Originally posted by TrashMan
You ARE paraniod.
There is no privacy in public areas - if you're at work, in a restoraunt or at home - THAT's private propoerty, private space. But as long as you are on the streets or public squares climing privacy is illogical since you're in plain sight of everyone around you!
I never mentioned privacy. I specifically argue the point of police surveillance.
I am not paranoid. I don't think anyone is out to get me. I just don't trust anyone in power.
City-wide street survailance would be EXTREEMLY efficient.
And for the matter of erasing - tapes would be erased for a simple reason - storage. You would have thoushands of cammeras, thousands of tapes each day. You simply can't keep them all, no way, no how.
I don't care if they're kept for a week, a month or a year. It only took a few moments for that cop to download the photos of that woman's phone. His PDA is not controlled by a central authority. There's no guarantee that cops would never abuse the Camera System, and once one of them does, the system is permanently compromised.
Every service or insitutioin (police, firefighters, military, etc..) work on two principles:
1. trust - you should trust those people to do their job right.. give them a benefit of the doubt
2. internal control - the subgroup that controls and monitors a service, exposing those who misuse their power and punishes them.
Every governemnt service works this way. You say you can't trust anyone - what do you propose - to dismiss the police? Dismiss hte firefighterrs? Hell, why not dismiss the whole governmet seing as you don't trust them.
EVERY system, no matter how well though of will have some exploitable holes under the right circumstances - there is no perfect one. Does that mean we have to abandon everything, use pure anarchy?
My lack of trust in them is the only thing that keeps me free of them. In the United States, that's one of the core ideas in the Constitution. You can't trust the President, so the Supreme Court and the Congress can overrule him. You cannot trust Congress, so the Supreme Court and the President can over rule it. You cannot trust the Supreme Court, so the President and the Congress can overrule it. Its called checks and balances.
My bottom line is that if you do something stupid in public - it's 100% your fault!
If you're only argumant is that the system has a possiblity of being misused sometimes - than that's no argumen at all for any system can be misused sometimes. A cop can plant some incriminating evidence on you whenever he wants and what can you do about it?
My bottom line is that unless I do something illegal, the police have no right to investigate or film me. This is an absolute, 100%, unwavering and unmitigable core belief. My point is that such a system opens the way to more abuse than efficiency. Stratcomm has pointed this out several times in this very thread.
anywayy you claim me avoding answeriong your questions and at the same time you haven't answered mine - give an clear example of a abouse of that system.
And you still have not answered my other questions, even though I've posted them TWICE. Stratcomm already gave a very good example of abuse. I've already given you a very clear example of an abuse of a camera system by the police. Tell me if my example wasn't clear, because I will clarify it for you if you'd like. I'm afraid that it will pretty much be exactly what I said up there in this post about "His PDA is not controlled..."
I am an American. I firmly believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. My opinion on unwarranted (in the strictest legal sense) surveillance of the citizenry of the country by the government (or its enforcement arm) is very much born from that Constitution. You may never have read the Constitution, nor care what it says, but that does not matter. Its the basis of my argument and the source of my position on the subject.
You may choose to trust people in power to act in the best interests of you, your family, your community and your country over their own interests. Every day in the news, however, we see that politicians and police cannot be trusted. These people in power break laws, lie, get caught lying and lie some more about lying. Police plant "evidence", make bogus arrests to fulfill quotas, shoot people in the head and then lie about the circumstances of that shooting. I don't need much more proof than that to convince me that I have to take everything these people say and do with a grain of salt and consider that they are lying or manipulating the data in such a way as to attempt to influence the beliefs and opinions of the public they are supposed to serve.
