http://www.gvcards.com

If, on the other hand, your point is that we therefore should reduce the number of cameras, I don’t think that’s right, because the cameras are serving a purpose other than deterrence — they’re also used to collect evidence, etc. I’m not saying I support their use all over — just that the point made on the show that “post-hoc = no deterrence value” was flawed.

Well, then, we had better consider the “placebo effect” of those realistic fakes that have been available for several years, now… At what point do the people who “change their spots” begin to calculate the likelihood that they’ll be caught by a “live” cam? Will Ronald Reagan masks become a sort of “de riguer” until they’re outlawed? In the Western forests of the 70s the anti- spray activists occasionally tied a tree down with fishline, so that the downdraft of a ‘copter would release it- and catapult gravel into the sky- rattling the pilots. After awhile they’d simply go into forest plantations scheduled to be sprayed and tie a little fishline around, which, when spotted, required a ground crew to ascertain its potential danger to the spray crew. I imagine that one might see a thousand crumpled plastic grocery bags along a highway in Iraq- where 2 or 3 of them contained enough c4 to flip a Hummer. All of them will need to be treated with circumspection, as the emotional state of vehicle drivers & passengers will require it. Surveillance, flooded with “information”, bogs a system down… and then what? ^..^

He used a statistical oddity to make his claim:
The camera only catches the events that occur – it can’t catch the non-event (the deterrent) b/c nothing occurs.

The fact that something occurred in front of the camera just means that the people were stupid.

What this says, I think, is that surveillance is a means employed by those who might be dangerous rather than an inherent danger itself. That doesn’t mean we should disregard surveillance itself — like guns and nuclear weapons, it may well be better to limit access to the tools, because we can’t guarantee that only good actors will weild them. But it does put a premium on differentiating the varieties of surveillance likely to give rise to problems from those that may be useful and socially beneficial tools, and on figuring out ways to cabin the ability of bad actors to use those beneficial tools for evil purposes. If and when surveillance leads to tyranny (however mild), the fault, as always, will have been neither in our stars nor in our tools, but in ourselves.

herbert browne, at the top of the thread, Says:
///….surveillance morph into a “control” pattern…\\\

legal or illegal / moral or immoral it is about control, no?

This is like 1910, when fatal motor accidents were happening at a vast rate per-automobile-on-the-road, because every highway was filled with Mr Toads (Wind In The Willows) who had no idea how to drive. Understanding the hazards of a new and revolutionary technology takes a long while, and we’re still in the infancy of a technology just as revolutionary, and probably more so, than that of the private car.

My point was that the line between the public and the private realms are shifting fast, and that it is more important to understand that than merely to protest it, a la Bill Brown.

Yes, we could recover the level of privacy we all enjoyed as a matter of course circa 1990. That solution is easy: tear your phone out by the roots, take your computer to the dump, tear up your credit card, sell off your car–and live like a Mennonite or an Amish, driving a horse and buggy through the 21st century. I’m not planning to do that. Nor, probably, are you.

In 1974, Richard Sennett published a terrific book titled “The Fall of Public Man”, charting the increasing obsession with privacy–and narcissism–since the 18th century. Well, the narcissism hasn’t stopped, but I think our era might be titled “The Alarmingly Accelerated Rise of Public Man.”

It’s not–as I tried to suggest on the program–just spycams that are important here: it’s the irresistible fingertip technology of checking-out, checking-up, authenticating, available now to everyone at one click of the mouse. We could, like the Luddites, just concentrate on smashing the machines: I believe it’s more constructive to understand their consequences for all our everyday lives.

To PeggySue: I very much you stay “grabbed” by Surveillance.

Best to all, Jonathan Raban

Haven’t heard the show yet here in Seatle…