclubs, but US-style curfews do not exist. A Swiss town (interlaken) that voted to impose them had to hire private security guards because the police refused to enforce the rule. Curfews are somewhat common in developing nations like the Philippines and Thailand, but again don't really exist in developed nations in Asia. I didn't do an exhaustive global survery, but to my general knowledge the US is an outlier in this regard.

The fundamental problem with the curfew mentality is this assumption of malignity, and there's no end to it once you introduce it. Suppose we claim that crime has fallen since security cameras were deployed. And yet, there's still some crime and not all of it appears on our public camera network! It turns out quite a lot of crimes are committed in private. Maybe we should just put cameras inside people's homes - after all, why would anyone object...unless they wanted to commit crime? Maybe we should do away with warrants - they're time-consuming to apply for and create paperwork (we hate bureaucracy, don't we folks). Sure they're in the constitution, but haven't you noticed how people who insist on seeing a warrant always turn out to be the worst sort of people? Obviously innocent people would welcome the police into their home, and take pride in demonstrating their innocence. Why, I think most right-thinking folks would be prepared to sacrifice some of their own liberty if it meant catching just one extra criminal.

[throwpriv2607]

> I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.

See copypasta https://pastebin.com/GQBGWjv8 for full explanation of the four counter arguments below, too long to post here.

> > "You have nothing to fear" This is a very dangerous mindset. The argument is frequently raised in debates by pro-big brother hawks, and doing so is dangerous, cowardly and dishonest.

> > There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument solidly and uncompromisingly: the rules may change, it's not you who determine if you're guilty, laws must be broken for society to progress, and privacy is a basic human need.

> Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine.

In the 1980s depending on your jurisdiction there were some kind of sodomy or gross indecency law. Applying AI and surveillance to that. Guy goes for a walk, kisses his boyfriend, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine and/or jails them.

Most arguments boil down to not trusting current or future government because the government can commit violence against you, deprive you of liberty, or take away your possessions. With a combination of the rules may change, and it's not you who determines guilt.

From: https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Solove-2011-TheNothingToHideArgume...

> > in Friedrich Durren-matt's novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "'An altogether minor matter,' the prosecutor replied .... 'A crime can always be found."'

Dave Eggers' The Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) - also a movie - explores the concept of people going fully "transparent" effectively mass surveilling themselves

[tencentshill]

Lack of trust in government is a very American thing, to be sure. But the issue is they have now truly alienated pretty much all of the population for one reason or another. I used to think libertarians were crazy until we actually had government agents breaking, entering, and killing without warrants. Accountability is all we want. Surveillance with proper oversight is very much possible, but those in power are unwilling, so must be voted out.

[secretsatan]

It’s hard to parse this, it’s like asking, apart from the murdering, what’s wrong with murder?

[preg_match]

Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.

And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.

I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.

[AvAn12]

1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.

2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?