[aldo_14]

You do know that the whole "armed gangs going around raping and pillaging" bit was was overblown, right? As always, the media sensationalized things because, hell, that's how they make their money and later it came out that things weren't as bad as previously reported.

There was, however, some very crazy **** going on (to paraphrase).  Offhand, I know at least one medical helicopter was forced to turn back after being fired at.... that incident alone is quite incredible; I've never heard of anything like that happening in a disaster area before (with the caveat, of course, that it was an exceptionally well documented and media-covered disaster).

[Rictor]

Don't you mean "...I've never heard of anything like that happening in a Western disaster area before..."?

The Asian tsunami hit Aceh province, where the government was an is fighting a guerilla war, which seriously slowed the flow of emergency aid. Same thing in Kashmir: the place is crawling with militants, from both sides. And I'm sure that any place in Africa that is eligible for humanitarian aid is probably not far from a warzone. The world is not fundamentally a safe place. General chaos follows any sort of natural disaster, and the only question is how much. Certainly, the aftermath of Katrina could have been handled better, but it wasn't anything the world (well, the world excluding the West) is not accustomed to.

[TrashMan]

Right, so the ability to track the movements of individuals and archive, analyse them is completely harmless and could not ever lead to any abuse, ever.  You're displaying the sort of naive attitude that had people in 1950s Russia writing letters to Uncle Joe, thinking he couldn't possibly know of the gulags.  If you make it easy for someone to abuse their position and gain power, they will.  It's simple human nature, and we've seen it so many times it begs belief you're not even aware of the danger.

Anything can be misused..but security cameras are not as likely to be and don't do as much harm. There many other things that are far more dangrous for your freedom out there..
And security cameras would be a bad thing in a totalitarian regime, but last time I checked your country wasn't one of those.

[Flipside]

I'm not all that worried about CCTV's at stations, shopping malls, parks etc, though I do think that the paranoia that led to them was somewhat encouraged, however, the problem that I find with it all is not so much the fact that these may be installed, whatever the intention behind it, my concern is this. No matter what happens in the future, no matter which party, which leader, no matter what their beliefs on public monitoring and control, they will have access to these facilities. It's like leaving a gun on a table, it might be the property of one responsible person right now, but what about the next person that walks in the room?

[karajorma]

And security cameras would be a bad thing in a totalitarian regime, but last time I checked your country wasn't one of those.

And do you know what stops it becoming one? Speaking out against draconian measures like these ones.

Dictators don't seize power. They are given it through the inaction of the people. All it takes is for the population to spend enough time looking elsewhere or blaming someone else for their problems.

[TrashMan]

I'd have expected someone who grew up in a former communist country to be the one who understood the dangers of letting the government have too much power

And exactly becouse I know what a totalitarian regime is and how it works am I in the perfect position to comment on this.
CCTV won't bring you any step closer to such a regime. As long as you have freedom of speech and press, as long as the public keeps na eye at what the leadership is doing it's not totalitarian..not by a longshot.

and look at it this way - what do you fear more - the CCTV system or the corrupt police or military? Should we then disband them?

[aldo_14]

I'd have expected someone who grew up in a former communist country to be the one who understood the dangers of letting the government have too much power

And exactly becouse I know what a totalitarian regime is and how it works am I in the perfect position to comment on this.
CCTV won't bring you any step closer to such a regime. As long as you have freedom of speech and press, as long as the public keeps na eye at what the leadership is doing it's not totalitarian..not by a longshot.

and look at it this way - what do you fear more - the CCTV system or the corrupt police or military? Should we then disband them?

Your...naievety astounds me.  You really think totalitarianism and dictatorship just hop in overnight?  That it's safe to erode any and all civil liberties so long as it's done slowly?  That freedom of speech and press is immutable (hell, just look at the Hutton report for that one)?  Are you perfectly ok with the concept of having your very single move tracked and recorded (as will be possible with linked CCTV and facial recognition software, as is under development)?  Do you think that's a good thing, for the state to be able to follow your entire life from place to place, who you meet, talk to, etc - and that there is no chance whatsoever that could ever be misued against you?

And your comparison..... it's insane.  We're not talking about limited, on-the-minute surveillance of small public areas (the equivalent of having proper police patrols, if well implemented).  We're talking about a system expressly designed to record the private journeys of individuals by cars, for no reason beyond it being of possible use in trial, for a tiny minority of individuals being monitored.  And it's a system being placed with far less balances, less morality (because it's composed of technology, not individuals with such concepts of right, wrong, democracy) than any police or army service ever has been, or is, created with.  There is no major net benefit overwhelming the possible risks as we have for the public services - just a huge infringement upon the right to anonymity and freedom of travel.

