That doesn't mean its worth it. There is always a tradeoff and I would rather live in a world where I know I am free from surveillance than a world where I am .000001% safer or criminals are caught 10% faster.
It's not just safety vs. privacy, it's safety vs. safety: pervasive surveillance can and does make us less safe due to the potential for a future, less benevolent, government to abuse it to oppress politically unpopular groups.
Do you have any proof to backup your empty claim? It may discourage pocket picker at your local market.. when it comes to blowing up King Cross I bet you more survelieance the more incouraging to terror. These folls live for five minute survelliance video of one of their own walking down with backpack across few CCTV cameras on all national News Stations, so yeah I bet you its a one big fat encouragement to them to harm more.
> pervasive surveillance can and does make us less safe due to the potential for a future, less benevolent, government to abuse it to oppress politically unpopular groups.
Do you disagree that pervasive surveillance would make it easier for an oppressive government to collect data on their opponents and imprison or harass them? The East German Stasi didn’t have the advantage of universal surveillance and they did a great job of suppressing political opposition. Do you think their job would have been easier or harder with pervasive logging of all conversations conducted electronically or in public or private spaces?
In the grandparent comment’s specific example police stalked and killed a completely innocent man because they thought he looked like one of the bombers from their CCTV tapes
Just the presence of surveillance alone discourages criminals from acting in the first place. Without any surveillance, I don't think criminal activity will increase by just .000001%.
In the case of (PUBLIC) meatspace, physical surveillance (e.g., cameras), I'm onboard with the Big Brother panopticon state. Bad, meaningful stuff happens in meatspace, like explosions.
When it comes to cyberspace, digital surveillance, I fled Windows for Linux and read /r/StallmanWasRight. Bad stuff happens in cyberspace, but none of it is meaningful enough to me to warrant the limitations to privacy that we endure IRL.
Does anyone else have this arbitrary configuration of opinions?
Well. Strangely I happen to be one of the folks in that .000001%, so I apologize if my opinions have been shaped differently.
I lost one of my ex-school mates in an market-place explosion (2005 Delhi bombing). While the London Bombing suspects were identified, all suspects in the Delhi bombing that same year were released due to "lack of evidence".
I am completely in favor of surveillance of public property.
> While the London Bombing suspects were identified
They were identified. After they’d blown themselves up on trains and a bus. The one person ‘identified’ as it was happening was in fact mistakenly identified and killed by the police.
Surveillance only helps in situations like this where the authorities have intelligence upfront. Even then you can argue that regular on-foot surveillance is a more proportionate approach over serveilling the entire nation ‘just in case’.
I was in London when the bombs went off (I worked on Russel Square along from the bus bomb - I would walk past the site, every day, to and from work; and have a friend who was on the train going from Liverpool St that was blown up). And, I remember being nearby (and hearing) the IRA bomb in Bishopsgate. I still believe very strongly that governments should not have carte blanche rights to spy on all citizens. Privacy is more valuable
But if we make a world safe from these .000001% events, what do you think that will look like? I can only imagine a dystopian/ Orwellian society where we are all encouraged to report any suspicious behavior and everything becomes a race to the bottom, a Prisoner's Dilemma where I feel pressured to rat out my neighbor for _something_ before he does it to me.
Who's asking everyone to report suspicious behaviour ? You have raised a _strawman_ argument. Automatic surveillance of public property and public spaces is in my opinion necessary for analysis, investigation and prosecution of terrorists. This must be done by career intelligence folks not by amateurs.
Pervasive surveillance will inevitably lead to machine learning techniques being used to analyse the data which will massively increase the rates of false positives, people who aren’t a threat but who the system flags as potential threats. Freedom and security trade off against one another.
Citation needed. You are making a strong statement about the inevitable future based on what? Sounds like evidence as strong as your claim would be worth some very interesting papers.
Have you been paying attention to anything regarding government surveillance in the past decade? NSA? Five Eyes? Governments are thirsty for any new tech that allows them to amass data fast about public behavior. There's startups that exist right now that use ML techniques to analyze security footage for bad actors. There was a Japanese one on the HN front page a couple days ago. This isn't a slippery slope argument, this shit is happening right now.
The question is where do you draw the line for removing privacy to enable law enforcement? Would you consider a system that monitors every individual at all times because it would almost guarantee that any criminal is identified?
