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**c1ue** · July 05, 2011, 04:32 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

"We're just the technology platform," he said, adding that it is the responsibility of the buyers "to meet and adhere to laws and policies" of their jurisdictions. Ultimately, Intergraph has "to manage the risk against the gain.

Businessspeak for "I vas chust followink orders"

**brent217** · July 05, 2011, 07:20 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say ten or twenty years from now.
Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.

At first sight, this pair of municipalities look pretty much alike. Both contain dazzling technological marvels, especially in the realm of electronic media. Both suffer familiar urban quandaries of frustration and decay. If some progress is being made at solving human problems, it is happening gradually. Perhaps some kids seem better educated. The air may be marginally cleaner. People still worry about over-population, the environment, and the next international crisis.

None of these features are of interest to us right now, for we have noticed something about both of these 21st century cities that is radically different. A trait that marks them distinct from any metropolis of the late nineteen-nineties.
Street crime has nearly vanished from both towns. But that is only a symptom, a result.

The real change peers down from every lamp post, every roof-top and street sign.
Tiny cameras, panning left and right, surveying traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view.

Have we entered an Orwellian nightmare? Have the burghers of both towns banished muggings at the cost of creating a Stalinist dystopia?

Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.

At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.

Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.

Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.

A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.

Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.

In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.

Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?

Technology's Verdict

Alas, they do appear to be our only options. For the cameras are on their way, along with data networks that will send a myriad images flashing back and forth, faster than thought.

In fact, the future has already arrived. The trend began in Britain a decade ago, in the city of King's Lynn, where sixty remote controlled video cameras were installed to scan known "trouble spots," reporting directly to police headquarters. The resulting reduction in street crime exceeded all predictions; in or near zones covered by surveillance, it dropped to one seventieth of the former amount. The savings in patrol costs alone paid for the equipment in a few months. Dozens of cities and towns soon followed the example of King's Lynn. Glasgow, Scotland reported a 68% drop in citywide crime, while police in Newcastle fingered over 1500 perpetrators with taped evidence. (All but seven pleaded guilty, and those seven were later convicted.) In May 1997, a thousand Newcastle soccer fans rampaged through downtown streets. Detectives studying the video reels picked out 152 faces and published eighty photos in local newspapers. In days, all were identified.

Today over 250,000 cameras are in place throughout the United Kingdom, transmitting round-the-clock images to a hundred constabularies, all of them reporting decreases in public misconduct. Polls report that the cameras are extremely popular with citizens, though British civil libertarian John Wadham and others have bemoaned this proliferation of snoop technology, claiming that "It could be used for any other purpose, and of course it could be abused."

This trend was slower coming to North America, but it appears to be taking off. After initial experiments garnered widespread public approval, the City of Baltimore put police cameras to work scanning all 106 downtown intersections. In 1997, New York City began its own program to set up 24-hour remote surveillance in Central Park, subway stations and other public places.

No one denies the obvious and dramatic short term benefits derived from this early proliferation of surveillance technology. That is not the real issue. Over the long run, the sovereign folk of Baltimore and countless other communities will have to make the same choices as the inhabitants of our mythical cities One and Two. Who will ultimately control the cameras?

Consider a few more examples:

How many parents have wanted to be a fly on the wall, while their child was at day care? This is now possible with a new video monitoring system known as Kindercam, linked to high speed phone lines and a central Internet server. Parents can log on, type www.kindercam.com, enter their password, and access a live view of their child in day care at any time, from anywhere in the world. Kindercam will be installed in 2000 day care facilities nationwide by the end of 1998. Mothers on business trips, fathers who live out of state, as well as distant grandparents can drop in on their child daily. Drawbacks? Overprotective parents may check compulsively. And now other parents can observe your child misbehaving!

Some of the same parents are less happy about the lensed pickups that are sprouting in their own workplaces, enabling supervisors to tune in on them, the same way they use Kindercam to spy on their kids.