[TrashMan]

Naive? No..maby you are.

Of course such things don't happen over night, but there is a line that shouldn't be crossed, and frankly, this is not it.

So the government can track any movement of mine with my car..so what? That info is as usefull to the government as my OLD toilet paper. You know how many people drive around on the roads? The government may store the info, but it won't look at that info unless it has to. Why? Becosue there simply isn't enough resources to constatly track millions of drivers.
You might have them stored on a tape for a period of time, but who is gonna review them? Tehre will be a limited number of those who will do that and there are thousands of tapes and millions of pople..so they'll have to restrict viewing/tracking actually those who they really should..simply becouse it's too time consuming, impractical and expensive to track anyone.

So the only time anyone would view your tape is only if they are tracking someone else and you happen to appear on that tape for a split second or if you are actualyl suspected/acused of something.
And no, the comparison isn't insane if you think about it.
A police officer can be very well corrupt and beat the s*** out of you and you can't do nothing.
Military is fiercly loyal to the government in most cases (brainwashing)
Cameras are neutral. And it may werry well prove that cop X bet you up for nothing.
And while tapes can be doctored, it can allso be proven that they were tampered with..

[Kosh]

Cameras are neutral.

Maybe, but the people looking THROUGH those cameras are often not neutral.

[aldo_14]

Naive? No..maby you are.

Of course such things don't happen over night, but there is a line that shouldn't be crossed, and frankly, this is not it.

So the government can track any movement of mine with my car..so what? That info is as usefull to the government as my OLD toilet paper. You know how many people drive around on the roads? The government may store the info, but it won't look at that info unless it has to. Why? Becosue there simply isn't enough resources to constatly track millions of drivers.

You might have them stored on a tape for a period of time, but who is gonna review them? Tehre will be a limited number of those who will do that and there are thousands of tapes and millions of pople..so they'll have to restrict viewing/tracking actually those who they really should..simply becouse it's too time consuming, impractical and expensive to track anyone.

So the only time anyone would view your tape is only if they are tracking someone else and you happen to appear on that tape for a split second or if you are actualyl suspected/acused of something.
And no, the comparison isn't insane if you think about it.
A police officer can be very well corrupt and beat the s*** out of you and you can't do nothing.
Military is fiercly loyal to the government in most cases (brainwashing)
Cameras are neutral. And it may werry well prove that cop X bet you up for nothing.
And while tapes can be doctored, it can allso be proven that they were tampered with..

Have you ever heard of those strange devices called "computers"? 

What do you think is being used to record and store this data - eyes and notepaper?

 This is perfect for computer analysis (raw data in digitisable form; unique identifiers for cars as digitised from the numberplates + easily definable to-from-via journeys).  If you bothered reading even the summary of the article, it describes how the system is designed to store every journey, by every car, for a period of 2 years (or over) - using computers!  And once that data is there, it's actually pretty trivial (more a question of processing time than actual difficulty)  to run a pattern matching algorithm - perhaps tracking people whose cars have made journeys to regions coinciding with political protests or meetings.  Alongside cars, you have the capacity for individual recognition - various governments and businesses are investigating the use of individual biometric identification (using infra red IIRC - we each have a unique vein system forming our faces that can be used as the identifier).

Hell, one of the reasons I said it was dangerous was because there's a vastly reduced need for human interaction.  Another point I made was that a system built to be inherently 'neutral' can be much more easily turned to 'bad' than the police or army, which have built in human checks alongside the various rules and legislation.

And there is recourse to police corruption - namely the internal investigations entities of the police force itself, and the independent legal system (I think it's the IPC who operate as an indepent investigative force to monitor the police).  With the army, there are immutable international as well as national laws upon the conduct of individual soldiers (including a responsibility to never follow an illegal order), and soldiers are also accountable to the legal system of the country in which they are operating (within certain restrictions with regards to war, where IIRC they are held accountable to British law rather than the law of a hostile nation).  These systems, as such, both provide a degree legislative recource which is absent from a system - in particular a hidden one - such as CCTV or this particular GATSO 2 scheme.

Tell me, what is 'the line', then?  Universal surveillance (which is what this is) obviously is ok by you.  In the context of UK we can have detention without trial (which can be effectively indefinate for foreign nationals, 28 days IIRC for British), and possibly even rendition to foreign countries if it's decided to 'ghost' people.  The 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act gives the Home Secretary the right to place control orders upon individuals, suspending parts of the Human Rights Act - i.e. a minister can now place anyone under house arrest, and does not need to give a reason or justification to the courts.

