Yes, I think this part is incredibly important to understand; it's similar to laws where the penalty is a fine; devastating for many people if they get caught, but for those with wealth, it's just the cost of business to do whatever they want.
Same with the idea of persistent surveillance -- it's only as good/useful as those who control the surveillance. In the case of authorities who are willing to abuse their power, surveillance does not make you more safe with these authorities, it just means that there is surveillance data they control, and it works for them, not not for you unless they decide to allow that.
Recordings get deleted "accidentally" all the time, and for most regulated businesses, at worst it's a small fine and some forms and mandatory training, none of which would make me feel particularly better if the "accidentally deleted" video was the only proof of the authority figures beating me to a pulp.
It's the same reason government backdoors can never be a tool "for the good guys"; once it's there, anyone able to pass a correct secret to the backdoor gets in, regardless of their intent or right to be.
Surveillance doesn't make us safer by default; it is a tool like any other, and it has it's legitimate uses and illegitimate uses. I don't feel safer if a stranger runs at me in an alley wielding a claw hammer just because I know that claw hammers are usually for construction work; I'm very much so aware that while a nail might survive the impact, my flesh and bone will not fare as well. Same with any surveillance -- I do not see how it's making _me_ safer, it's instead making someone else's job easier to monitor me, and I have no idea who that might be or why they're monitoring me.
This isn't to say it's always morally imperative wrong to have some sort of surveillance; I think a closed circuit recording system in a store is maybe frustrating, but I also don't have to go into that particular store I suppose. This does become a problem though once surveillance is everywhere, and even worse, when it's non-secured surveillance tech, so anyone might get at it.
> it's similar to laws where the penalty is a fine; devastating for many people if they get caught, but for those with wealth, it's just the cost of business to do whatever they want.
The purpose of a fine is to put a price on something. Parking on the school lawn is a nuisance, so to do it you have to pay $65. For most people that isn't worth it, but if Richie Rich wants to park on the lawn every day, that's great! Now society has more than $20,000/year to spend on homeless shelters or cancer research or whatever you like.
It works as long as the fine is at least as much as is necessary to compensate society for the nuisance. And if it isn't, you've set the amount of the fine wrong.
But the amount of the fine is the same for everyone because the amount of the nuisance is the same for everyone. You don't get a discount if you have less money because you only get to do it if you're willing to more than compensate society for the cost you're imposing.
The problem with surveillance is entirely different: It's not that powerful people don't suffer the same penalty as everyone else, it's that they excuse themselves from that penalty because the recording is "lost" whenever it's to their advantage. And a technology which is only used by the powerful to oppress is to be destroyed.
Late reply I'm sure you'll never see, but I do not agree with the idea that such a system is a betterment for society given our approaches to prison and arrests.
The law should be consistent for all persons; any punishments should be consistent and equal for the same crimes, while being reasonable punishment. If a rich kid can continue doing something destructive that we all agree is bad, the fact that they pay us $65 each time they do it is not relevant, and it more or less proves my original point; the law was made to prevent the senseless destruction, and just because someone is rich they can do what they want.
One of the big problems of this is that it treats criminal acts as a revenue stream; the point of the law isn't to fill the coffers, it's to keep everyone from just doing whatever they want without consideration for the consequences of their actions. An eye for an eye is great in theory, but is anyone really better off with two half-blind persons? Not to speak of recidivism; in your example, the intended behavior is we don't want people parking anywhere except designated parking spaces; if the penalty is just a fine, then really all it does is commoditize the activity the law is meaning to address. "You can't do this, unless you pay of course"
It's a similar idea to bail and to justice; consider two persons caught with coke, one who is wealthy and one who is not. We have the laws on cocaine because supposedly it's so vile towards society that it must be controlled (this is debatable, but not relevant). But, if someone can afford bail and the fines and walk free within a few hours and another will likely sit in jail for long time and be deprived of their freedom, the punishments aren't really the same in practice, even though on paper they are the same.
These are edge-cases yes, but they're edge-cases that are incredibly common and very impactful and harmful if you can't afford them. Having wealth negatively influences the justice system, and not in a way that is a betterment for society; society might get a booster of 20k as you proposed, but now the school or anyone who Richie Rich wants to bother by parking their car anywhere has no recourse against the action; Richie Rich already "paid" their debt to society quite literally with money, while still doing the stuff that society specifically said "hey stop that"; yes, in real life Richie Rich _might_ get enough instances where someone takes action or maybe the school will get a restraining order, but again, why should they have to? If the laws were agreed upon to generally be best for society, why is it alright to "just pay a fine" and allow the person to continue doing whatever they want? What about the law which is meant to prevent this action? Just because someone has money they should be allowed to violate it?