That is, if they notice the cameras at all. At present, engineers can squeeze the electronics for a video unit into a package smaller than a sugar cube. Complete sets half the size of a pack of cigarettes were recently offered for sale by the Spy Shop, a little store two blocks from the United Nations. Meanwhile, units with radio transmitters are being disguised in clock radios, telephones and toasters, as part of the burgeoning "nanny-cam" trend. So high is demand for these pickups, largely by parents eager to check on their babysitters, that just one firm in Orange County, California, was selling from 500 to 1,000 disguised cameras a month. By the end of 1997, prices dropped from $2,500 to $399.

Cameras aren't the only surveillance devices proliferating in our cities. Starting with Redwood City, near San Francisco, several police departments have begun lacing neighborhoods with sound pickups that transmit directly back to headquarters. Using triangulation techniques, officials can now pinpoint bursts of gunfire and send patrol units swiftly to the scene, without having to wait for vague phone reports from neighbors. In 1995 the Defense Department awarded a $1.7 million contract for SECURES, a prototype system created by Alliant Techsystems, to test more advanced pickup networks in Washington and other cities. They hope to distinguish not only types of gunfire, but also human voices crying for help.

So far, so good. But from there, engineers say it would be simple to upgrade the equipment, enabling bored monitors to eavesdrop on cries of passion, through open bedroom windows -- or even listen to family arguments. "Of course we would never go that far," one official said, reassuringly.

Consider another piece of James Bond apparatus now available to anyone with ready cash. Today, almost any electronics store will sell you night vision goggles using state-of-the-art infrared optics equal to those issued by the military, costing less than a video camera. AGEMA Systems, of Syracuse NY, has sold several police departments imaging devices that can peer at houses from the street, discriminate the heat given off by indoor marijuana cultivators, and sometimes tell if a person inside moves from one room to the next. Military and civilian enhanced-vision technologies now move in lock-step, as they have in the computer field for years.
In other words, even darkness no longer guarantees privacy.

Nor does your garden wall. In 1995, Admiral William A. Owens, then Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described a sensor system that he expected to be operational within a few years -- a pilotless drone, equipped to provide airborne surveillance for soldiers in the field. While camera robots in the $1 million range have been flying in the military for some time, the new system will be extraordinarily cheap and simple. Instead of requiring a large support crew, its controller will be one semi-skilled soldier, and will fit in the palm of a hand. Minuscule and quiet, such remote-piloted vehicles, or RPVs, may flit among trees to survey threats near a rifle platoon. When mass-produced in huge quantities, unit prices will fall.

Can civilian models be far behind? No law or regulation will keep them from our cities very long. The rich, the powerful, and figures of authority will have them, whether legally or surreptitiously. The contraptions will get smaller, cheaper and smarter with each passing year.

So much for the supposed privacy enjoyed by sunbathers in their own back yards.
Moreover, surveillance cameras are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Other entrancing and invasive innovations of the vaunted Information Age abound. Will a paper envelope protect your correspondence, sent by old-fashioned surface mail, when new-style scanners can trace the patterns of ink inside without ever breaking the seal?

Let's say you correspond with others by email, and use a computerized encryption program to ensure that your messages are only read by the intended recipient. What good will all the ciphers and codes do, if some adversary has bought a "back door" password to your encoding program? Or if a wasp-sized camera-drone flits into your room, sticks to the ceiling above your desk, inflates a bubble lens and watches every key-stroke that you type? (A number of unnerving techno-possibilities will be discussed in chapter 8.)

The same issues arise when we contemplate the proliferation of vast databases containing information about our lives, habits, tastes and personal histories. As we shall see in chapter 3, the cash register scanners in a million supermarkets, video stores, and pharmacies, already pour forth a flood of statistical data about customers and their purchases, ready to be correlated. (Are you stocking up on hemorrhoid cream? Renting a daytime motel room? The database knows.) Corporations claim this information helps them serve us more efficiently. Critics respond that it gives big companies an unfair advantage, knowing vastly more about us than we do about them. Soon, computers will hold all your financial and educational records, legal documents, and medical analyses that parse you all the way down to your genes. Any of this might be accessed by strangers without your knowledge, or even against your stated will.