So we're looking at a situation where the private movements of anyone by private vehicle can be monitored, stored for 2+ years, analysed by any number of government agencies, and where an elected politician can opt to place that person under (amongst other restrictions) house arrest or tagging, without any need to inform that person of the evidence against them.

Isn't that close enough to 'the line'?

[ionia23]

I think the point being missed here is that our own priviledges (such as privacy) are abused.  The old argument still stands: If you aren't doing anything wrong, then what do you care who is watching?

[aldo_14]

I think the point being missed here is that our own priviledges (such as privacy) are abused. The old argument still stands: If you aren't doing anything wrong, then what do you care who is watching?

Because then it's the watcher who decides what is wrong or right, not you.  And the more power that watcher gets, the more at risk you become - we (the UK, but also other nations) are progressing towards a stage where said watcher is capable to act 'invisibly', protected from scrutiny in deciding that.  The risk we take is that by assuming we are not at risk from this, we sleepwalk our way into a stage where we have surrendered all the power and rights we had to prevent that situation.  It's very easy to wake up one day and realise you're freedom and rights are gone - it seems to be much harder for this country to wake up and realise they're being slowly taken.  It doesn't matter whether the current administration genuinely has good intentions, because we don't know who the next government will be - or the one after that - the very reason we have these - supposedly - immutable and universal rights (such as habeas corpus) is because of that risk. And the risk of such a government, is only heightened by the fear mongering and paranoia inspiring tactics of the likes of Blair and Bush (not wishing to invoke Godwins law, but look at how the minority Nazi party was, amongst other things, able to exploit fear of communism in Germany in the 30s).

Plus, if you were being - for this specific example - followed throughout your car journeys by an individual (say a stalker or a private investigator who always remains hands off, yet records your every move), then surely you'd be upset?

[Rictor]

That's not an arguement...at least, not a very good one. Privacy is a form of protection from power, both state power and private power. There is reason for suspicion and distrust of power, in and of itself. This is something the founding fathers of the US realized, and something which I think has been proven time and again through history.

Like I said, it is for the good of society that none of its laws, no matter how righteous they seem, be unbreakable, because we will never create laws just enough that breaking them will not be warranted in some cases.

It's really a matter of trust. Give your government the means be implement tyranny, and hope that they don't? Or refuse to give them the means, because you know that sonner or later they will. It's like giving someone a loaded gun and trusting them not to use it. Certainly, if you trust them, there is absolutely no reason to fear. But I don't have that much faith in anyone, especially not those who dedicate their lives to accumulating and exercising power over the population.

[TrashMan]

I don't consider taping you as you drive around an infrigment of privacy. After all, it's in an open, public area. The government (or any individual) can just as easily put a private eye after you who wil lrecord you every move..and that isn't ilegal. The difererence is the method and limitation - those cammeras can only tape you on the street. P.I:'s can follow you practicly everywhere.

And failsafes? Police has internal control, so set up an internal control for CCTV. Problem solved. This system is no more corruptable or abusable than the police.

and someone mentioned it was an infringment of our freedom of travel??? I don't see how as no one is stopping you.

B.t.w. - I really think people are shouting the word "freedoms" and "rights" waay too much. I gues you can call me conservative, but that's only becosue I've seen what too much liberalism can do...

[aldo_14]

I don't consider taping you as you drive around an infrigment of privacy. After all, it's in an open, public area. The government (or any individual) can just as easily put a private eye after you who wil lrecord you every move..and that isn't ilegal. The difererence is the method and limitation - those cammeras can only tape you on the street. P.I:'s can follow you practicly everywhere.

!?

So you would be perfectly happy to have every person observed in every movement they make across a public space, whether by technological or individual means?  You would be content to be followed, monitored and your movements be stored for possible use against you?  I mean, we are talking the tip of the iceberg here.  Once we have a legal framework that permits this monitoring of travel, then it's inevitable that the erosion of privacy will extend to CCTV-based biometric tracking across public areas, combined with ID card tracking (specifically, tracking the 'accesses' made to digitally check the card and the location from where they occur), and those systems will be combined to erode any sense of freedom of privacy in public (and perhaps beyond).

Furthermore, it would appear that you would be happy with any form of invasive monitoring so long as it was seen as 'public'.  Presumably you have no object to the men in dark overcoats with guns, si so long as you are seen to be loyal enough to be left alone.  Very Citizen Smith.