> It's not that powerful people don't suffer the same penalty as everyone else, it's that they excuse themselves from that penalty because the recording is "lost" whenever it's to their advantage.
I'm not sure how your two sentences can both ring true for you frankly speaking. The penalty of surveillance as I described it is that most people have 0 control over who records what about their lives, who is recording and where and when, etc. And worse, the actors implementing the surveillance are trying to make it _the law that they must have access_, even though there is 0 reason to believe that it will be used for the good of society based on the clearly recorded and documented abuses of this surveillance power by those in authority. If surveillance that you do not control can only harm you, not help you, and if those in power control the surveillance, then no, they do not have the same penalty; they are the adjudicators as to who the surveillance will help because they control it; if they don't want a penalty due to the surveillance of themselves, then there isn't a penalty -- how could there be? Credibility in technical matters only goes so far; let us not forget that footage of a person accused of murder shooting people was thrown out of court because the video was enlarged for viewing purposes, and thus considered "altered", as argued by the Defense;† the courts have very little patience for technological quibbles is the point, as while the statement is technically true, it's not like enlargement algorithms for video are some mystery, and it wasn't even argued that the content's expression and message changed, just that the video had been altered.
It's very scary stuff for me about surveillance and talks of justice, as it's far too easy to get into really spooky and bad situations as they are so many real life edge cases that absolutely are ripe for abuse (and frequently abused), especially by those in positions of authority and especially by the rich. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have frequently called out other for defamation, but openly will espouse any statements factually about just about anyone; Elon called the cave diver a pedophile, the mere accusation of which is enough to cause a ton of trouble for just about anyone. Somehow Elon won that law suit, and I'm not confident that a less rich person would have.
>It works as long as the fine is at least as much as is necessary to compensate society for the nuisance. And if it isn't, you've set the amount of the fine wrong.
I will end the rant that no one will read with this comment, which is the one that triggered me to respond to this: I don't think it's a good idea to commoditize punishments like this. It focuses purely on an if>then understanding of justice and law that only tries to satisfy a code-like logic. I wrote before the law should be applied equally, and I do maintain this; the total punishment as a result of the crime should be equal; if being able to pay to get less punishment overall is possible, then the fine is just a fee that rich people can pay to do what they want. This is not an argument for minimum sentencing guidelines, it is about appropriate responses to the infraction that are consistent and equally impactful; if being poor means that parking on a lawn (regardless of intent) deprives you of freedom because you couldn't pay a fine or bail right away, then the impact of the law for the person without money is greater than that of someone with money.
It similarly ignores intent -- if the person with money intends to continue breaking the law because they can pay it, then society is not made whole by the fines they pay; the behavior the law is intended to prevent and discourage is still happening, and increasing the fine equally for everyone just makes the impact for those without wealth even worse, and the gap between the punishments received only grows bigger.
Wealth should not allow you to skirt the law or punishment -- I understand that's quite idealistic and I have no doubts that we will not see this as a reality in some time; but let's not pretend that such a system is really a benefit. To use a classic scare tactic, is it really fair that a particularly bad person in bad circles can do some egregiously horrible, but avoids serious punishment because they happen to know a lot of bad people and can plea bargain while anyone else who does the same action would get the full force of the justice system bearing down on them? We would agree the two crimes are equally egregious I think, but we'd differ on whether the information given as part of the plea bargain is equal to the punishment the other person received, and I would not call the plea bargain in support of justice so much as just a quick way to get out of jail that actually encourages more bad behavior from the individual -- after all, the only reason they got a plea bargain is because they did enough illegal/bad stuff with other people that they have a treasure trove of knowledge. I sincerely question if the justice applied in such a situation will prevent the person from doing such activities again, or if they'll be emboldened to realize how much power they have to barter, and want to get more so they can get out even faster next time.
I strongly urge you to revisit your thoughts on justice, as the edge case failures are a matter of life and death sometimes, of having a normal life or being in prison for the rest of your days because you could't afford the same fines/fees/lawyers as someone else guilty of the same crime. And the edge cases are very common to the point that depending on who you are, it's almost expected that you will be targeted by police.
Justice cannot exist in such a system via fines; that's not justice, that's a class system enforced by the state, who will use violence to enforce it if required. I cannot find a favorable interpretation of such a system, even if it at first blush appears to be beneficial.
That's the beauty of widespread surveillance and easy bulk storage - there's no reason to give any of the surveilled parties the power to control the data. Camera records the footage and sends it to a centralized storage facility, where it is automatically deleted after 5 years or some other length of time. As long as there's enough storage space for the relevant time frame's worth of footage, there's no reason any person needs to be able to delete it. If it's on a server hundreds of miles away what can some petty bureaucrat do even if they wanted to?