As with those allegorical street-lamp cameras, the choices we make regarding future information networks -- how they will be controlled and who can access the data -- will affect our lives, those of our children, and their descendants.

A Modern Concern

The issue of threatened privacy has spawned a flood of books, articles and media expos�s -- from Janna Malamud Smith's thoughtful Private Matters, and the erudite Right to Privacy, by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, all the way to shrill, paranoic rants by conspiracy fetishists, who see Big Brother lurking around every corner. Spanning this spectrum however, there appears to be one common theme. In almost every case, the author has responded with a call to arms, proclaiming that we must become more vigilant to protect traditional privacy against intrusions by faceless (take your pick) government bureaucrats, corporations, criminals, or just plain busybodies.
That is the usual conclusion... but not here.

For in fact, it is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.

Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.

The real issue facing citizens of a new century will be how mature adults choose to live -- how they might compete, cooperate and thrive -- in such a world. A transparent society.

Regarding those cameras for instance -- the ones topping every lamp post in both City One and City Two -- we can see that very different styles of urban life resulted from just one decision. From how people in each town answered the following question.

Will average citizens share, along with the mighty, the right to access these universal monitors? Will common folk have, and exercise, a sovereign power to watch the watchers?

Back in City Number One, Joe and Jane Doe may walk through an average day never thinking about those micro-cameras overhead. They might even believe statements made by officials, claiming that all the spy eyes were banished and dismantled a year or two ago. (When in fact they were only made smaller, harder to detect.) Jane and Joe stroll secure that their neighbors cannot spy on them. (Except the old-fashioned way, from overlooking windows.) In other words, Jane and Joe blissfully believe they have privacy.

The inhabitants of City Number Two know better. They realize that -- out of doors at least -- privacy has always been an illusion. They know that anyone in town can tune in to that camera on the lamp post over there... and they don't much care. They perceive what really matters... that they live in a town where the police are efficient, respectful, and above all accountable. A place where homes are sacrosanct, but out on the street any citizen, from the richest to the poorest, can walk both safely and with the godlike power to zoom at will from vantage point to vantage point, viewing all the lively wonders of the vast but easily-spanned village their metropolis has become, as if by some magic power it had turned into a city not of men and women, but of birds.

Sometimes, citizens of City Number Two find it tempting to wax nostalgic about the old days, before there were so many cameras... or before TV invaded the home... or before the telephone and automobile. But for the most part City Two's denizens know those times are gone, never to return. Above all, one thing makes life bearable -- the surety that each person knows what is going on, with a say in what will happen next. And rights equal to any billionaire or chief of police.
This little allegory -- like all allegories -- may be a gross oversimplification. For instance, in our projected city of "open access," citizens will have ten thousand decisions to make.

Since one might conceivably use these devices to follow someone home, should convicted felons be forbidden access to the camera networks?

Might any person order up a search program, using sophisticated pattern-recognition software to scan a throng of passersby and zero in on your specific face? If such "traps" could be laid all over town, a lot of fugitives might be brought to justice. But will you or I ever again be able to seek anonymity in a crowd? Will people respond by wearing masks in public? Or will safety ultimately come from unleashing our own search programs, that alert us to watchers.

When should these super-cameras be allowed indoors? If cameras keep getting smaller and more mobile (e.g., wasp-scale drones), what kind of defenses might protect us against peeping Toms, or police spies, flying such devices through the open windows of our homes?

The list of possible quandaries goes on and on. Such an endless complexity of choices may cause some citizens of City Two to envy the simplicity of life in City One, where only big business, the State, and certain well-heeled criminals possess these powers. That elite will, in turn, try to foster a widespread illusion among the populace that the cameras don't exist. Some folk will prefer a fantasy of privacy over the ambiguity and arduous decisions faced by citizens of City Two.

