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Excessive Surveillance Helps Criminals

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet at 2:53 PM on June 17, 2008.


Crimefighters paralyzed by information overload.
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The attacks of 9/11 accelerated an alarming trend towards continual surveillance of ordinary people. Citizens were promised security in exchange for privacy. In fact the surveillance industrial complex is depriving them of both, and wasting their tax dollars to boot.

In today's Guardian, tech writer Cory Doctorow examines the technical side of information overload:

At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It's better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow's weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don't get tomorrow's forecast until next week.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you'll get so much information that you'll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

[HT: Boing Boing]

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Tagged as: surveillance, technology

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.


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Posted by: BlueBerry PickN on Jun 17, 2008 5:06 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
have known this for a long time now...

as well as anybody who has had to glean through mounts of information... the management of the information becomes as cumbersome & insurmountable as the original problem.

you know, like the Stazi, the USSR & WWII counter-espionage surveillance agencies

But let's not kid ourselves... THE GOAL ISN'T TO ACTUALLY SURVEIL, but to CHANGE the BEHAVIOURS of individuals TO REFLECT A STATE OF PERCEIVED -not genuine- SURVEILLANCE.

*that* is the goal.

to have us feeling we can trust no one.
to have us feeling forever surveilled.
to have us feeling perpetual anxiety & self-monitoring...

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BlueBerry Pick'n
can be found @
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Its being put up everywhere on the Hill, claiming its for protection of Congress but...
Posted by: Turiye on Jun 17, 2008 8:51 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
....anyone that is on the Hill often is quite aware that the entire Mall area has been under intense surveillance for quite some time now. The increased, or inferred increase is for us , You and me. Gosh, we're homegrown Terrorists , yeah? My we have the audacity to sit until we are listened to, if we don't move on order we are arrested. Why do you think they're shining up those AMERICANS of Japanese Descent Interment Camps? why for us, of course. Now thank them everyone, spineless rat bahstads, Congress[not Kucinich, Wexler, Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson-Lee, and a few more]violating their Oath of Office by swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States making them, indeed complicit. Cowards!!!!

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like so much else, it's profit--not security--driven
Posted by: Suzon on Jun 18, 2008 4:05 AM   
Current rating: 3    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Yes, there are some rather sinister plotters around, but much of the disfunctionality in our world is based upon three factors: fear, favoritism and guilty secrets.

Although there is a veneer of democracy in the US and UK, the wealthy advantage-seeking monarchists in both countries are driven by fear. Whether inheritors or professional looters, they obtained their privileged postions by using law for criminal purposes and must live with the possibility that justice just might catch up with them. Their fear is well-founded and drives them to relentlessly amass more wealth and power.

As there is some safety in numbers, they seek out friends to do favors for and receive favors from. This often amounts to imprisonable offences. More reason to be afraid and more reason to be ruthless.

Their guilty secrets (or not so secret guilt, as in the Bush administration) pile on even more pressure. In their "us and them" thinking, they focus on personal survival not the common good.

Anti-social people claw their way into power and use it to suppress the people they have wronged. Selling bogus security is a great business. It keeps ordinary people fearful and diverts money into already deep pockets.

The security the high-handed elitists seek is not ours, but their own.

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On the sunny side of things.
Posted by: wolfgangmo75 on Jun 18, 2008 12:56 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Systems like this are very easy for citizen activists, through co-ordinated efforts, to completely bollocks up the system.

Imagine hackers changing key information in the biometric system to show the the entire cabinet are suspected of terrorism. Imagine simultaneous acts of civil disobedience happening daily and perpetrated by 10's of thousands daily. Imagine 100,000 people with cans of black spray paint [or slingshots] taking out 1 camera each daily.

The power, as ever, is still in our hands if we decide to accept it.

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A sense of Priority
Posted by: harryf200 on Jun 18, 2008 1:32 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
It's 21.30 UK time and there has been only 4 comments thus far ... but if this had been (yet another) Marijuana article the page would be thick with comments, and so many of them accusing the State of an infringement of their liberty. Yet when we have an article that really is about something truly worrying, barely a peep!

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Observer
Posted by: davy on Jun 19, 2008 12:37 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
O !! I know. Lets take away the peoples living and wonder why we have police overload. The land of barking dogs. IS ANYBODY THINKING ?????

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