[infinity0]

The article contained a story which directly disagrees with your last point.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2849#comic

Surveillance may result in more evidence that could potentially allow for better enforcement. However, people run these systems. Centralised surveillance gives a minority of people more power. As seen in the article, this power is abused, because there is nothing else to balance this power.

All these arguments talk about the benefits of surveillance without looking at the social relationships of how real-world surveillance is implemented. Like privacy tools, surveillance is just a tool. Without looking at the social relationships, one can make any argument in favour of, or against, these tools.

Centralised surveillance run by security forces, by nature will overestimate what crimes are being done, and allow the people in charge the ability and incentive to overinterpret innocent acts inappropriately.

CCTV rescuing you from drunken arguments is only one very small part of what CCTV can and will become.

[gambiting]

And then you can never foresee what that data is going to be used for in the future. Nazis used "completely innocent" records held by countries to find out where Jewish families lived so they could find them and put them in camps. The less the government knows about you the better.

[LLWM]

And if the records had been complete video of those peoples' everyday lives, those Nazis might have felt some empathy for the people they were exterminating, and reconsidered their positions. Anyone can make up whatever arguments they want about history, since it's not a repeatable experiment.

[msvalkon]

And if such behaviour was ever found, the gas chamber ate another person. The Nazi government did not take well to dissenters, especially among the armed forces.

[LLWM]

Yes, the Nazis were bad. How insightful.

[gambiting]

Well, the point is at there always were bad people and bad governments. You can't just say that history is not a repeatable experiment, so we are just going to gamble with our private info in hopes that we never get another Stalin or Hitler. I mean, you absolutely can, please feel free to, but I would rather not, thank you very much.

[LLWM]

There's more to it than just hope. With sufficient surveillance and recording, you will know you are getting another Stalin or Hitler long before he takes power.

[LLWM]

You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not a matter of abusing power or not. That power is destroyed when people realize that privacy doesn't exist. You are worried that someone will record you picking your nose? Instead of banning such recordings, how about changing society to one that accepts that everyone picks their noses?

[silentOpen]

That is not a realistic scenario. Not everyone kisses people of the same gender. Not everyone wears religious head garb. Not everyone vomits in the street.

A free society is one where people are free to question social norms, express themselves, and act in ways that don't violate others' rights. A society with ubiquitous surveillance is no longer a free society because people cannot freely and openly question social norms through action, express themselves, or act in ways that may be annoying or unbecoming but which do not violate others' rights. In a surveillance society, even one where "everyone knows", these behaviors are implicitly and globally discouraged by the act of recording all behavior and saving it in perpetuity.

I recommend reading about chilling effects < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect >.

[LLWM]

Sure they can. They might choose not to out of paranoia or cowardice, but that already happens today. Chilling effects are the result of vague laws and inconsistent enforcement. Universal surveillance solves that problem, it doesn't exacerbate it. There's much less need to speculate about whether you will be convicted of assault for punching this person when you can review every single alleged assault of the last 20 years and whether each defendant was found guilty.

[silentOpen]

Or people might not choose to exhibit borderline behavior out of rationality. That is, in the recent past, there were consequences for borderline behavior but the leverage of any single actor was no where near the leverage you are proposing.

If you read the wikipedia article, you will find that chilling effects are not only the result of vague laws and inconsistent enforcement but also the result of any legalistic behavior that might cause others to self-police or self-censor.

As for your assertions about universal surveillance, I find your position has a number of serious conditions:

1. It requires total surveillance of everyone.

2. It requires totally unambiguous laws and norms.

3. It requires total stasis of society.

4. It requires total faith in system by the governed population.

There are two major issues with this position:

1. Society must transition to this system somehow and survive.

2. People and systems in the material world are imperfect and we have no existence proof of any social system which achieves anywhere near the requisite levels of assurance.

I can only see this kind of system working in a society with 0 or 1 people in it. That is to say, I believe what you propose is impossible to enact by its very fundaments.

However, you continue to argue that attempting to create such a system is desirable. Due to this, I can only fathom that either:

1. You are a naive totalitarian.

2. You are a long-playing troll.

Because of this line of reasoning, I must conclude that the attempt to bring your proposed social system into being will not succeed and that the intermediate state will be much worse than the present state as totality will never be reached but concentration of power will corrupt.

If you insist that your proposed system is possible, how will you deal with dissenters such as myself who will refuse to live inside such a system? Doesn't the existence of dissent mean that you cannot reach totality? Or perhaps you believe that such a system can be made to accommodate dissent? What if the resistance is violent? Should the surveillance state kill anyone trying to resist its total surveillance, total laws, total stasis, and total faith? That would surely solve the dissent problem but perhaps the result would be neither stable nor pleasant...

[LLWM]

You will die of old age long before this society is even possible.

[silentOpen]

An excellent reason for us to not attempt to hasten its arrival lest we be stuck in a terrible intermediate state.

[infinity0]

You're talking about a theoretical world where absolutely no-one has any privacy, even presidents, security guards, etc.

In the real world, there is lots of asymmetry. This asymmetry is absolutely critical when making ethical considerations.

[LLWM]

Yes, I'm talking about the world that we should work towards realizing. Wasn't that the entire point of this discussion?

Obviously it will take some time. Even if we recorded everything everyone ever did starting 50 years from now, which is still quite a stretch, it would likely take another 150 before we could be certain that every living person had been under surveillance for their entire lives.

[infinity0]

No, that wasn't the entire point of this discussion. You give no consideration on how to achieve your supposed scenario, whereas everyone else has considered how the ways of doing this proposed by the state, would lead to horrific crimes.

[LLWM]

I thought your whole objection was that these acts were not crimes, but should be.