There is nothing new in this. All previous generations faced quandaries the outcomes of which changed history. When Thomas Jefferson prescribed a revolution every few decades, he spoke not only politically, but about the constant need to remain flexible, adapting to changing circumstances -- to innovate at need, while at the same time staying true to those values we hold unchanging and precious. Our civilization is already a noisy one for precisely that reason -- because we have chosen freedom and mass sovereignty, and that means the citizenry itself must constantly argue out the details, instead of leaving them to some committee of sages.

What differs today is not only the pace of events, but also our tool kit for facing the future. Above all, marking our civilization as different, has been its knack for applying two extremely hard-won lessons from the past.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error -- a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes. One remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Scientists have known this for a long time. It is the keystone of their success. A scientific theory only gains respect by surviving repeated attempts to demolish it. Only after platoons of clever critics have striven to come up with refuting evidence, forcing a myriad changes and improvements, do a few hypotheses eventually rise from mere theories to accepted models of the world.

Another example is capitalism. When it works, under just and impartial rules, the free market rewards agility, hard work and innovation... as it punishes the stock prices of companies that make too many mistakes. Likewise, any believer in evolution knows that death is the ultimate form of criticism, a merciless driver, transforming species over time.

Even in our private and professional lives, mature people realize that improvement only comes when we open ourselves to learn from our mistakes--no matter how hard we have to grit our teeth, when others tell us we were wrong.
Which brings up a second observation --

Alas, criticism has always been what human beings -- especially leaders -- hate most to hear.

This ironic contradiction -- that I will later refer to as the "Paradox of the Peacock" -- has had profound and tragic effects on human culture for centuries. Accounts left by past ages are filled with woeful events in which societies and peoples suffered largely because openness and free speech were suppressed, leaving the powerful at liberty to make devastating blunders without comment or consent from below.

If neo-western civilization has one great trick in its repertoire, a technique more responsible than any other for its success, that trick is accountability. Especially the knack -- which no other culture ever mastered -- of making accountability apply to the mighty. True, we still don't manage it perfectly. Gaffes, bungles and inanities still get covered up. And yet, one can look at any newspaper or television and see an eager press corps at work, supplemented by hordes of righteously indignant individuals (and their lawyers), all baying for waste or corruption to be exposed, secrets to be unveiled, and nefarious schemes to be nipped in the bud. Disclosure is a watchword of the age, and politicians grudgingly responded by passing the Freedom of Information Act, truth in lending laws, open-meeting rules, then codes to enforce candor in housing, in dietary content of foodstuffs, in the expense accounts of lobbyists, and so on.

Although this process of stripping off veils has been uneven, and continues to be a source of contention, the underlying moral force can be clearly seen pervading our popular culture, in which nearly every modern film or novel seems to preach the same message -- suspicion of authority. The phenomenon is not new to our generation. Schoolbooks teach that freedom is guarded by constitutional "checks and balances," but those same legal provisions were copied, early in the 19th century, by nearly every new nation of Latin America, and not one of them remained consistently free. In North America, constitutional balances only worked because they were supplemented by a powerful mythic tradition, expounded in story, song -- and now every Hollywood film -- that any undue accumulation of power should be looked on with concern.

Above all, we are encouraged to distrust government.

The late Karl Popper pointed out the importance of this mythology in the dark days during and after the Second World War, in The Open Society and its Enemies. Only by insisting on accountability, he concluded, can we constantly remind public servants that they are servants. It is also how we maintain some confidence that merchants aren't cheating us, or that factories aren't poisoning the water. As inefficient and irascibly noisy as it seems at times, this habit of questioning authority ensures freedom far better than any of the older social systems that were based on reverence or trust.

And yet, another paradox rears up every time one interest group tries to hold another accountable in today's society.

Whenever a conflict appears between privacy and accountability, people demand the former for themselves and the latter for everybody else.