And failsafes? Police has internal control, so set up an internal control for CCTV. Problem solved. This system is no more corruptable or abusable than the police.

It's an automated, computer based system; the technological basics of it mean that it becomes much easier to subvert the system.  Additionally, the very concept of the system itself is such that the only controls that could prevent the risk it poses, would be ones that removed the system itself; this system is designed to be intrusive and invasive (as a tracking system), and designed to be used by state entities with a capacity for misuse.  As I said twice before, the simple fact that the police - and army - is comprised of individuals (and a large number of them), brings in it's own oversight of simple, human conscience.

But tell me, how would you set up oversight for an automated system such as this?  One with the expressed design to store where everyone has driven over the last 2+ years?

and someone mentioned it was an infringment of our freedom of travel??? I don't see how as no one is stopping you.

Because your movements can be used against you (especially in the case where the system is 'established', and hence can be believed even if altered to suit the prosecution).  If your every word was taped for potential use in 2+ years (in a court case, at the very least), then that would impinge your ability to speak freely.

Moreso, you can be punished (i.e. based on these movements) without any form or ability to offer recourse.  Because virtually no-one will keep a record of every journey they've made over the last 2 years - let alone proof - and yet the states digitised (i.e. numbers, not - for example - visual photographic evidence) evidence will be seen as incontestible.

B.t.w. - I really think people are shouting the word "freedoms" and "rights" waay too much. I gues you can call me conservative, but that's only becosue I've seen what too much liberalism can do...

Do you know what 'liberal' means, pray tell?  It means (for example) "tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition".  Do the same search for conservatism.  Neither claim to stand for the erosion of individual human rights or freedoms in the name of greater state security.  I believe the general term for that is something like 'totalitarian' or 'authoritarian'.

And there was me thinking the US bastardization of those terms hadn't reached Europe yet.  Sigh.

[ionia23]

Because your movements can be used against you (especially in the case where the system is 'established', and hence can be believed even if altered to suit the prosecution).  If your every word was taped for potential use in 2+ years (in a court case, at the very least), then that would impinge your ability to speak freely.

Your ability to speak freely would remain.  The only difference is that now there is a record.  That record can be used for both persecution AND defence.  However, freedom of speech* is not at issue here.

See, my reaction to someone getting bent out of shape about Britain's plan for tracking vehicle movements is:  If you're that worried about being seen doing something, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it.  Know what I mean?

[Janos]

See, my reaction to someone getting bent out of shape about Britain's plan for tracking vehicle movements is:  If you're that worried about being seen doing something, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it.  Know what I mean?

Like meeting your lover?

[Rictor]

Your gay, drug-smuggling, al-Qaeda-affiliated lover?

[Janos]

Your gay, drug-smuggling, al-Qaeda-affiliated lover?

oh darling are you jealous

[WMCoolmon]

Your ability to speak freely would remain.  The only difference is that now there is a record.  That record can be used for both persecution AND defence.  However, freedom of speech* is not at issue here.

See, my reaction to someone getting bent out of shape about Britain's plan for tracking vehicle movements is:  If you're that worried about being seen doing something, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it.  Know what I mean?

Didn't I just read about someone getting shot dead a month or two ago because they mentioned something about a bomb in an airport? And everyone talking about how that was justified (even though AFAIK the man was completely innocent). So much for 'freedom of speech' and 'right to be presumed innocent'

However I suppose my response to the latter paragraph is twofold.

If the government needs this sort of all-pervasive system to enforce its laws, something they're legislating is fishy. A constant public surveillance system just makes me wonder. Sure it could be used to track terrorists or keep people to _always_ drive below the speed limit, and live in fear of that quick burst to 65 mph they made. Or it could be used to nitpick someone's life, to bring up some minor reason to persecute them, or provide damning circumstantial evidence at a trial.

It violates one of the principles of the legal system, although we really seem to have forgotten that what with the rationalization for these incredibly strict copyright laws. And that is that generally the laws are to govern the interactions between people, rather than people themselves, so as to give the individual as much freedom as possible.

I've been thinking recently about all those people who died in the terrorist attacks. What did they die for - was there any meaning in their deaths? As more laws like this get passed then I wonder. Rather than standing firm in our laws and ideals we seem to have run away in fear, and try to barricade ourselves in little holes because of what might happen. I hear people talking about it being a 'completely different world' after 9/11, but it seems that for the most part, it was us that made it that way.

I've barely ever heard of these new terrorism laws catching even suspected terrorists, much less proven ones.