I mean, it's a nice thought, but it does not change the situation I described. The persons with the power of authority determine whether or not the surveillance data can be accessed.
In the example I mentioned where the only footage of violence against me by persons is controlled by the persons themselves, what does it matter if it gets sent to S3 with immutability for 10 years? I still can't get that data if they don't want me to, in some countries the legal discovery process might _say_ all parties in a legal dispute must comply with the discovery process, but if one of the parties states they simply don't have the data, the courts can't do much of anything in such cases.
(The following statement is not to decry encryption, but more just to show that "deletion" is just an example there are many ways to "lose" such surveillance)
What if instead of deleting, we said "could not accesses, whoopsiekittens"? Let's say they do send the data to a centralized storage center, and naturally, they're encrypting all the data they send as per best practices? What exactly would I or anyone in my situation be able to do if the company "lost" the encryption key? Or they retrieve the data, muck a bit with the file to make it unreadable, and then just say "welp, guess just bad luck here"?
Unless it's _all open and all accessible_, it just means that those with the surveillance data have the power to use it however they want. Their excuses may be disprovable over time, but how long do you think most reasonable people would believe me if I tried to convince them that every excuse created was an intentional deception? How could I even prove it in most cases?
I am not advocating for non-stop surveillance and full open access to that surveillance to be clear; I have not thought what a system like that would look like and I am not able to say how it could work "for everyone", nor do I think it really could.
That's not the point, the point is instead that no matter how it's stored, unless everyone has equal access to it, it's still is surveillance that only those who control the surveillance data can use, regardless of what they decide to use it for. Body Cams for police in the US are a perfect example of this -- theoretically, they're for the public to use and for accountability with police, but since the police control the body cam footage and even get to decide that they don't _need_ the body cams at times, it's effectively surveillance that works for them when they want it to, and can be hidden when it works against them.
> I mean, it's a nice thought, but it does not change the situation I described. The persons with the power of authority determine whether or not the surveillance data can be accessed.
That is why you (and all the kids) wear a 360 degree camera connected to a mobile network that is backing up to a remote site you control.
Just like you want your own dashcam in the car to have the option to show your side in the event of a collision.
Or you start recording on your phone once you get pulled over by the cops.
A late reply you'll probably never see, but while in theory that works, keep in mind that (at least for US Court systems), there is an evidentiary process that must be satisfied before any of that will be considered. The police have repeatedly been documented outright beating and murdering people with dozens of witnesses and even their own body camera footage -- very few have been punished in a meaningful way.
None of what you mentioned really changes anything about my statement -- if the court date for my arrest where I was brutally beaten by officers for no reason is 30 days out, it doesn't matter that I got a video on my iPhone and uploaded it to whatever social media -- I'm still in jail, I still got the crap beat out of me, it's unclear if the video will even be accepted as evidence, the police video footage will also be considered as will their testimony.
Again, it's not about the actual video files, its about the concept of what surveillance can do, who actually is empowered by it, and who is surveilling who; the fact that there are continued policy brutality/abuse incidents despite the ever-present surveillance from all things is pretty supportive of what I'm intending to convey; they are surveilled for sure, but because they have the power/are protected by those who control the surveillance, they act with impunity because they _know that the surveillance works for them_; that is the point, not that you _can_ surveil someone if you want.
Same with the idea of persistent surveillance -- it's only as good/useful as those who control the surveillance. In the case of authorities who are willing to abuse their power, surveillance does not make you more safe with these authorities, it just means that there is surveillance data they control, and it works for them, not not for you unless they decide to allow that.
Recordings get deleted "accidentally" all the time, and for most regulated businesses, at worst it's a small fine and some forms and mandatory training, none of which would make me feel particularly better if the "accidentally deleted" video was the only proof of the authority figures beating me to a pulp.
It's the same reason government backdoors can never be a tool "for the good guys"; once it's there, anyone able to pass a correct secret to the backdoor gets in, regardless of their intent or right to be.
Surveillance doesn't make us safer by default; it is a tool like any other, and it has it's legitimate uses and illegitimate uses. I don't feel safer if a stranger runs at me in an alley wielding a claw hammer just because I know that claw hammers are usually for construction work; I'm very much so aware that while a nail might survive the impact, my flesh and bone will not fare as well. Same with any surveillance -- I do not see how it's making _me_ safer, it's instead making someone else's job easier to monitor me, and I have no idea who that might be or why they're monitoring me.
This isn't to say it's always morally imperative wrong to have some sort of surveillance; I think a closed circuit recording system in a store is maybe frustrating, but I also don't have to go into that particular store I suppose. This does become a problem though once surveillance is everywhere, and even worse, when it's non-secured surveillance tech, so anyone might get at it.