The rule seems to hold in almost every realm of modern life, from special prosecutors investigating the sex lives of political figures, to worried parents demanding that lists of sex offenders be made public. From merchants anxious to see their customers' credit reports, to clients who resent such snooping. From people who "need" Caller I.D. for screening their calls, to those worried that their lives might be threatened if they lose telephone anonymity. From activists demanding greater access to computerized government records, hunting patterns of corruption or incompetence in office, to other citizens who worry about release of personal information contained in those very same records.

In recent years there have erupted widespread calls to "empower" citizens and corporations with tools of encryption -- the creation of ciphers and secret codes--so that the Internet and phone lines may soon fill with a blinding fog of static and concealed messages. A haze of habitual masks and routine anonymity.

Some of society's best and brightest minds have begun extolling a coming golden age of privacy, when no one need ever again fear snooping by bureaucrats, federal agents, or in-laws. The prominent iconoclast John Gilmore -- who "favors law-n'chaos over law-n'order" -- recently proclaimed that computers are literally extensions of our minds, and therefore their contents should remain as private as our inner thoughts. Another activist, John Perry Barlow, published a widely discussed "Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace" proclaiming that the mundane jurisdictions of nations and their archaic laws are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the Internet and its denizens (or "netizens"). Among the loose clan of self-proclaimed "cypherpunks" a central goal is that citizens should be armed with broad new powers to conceal their words, actions, and identities. The alternative, they claim, will be for all our freedoms to succumb to a looming tyranny.
In opposing this modern passion for personal and corporate secrecy, let me first emphasize that I like privacy! Outspoken eccentrics need it, probably as much or more than those who are reserved. Going back to the example at the beginning of this introduction -- I would find it hard to get used to living in either of the cities described in those early paragraphs. But a few voices out there -- such as Stewart Brand and Bruce Sterling -- have begun pointing out the obvious. Those cameras-on-every-street-corner are coming, as surely as the new millennium.

Oh, we may agitate and legislate. But can "privacy laws" really prevent hidden eyes from getting tinier, more mobile and clever? In software form they will cruise the data highways. "Anti-bug" technologies will arise, but the resulting surveillance arms race can hardly favor the "little guy." The rich, the powerful, police agencies and a technologically-skilled elite will always have an advantage.

In the long run, as author Robert Heinlein prophesied years ago, will the chief effect of privacy laws be simply to "make the bugs smaller"?

The sub-title of this book -- Will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom? -- is intentionally provocative. As we'll see, I think such a stark choice can be avoided. It may be possible to have both liberty and some shelter from prying eyes.

But suppose the future does present us with an absolute either-or decision -- to select just one, at the cost of the other. In that case, there can be no hesitation.
Privacy is a highly desirable product of liberty. If we remain free and sovereign, we may have a little privacy -- in our bedrooms and sanctuaries. As citizens, we'll be able to demand some.

But accountability is no side benefit. It is the one fundamental ingredient on which liberty thrives. Without the accountability that derives from openness -- enforceable upon even the mightiest individuals and institutions -- how can freedom survive?
In the Information Age to come, cameras and databases will sprout like crocuses -- or weeds -- whether we like it or not. Over the long run, we as a people must decide.

======================================

Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny... our secrets laid open... if in return we get flashlights of our own, that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm? Even the arrogant and strong?
Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?
There are no easy answers, but asking questions can be a good first step.

======================================

The Privacy We Already Have

Up to this point, much of Chapter 1 appeared earlier as a published article, and has since been perused online by interested parties around the globe. Their varied comments opened my eyes to a wide range of opinions about freedom, privacy and candor. From philosophers to steelworkers, it seems that each person views such things differently. Especially privacy, which like the fabled elephant fondled by a dozen blind sages, is described uniquely by each beholder.

