[LarryL]

The article is interesting and raises interesting points. For instance about the "face-recognition" impairment in police officers, which is a serious problem.

I was however surprised that this ability was not well known, I remember clearly reading stuff about it a LONG time ago. Using it in a systematic way & in a police unit may be new however.

And, of course, as EVERY TIME the topic is raised, I was aghast by the complete off-hand dismissal of the human right issues of the CCTV network. It is a HUGE mistake to underestimate the abuse potential, that's why it must be addressed NOW, because when surveillance will be 100% widespread and accepted as "normal" by people, it will be too late to go back. And we are going there very fast as the example of the UK has already shown us.

Some of the worse things are created out of very good intentions, here the police officer is clearly very honest & sincere about his use of the CCTV footage to catch criminals, but he forgets that he will NOT be the only one with access to it. I'd like to ask him: okay, so can you vouch personally for ALL the people who will use that system in the future, most of whom you have never met (and never will)? Do you REALLY believe that there will not be criminals, corrupt public servants or authoritarian officials who will access it (for nefarious purposes)? Note that this is already a HUGE issue with the secret services in all countries: there IS abuse, a lot of it is publicly known, here we'd be giving "the eye in the sky" enabling even worse abuses (more information available to more -potentially bad- people)!

From the article:

> “There is a friendly eye in the sky,” a Home Office minister proclaimed in 1994. “There is nothing sinister about it, and the innocent have nothing to fear.”

Stupid quote. The simple fact that he feels the need to say that there is "nothing sinister" is already raising a huge red flag. The truth is that history showed us that Nobody is EVER "innocent", there will always be someone to blame you for something: too thin, too fat, too short, too tall, too religious, not religious enough, etc. You know what I mean, it's a constant in humanity's history: the "need" to find an enemy, a scapegoat, someone who is "different" to blame for whatever issues are currently happening.

It is unfortunate (and worrying) that that stupid belief is so widespread (I hear and read it very often)...

[lapinot]

Completely agreeing on the dangers of CCTV. They even say in the article that the efficiency of the system is quite disputed: most crime footage will rot in a database. In general i would always be wary of an approach to security which tries to capture exhaustive information about something:

* there can and will be some form of misuse, even indirect: anti-terrorist laws in france being used to harass activists--ecologists and other; implies making things centralized which defeats security (like TLS PKI) * costs a lot of money to get a pile of mostly useless data * someone will throw some big data/machine learning at it and this gets dangerous because we start to base our police (and justice) on opaque statistical tools

Yet seeing that they use people instead of machines to do this job makes me a bit less angry.

[opportune]

To add on to your point, we have no idea what unjust laws will be passed in the future. Building the infrastructure for opression, even if not being currently used for that, is dangerous considering the uncertainty of how it will be used in the future