CCTV on America's streets

[Haggis@wk]

While revelations about government eavesdropping and data-mining operations are no longer headline news in the U.S., in Britain the debate is just getting started. Gordon Brown’s government is pressing ahead with plans to store the phone calls, text messages, and emails of every citizen for a year, along with details of every website visited.

What could go wrong?

Piq, has your Dad’s head exploded yet?

[dai bread]

Rule #1 if planning villainy: never put anything in writing, by any method. Now expanded to include telephony, mobile or fixed.

[piqaboo]

While revelations about government eavesdropping and data-mining operations are no longer headline news in the U.S., in Britain the debate is just getting started. Gordon Brown’s government is pressing ahead with plans to store the phone calls, text messages, and emails of every citizen for a year, along with details of every website visited.

What could go wrong?

Piq, has your Dad’s head exploded yet?

Probably, tho we are hoping to keep him in one piece thru the holidays.

[Haggis@wk]

CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the "routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

CCTV cameras were ubiquitius during our vacation in the UK this past August but the average Brit doesn’t seem to mind. What they resent is the plethora of red light and speeding cameras. They even have average speed cameras that time your passage between two sets of camera. Exceed the average speed limit and you get ticketed.. The number of speed cameras in the UK and Wales has now reached about 6,000 across the country, 2,500 of them being mobile speed cameras.

Speed camera detectors are big in the UK. Our taxi driver in London had one that used voice commands to warn him of both fixed and mobile speed detectors, sorta like a "Tom Tom snitch."
Aerial survelliance is going to be big here as well. The technology’s getting cheaper and easier to use. Heck, even I can be a bargain basment James Bond!

[Haggis@wk]

Pa. school spied on students via laptops

PHILADELPHIA – A suburban Philadelphia school district used school-issued laptop webcams to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit.
Lower Merion School District officials can activate the webcams without students' knowledge or permission, the suit said. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit.

[piqaboo]

That's nasty.
Easily solved - can you say "masking tape", boys and girls? I knew you could.

[Shapley]

Don't accept the school-issued laptops - buy your own or do without.

[DavidS]

That's nasty.
Easily solved - can you say "masking tape", boys and girls? I knew you could.

What about just switching them off when not in use?

[Haggis@wk]

Ubiquitous video: catching a thief:

Students sick of getting their lockers broken into and having their money disappear set up a cell phone camera to hopefully catch the crook in the act.

Deputies said the video showed the crook was Steven Simmons, 49, their PE teacher.

It’s news that spread quickly at North Marion High School. “There’s videos going around and forwarded messages of his mug shot, and it’s crazy,” said Shelby Revels, a North Marion High student.

Deputies said at first Simmons denied going into the lockers. However, when confronted with the video, they said he confessed to stealing money from students for years.

My prediction: The state Education Association will push for a law banning student video cameras in schools. . . .

[DavidS]

I was wondering whether there are any assessments as to whether CCTV cameras will be useful for catching the perpetrator(s) of the car bomb in Times Square, or might have been a deterrent against more "professional" terrorists, or have helped in some other way?

[jamiebk]

I was wondering whether there are any assessments as to whether CCTV cameras will be useful for catching the perpetrator(s) of the car bomb in Times Square, or might have been a deterrent against more "professional" terrorists, or have helped in some other way?

I don't know...but apparently they got the guy.

[dai bread]

Reports in my paper give the impression the cameras didn't help much. What got the guy was old-fashioned police work involving tracking the purchaser through the VIN on the vehicle's engine block, and its sales history.

[Haggis@wk]

Reports in my paper give the impression the cameras didn't help much. What got the guy was old-fashioned police work involving tracking the purchaser through the VIN on the vehicle's engine block, and its sales history.

U.S. police are making the same errors that the Brits are, they are trying to use CCTVs as a preventitive aid rather than what they are, a historical record. Even if a police officer had seen the guy park the car and walk away he'd have witnessed an illegal parking.

[Shapley]

I'm afraid CSI and N.C.I.S. have given people the impression that all these closed circuit cameras are capturing crime in exquisite detail all the time.

I was shocked, shocked I say, to walk in to our local crime lab and discover that they did not have one of those holographic image-producing computer screens that could instantaneously produce images from CCTV's all over the city. Are the producers of CSI lying to us about the utility of such things?

[jamiebk]

I'm afraid CSI and N.C.I.S. have given people the impression that all these closed circuit cameras are capturing crime in exquisite detail all the time.

Jack Bauer's people at CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) have all the technology. They just won't share it.

[dai bread]

I've seen several movies where the FBI or MI5 can control any camera anywhere in New York (say) or London and follow their suspects in glorious HD Technicolour. I bet every enforcement agency in the world would love to be able to do that.

I think our police monitor our cameras. I say "I think", because there was a big fuss a few years ago when it was found they didn't. If I remember rightly, someone got seriously beaten in full view of a camera, and nothing was done about it until long after the event.

[DavidS]

Looks like Big Brother isn't so big after all...

[Haggis@wk]

As I mentioned before CCTVs are nothing more than historical records. The Brits have tried to make them reactive aids but have failed miserable. First of all there are too many cameras and not enough eyes plus, when I was there last Summer there was a minor kerfuffle when it turned out cops in one city (I forgot which) were spending all their time watching couples copulating in a local park, even making copies of the CCTVs and handing them around.

I don’t know about NZ Dai, but the consequences of severely beating someone in the UK are no where near as serious as in the U.S. so most Brit villains don’t care if there is a record of that beating. The standing Liberal conundrum in the U.S. is that they can't understand why the prison population is so high while the crime rate is dropping.

[dai bread]

Beatings here are mostly a matter of emotion- someone gets angry with someone else and, depending on who's got the most friends handy, administers a beating. This is almost always without regard to witnesses, human or video.

[Haggis@wk]

Drone may be coming to Miami-Dade

This would be the first U.S. city to consider using drones and are, IMHO, inevitable. There's just too much they can do and too little evidence the courts are concerned with privacy. Which is a joke, we haven't had privacy since party lines were invented.