It is always nice to know that our officials value freedom! (sarcasm)
Here's my vote: "BLAM!!! (ka-chink) "BLAM!!!" (ka-chink) "BLAM!!!"
..."I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"...
The classic response of a statist goon. If I had been there, I would have clubbed him senseless with a chair or something.
I simply can not comprehend why anyone would live or work in a city in the first place.
It seems the goons have already won, since one can not state the simple and obvious solution to this problem.
I have little problem with cameras in public places. Cameras required in private homes or businesses should require a warrant.
Damn, looks like the fascists and the communists won. This is INSANE.
If he has any intention to run for governor in 2008, he'll squash this proposal.
Under the plan, private businesses that remain open more than 12 hours a day and bars that remain open until last call would have to install the cameras also. The bill as written now would not require that businesses hook up their mandatory cameras to city networks, but Chicago Tribune reports that eventually, "the city does plan to link cameras in office and apartment buildings and other private properties to its system."
Better enforcement of the new smoking ban, perchance?
How about live web cameras in the offices of elected public officials?
I fail to see how at least part of this is unconstitutional and probably all of it. Problem is, it may never be tested.
Since most of the things that most people don't want caught on camera are not illegal, but rather, shameful, when faced with the march of surveillance, for people to remain free they need to adopt a bigger dose of "SO WHAT?" then they are accustomed to.
Yes, I bought beer. SO WHAT?
Yes, I smoked a cigar in the alley. SO WHAT?
Yes, I bought two porno CD's. SO WHAT?
Yes, I had a drink with the hottie in accounting. SO WHAT?
The whole ability to lynch people, especially politically, for little moral pecadilloes only works if most of private life of most people is not recorded.
Consider the PeeWee Herman case. Now, granted, diddling in the back of the theater was not the move of a brainiac, but the whole faux-shock: My GOD, the man DIDDLES watching PORN (GASP!!!) which ended his career...that only works because everyone else in the country doesn't have a camera in his/her shower.
You start really surveilling people - and the Hollywood types have lived under that sort of scrutiny longer - and the only possible responses are to either wilt in a puddle of self-loathing apology for being HUMAN (what your enemies HOPE you will do, so as to be able to manipulate you through the fear of "exposure" of the fact that you are a human (i.e., sinful), or you get a big dose of SO WHAT brazen bravado, precisely like Hollywood does.
Chances are, people are not going to turn into Puritans if you surveil them very long. Rather, they will lower the overall moral standards of society so that they can't be manipulated anymore by the bastards who control the cameras.
There is another option. I will call it the French option. There, there is a strict legal right of privacy, and if you start intruding on it, publishing things, etc., you get prosecuted for a crime.
Either people can protect their privacy and the current structure of morality by using the law to punish anybody who pushes a camera where it doesn't belong and attempts to use any information there, or people will have no privacy, everything will be on camera, and everyone will brazen it out.
The choice is really France, where people commit their sins and it is a criminal offense to tell anybody else about it even if you find out, or Hollywood, where everybody commits his sins on camera and doesn't give a damn.
What isn't going to happen in this life is a world where, because people are surveiled, they stop sinning. Exposed to the bright light of relentless scrutiny, people will not forego the pleasures of life in order to uphold tradition morality. Rather, they'll beat morality to death with a club so it can't both them anymore. Traditional morality always has reposed on plausible deniability and hypocrisy. If you strip away all of the ability to hide, people won't become more moral they'll become more brazen.
Hollywood is brazen because American laws don't let people hide from those who want to pry.
Paris is more discreet, because French law punishes people who pry as felons, and truth is no defense to an assault on privacy.
Because I am a fan of public morality, and think that the veneer of good manners and correct behavior is well worth the price of hypocrisy that supports it, I think that the French approach of criminalizing efforts to pry into private life is preferable to the argument "If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
Everyone is doing something wrong.
Anybody care to have a camera installed in EVERY room of their house, on ALL the time?
Didn't think so.
bump
If I only had a nickle for every time I have seen some lamebrain on FR write that.
Of course, the police chief will be first to set a good example by installing a camera in his own home.
/sarc
How many times have I heard people make this argument? When I'm taking a cr*p, I'm not doing anything wrong, but I don't want to be camcorded. Got it?"
OMG
Completely unbelievable.
Dick Daley peeping up little girls dresses coming to a bathroom near your!
Yep, the slippery slope is getting steeper.
But I remain convinced that Americans are so reflexively superstitious about "The Rule Of Law" that they will go right off the end of the slippery slope and accept tyranny, so long as the tyranny is legally and correctly instituted, rather than develop an ethic of selective observance of the law, and intentional breaking of bad law.
Oh this article just reminded me: time to buy more ammo.