Even legal scholars cannot agree what the word means. American juridical rulings tend to treat privacy as a highly subjective and contingent commodity -- a matter of tradeoffs and balanced interests -- whereas other freedoms, of speech and the press, are defended with sweeping judgements of broad generality. Some reasons for this will be discussed in Chapter 3, where privacy is examined from many angles, and shown as the exquisite desideratum that it is. Indeed, without some privacy, we could scarcely function as humans. A chief aim of this book is to explore whether -- and how much -- privacy can be safeguarded in a coming era of cameras and databases.

Alas, although it seems intuitive to protect privacy by erecting barriers to information flow, there may be good reason to question that assumption. While putting off a more involved discussion for later, let me briefly illustrate with a "restaurant analogy."

We all know it is possible to be alone, or hold intimate conversations, in a public place. It bothers people to be stared at, especially while eating, yet we dine in crowded restaurants all the time, fairly secure that most of the eyes surrounding us aren't looking our way, at least not very often. We don't achieve this confidence by wearing masks, or because laws require other customers to wear blinkers and blindfolds. Mutual civility and common decency play a role, but not alone.

An added factor that helps deter people from staring is not wanting to be caught in the act. The embarrassment accrued by a voyeur is greater than your chagrin at being seen with asparagus in your teeth. Open visibility seems to favor defense over offense.

All right, it's not perfect, but it works overall.

Now suppose we try to improve things by passing laws and sending forth regulators with clipboards -- commanding that all restaurants erect a maze of paper shoji screens to keep customers from ogling other patrons. Will this prevent staring, or increase it? Without any plausible likelihood of getting caught, might voyeurs use technology (in this case poking tiny holes) to penetrate the "protective" curtain? No longer deterred, could peepers stare with impunity?

The restaurant analogy is just a thought experiment. But it suggests there is no dichotomy between accountability and privacy. Rather, you may need one to get the other.

This is from David Brin, in his book Transparent Society. I agree with his conclusions. It is too late to put the Genie back in the bottle. All we can do now is out best to ensure that all citizens have the right to watch the watchers. I have been watching the reports on itulip with much trepidation on police departments in the USA that have made filming their officers illegal. If we do not allow all citizens the right to observe at all times, those with the power do so will be sorely tempted to abuse that power.

**c1ue** · July 05, 2011, 11:42 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

David Brin is a technotopian.

He believes that an open society can be achieved by making the means open to all citizens.

In reality, even were the means open, the capability doesn't exist.

Citizens don't have multi-billion dollar software packages connected to vast server networks which can process literally all the data (think of the Echelon type cell phone call monitoring used in "Clear and Present Danger", but extended to video).

Citizens furthermore cannot distinguish between 'real' and 'fake' easily; modern software techniques as can be previewed by modern day movie editing make distinguishing reality vs. a plant out of reach for 95%+ of the population.

If only 5% of the population can even tell what is real vs. fake - what use then is the 'open society'?

The existence of technology doesn't remove the need for government, nor the need for a shared consensus on what is acceptable or not.

In the feudal era - vast numbers of servants were necessary to maintain upper class lifestyles. This vast underclass was ubiquitous, but socially they were invisible.

If privacy is indeed a necessary component of liberty, we as a society can and must draw the line.

**sandwind** · July 06, 2011, 03:51 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

500 000 for 30 milions city? This is not too many. Look at London. If I remember good 2 milion +

**Slimprofits** · July 06, 2011, 06:45 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

2 million cameras?

This link from 2007 says 10,524 cameras in London: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/a...me-unsolved.do

**touchring** · July 06, 2011, 11:09 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

Originally posted by babbittd View Post

2 million cameras?

This link from 2007 says 10,524 cameras in London: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/a...me-unsolved.do

I count about 4 CCTVs cams on every public bus in Singapore. There are 3500 public buses, which means there are 14,000 CCTVs just on buses alone. In every metro station, there are at least a couple hundred CCTVs. Every corner is being watched. I heard they intend to install them in cabs as well.

Chongqing is a metro of 30 million people, so if they were to install CCTVs on every bus, at every major traffic junction - which they do here in Singapore, 2 million cams is definitely possible.

