Originally posted by TrashMan
Not every movement - only when you're onthe streets.
So any movement between buildings; i.e. when you go to the bank, to a mates house, to the shops, etc would all be survey-ed. That's tantamount to invasive police surveillance.
Originally posted by TrashMan
And for logistical reasons, tracking someone in real-time would be hard and prolly used only in specia lcircumstances.
Why? What logistical reasons?
With facial recognition software, it'd be easy to automate. hook up, say, a biometric IR camera to the CCTV, turn on the central network to recognise a blood vessel pattern, and Roberts your fathers brother. (or just use good old facial recognition; I have a feeling blood-vessel is more reliable at present, which I why I chose that example)
This is, after all, technology being developed right now.... if it's not possible already, the presence of a CCTV network would make it easily facilitatable and
automatable.
Originally posted by TrashMan
How the system would work is when a crime is reported the records of the location are looked over and the suspects indentified and their movement tracked.
So it wouldn't prevent crime, then. Unless you plan on having a national ID database, it probably wouldn't be massively useful for tracking suspects, either.
It'd also mean records would be stored for a very long time (not all crimes are immediately reported). You'd presumably have an inherent tracking system, which again throws up the issue of tracking individuals.
If you'll note, one of the main fears over CCTV is the ability it gives to track individuals movements. For what may be the ability to solve a miniscule amount of crimes (bearing in mind there is such a thing as evidence, and it's quite possible a suspect would disguise their appearance against a non-invasive CCTV system*, the number of crimes
needing CCTV to solve them probably wouldn't be that high, especially in quiet residential areas), there is a massive threat to civil liberties.
*i.e. a suspect commiting a crime planned not to leave any evidence would disguise themselves; a non- or more correctly, less - invasive CCTV system would not be using, say, biometric UID data, making it impossible to track well disguised individuals. An 'invasive' system, using UIDs, would allow automatic tracking and thus automatic surveillance of innocent people.
(note that the definition of invasive is within context to global surveillance)Originally posted by TrashMan
Video can be falsified, yes, but only a very limited number of pople would have acess to those tapes and court experts can in most cases tell if it was doctored or not.
on the other hand - if youre telling me about a large conspiracy where the tapes were acessed, altered and the court experts influenced/mislead, then whoever has went to all thet trouble to incriminate someone doesn't need this sytem to do it. In fact, it would be easier to simply plant some flase evidence at the guys house or something...
But that system isn't infallible. That's the point I'm making; you cannot hold up video evidence as a sacrosanct solution or evidence. If you accept the possibility of evidence being doctored by police, video is equally susceptible. But by regarding it as being unimpeachable, the
value of doctoring video increases.
Again, the point being that video is no more reliable than conventionally gathered evidence. No assumption of security can override that.
It's quite simple, really. The more 'useful' a CCTV system becomes for combating crime, the more invasive and intrusive it becomes. If we all had RFID chips implanted at birth and monitored by satellite we'd never have to worry about kidnapping, but how many people are calling for that?
I'll accept CCTV in private locations (i.e. shops - but not in the changing rooms, malls, banks), and in very densely populated areas (busy city streets, i.e. where the crime is high and density of traffic makes it hard to track individuals), but not a blanket system that allows my daily movements from private residence to other places to be logged, and certainly not one where all that information can be centrally stored and pored over.
That is a recipe for abuse.