**nedtheguy** · July 06, 2011, 08:43 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

redacted

**brent217** · July 06, 2011, 09:08 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

Originally posted by c1ue View Post

If only 5% of the population can even tell what is real vs. fake - what use then is the 'open society'?

The existence of technology doesn't remove the need for government, nor the need for a shared consensus on what is acceptable or not.

If privacy is indeed a necessary component of liberty, we as a society can and must draw the line.

Quote from http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/003/3/00337.HTML :

With an estimated total number of journalists in mainstream news media of only about 4200, Australia (population 17 million) has just over half the number of journalists per head of population (.025%) as has the United States (.045%) (based on Wilhoit & Weaver's estimate of the US editorial workforce in 1992).So, a few years ago, when our 4th and 5th estates were working -better- than today, less than one half of one percent of the population were journalists. IMO, to your argument that only 5% of the population would understand what is going on, I say that would be 10 times the percentage that was tracking what was going on a few years ago; and as a result, if your 5% guess is correct, than we, as a society, would have a FAR greater chance of seeing wrongdoing than we are able to today.

As for the need of a shared consensus on what is acceptable... this is useless. There has NEVER been a shared consensus on what is acceptable; only legions of self righteous people throughout history that sought to impose their own ideas/beliefs/customs on "lesser" individuals. Whether the "lesser" individuals were ever asked their opinions is doubtful.

As for your third - is privacy a component of liberty? Who has argued that? Where? I can see how people like to keep some privacy, but that is different than having the freedom to choose your own path. Or do you mean, we must have privacy in order to ensure we have the freedom to conduct backroom politics to advantage ourselves at the expense of others?

**thriftyandboringinohio** · July 06, 2011, 09:45 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

Originally posted by brent217 View Post

...As for your third - is privacy a component of liberty? Who has argued that? Where? I can see how people like to keep some privacy, but that is different than having the freedom to choose your own path. Or do you mean, we must have privacy in order to ensure we have the freedom to conduct backroom politics to advantage ourselves at the expense of others?

Yes, privacy is a component of liberty.

Who argued it? Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and other founders who wrote and ratified the fourth amendment.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

That means no general snooping around in the hope you might find something by chance. We may only collect evidence "particularly described" by someone willing to make an "oath or affirmation" (i.e, sign their name) that they have a good reason to believe it will be found.

**sandwind** · July 07, 2011, 02:34 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

It depends what article you will pull out :-)

There are an estimated four million cameras in this country, with two million in London alone.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...ce-admits.html

**don** · July 07, 2011, 08:10 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

and then there's this . . .

(USA TODAY ) -- The Transportation Security Administration warns airlines and foreign security agencies that terrorists might try to surgically implant bombs in their bodies as a way to evade security.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the intelligence that led to the warning "does not relate to an imminent or specific threat." But the TSA urges foreign security agencies to ramp up security in response.

"As a precaution, passengers flying from international locations to U.S. destinations may notice additional security measures in place," TSA spokesman Nicholas Kimball said. "Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies."

**wayiwalk** · July 07, 2011, 09:10 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

Originally posted by c1ue View Post

Businessspeak for "I vas chust followink orders"

+1

I'm getting sick of our executives and their outlook on life and the "rest of us"

**thriftyandboringinohio** · July 07, 2011, 10:58 AM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."

-Mohandas Gandhi

**c1ue** · July 07, 2011, 06:07 PM

Re: WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

The existence of cell phone cameras is not the same thing as a societal more to use them inappropriately.

Cameras have existed for 100+ years; video cameras for at least 60.

What we have today is an entire world of people with a new toy in their hands, who don't understand yet what the consequences of misuse will have on society.

This is no different than mortgages during the great bubble of 2003-2007; Dr. Hudson has been speaking out to this for a generation - unfortunately only after the crash is the overall populace waking up to his message.

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WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

WSJ: Cisco and other American companies helping China build security apparatus

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