Why is wanting to protect one's privacy considered by some as the threshold of criminal intent ?  The old "what have you got to hide ? "  argument is utter bullshit.   The implication is that if you really are not going to commit criminal acts then you will not object to surveillance.  It's emotional blackmail.

  I have an equally plausible proposition.  Notify all law enforcement personell that every six months they will be required to undergo a polygraph examination in which they will asked if they have engaged in any illegal activities or have knowledge of any other illicit behaviour by fellow officers.  A refusal to to undergo the test or an answer indicating guilt would result in the immediate loss of employment and possible prosecution.   Believe me law enforcement agencies contain  many dirty little secrets.  How many officers would be eager to work under those conditions ?   After all, cops are supposed to be "the good guys"   What have they got to hide ?

I'm sure anyone cheating on their spouse would object. So would homosexuals who are more or less in the closet.

Not a libertarian - I'm a far-left socialist.

Leaving aside the question of whether cheating on a partner is harmless, I wasn't aware that the police were in charge of policing marriages or outing homosexuals.  How would being unfaithful on camera or appearing on a police tape with a same-sex partner result in anyone who knows you finding out?

As for focus, I'll ask whatever question I like within the rules of the forum.  You can't dictate what lines of enquiry people engage in.

Can anyone name a legal and harmless activity which would be impossible if public places were under 24-hour recorded surveillance?

I'll take that as a 'no' then.

Any protesting or anti-government rallies would be ruined by this kind of surveillance. This would be used to prevent public displays of dissent. Under this kind of system protesting would result in your face being recorded by the camera and then police (or, depending on the type of protest, homeland security) showing up at your home later. This would have a horrible chilling effect on protests and rallies that the government does not like.

I agree with ProzacDeathWish that the opening post is concerned with issues that are barely important in this matter. Not being able to break unjust laws and not being able to travel and live in anomitity is the real issue here. I would rather think about the illegal activities that harm no one that does not consent to them (prostitution, drug buying) that would be prevented by this kind of surveillance.

Being able to anonymously break unjust laws is something that I value. Imagine if we lived in the 1950's and I had a black girlfriend (I'm white) and we lived in a state that had anti-miscegenation laws and the kind of surveillance that you are talking about existed and was used. The police would be paying me visit (and giving me an ass-kicking) concerning my mixed-race relationship. That kind of unjust government enforced morality (yeah, they really claimed that it was immoral to date outside your race) is something that I don't want happening today with anti-drug and anti-prostitution laws. I have never been high and I will never use a prostitute's services, but I can't stand my tax dollars wasted on surveillance and police to crack down on pot heads and guys who pay for blowjobs.

I am by no means a libertarian, but I would still like to answer the question. 

Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any legal activity which one would not be able to do.  That however is not the problem.  The problem is of who polices the police.  Who and how are those monitoring the cameras kept in line and doing what is supposed to be their jobs rather than abusing the abilities and powers they now have?  In more places and occasions than supporters of cctv's would like to admit have those hired to monitor them abused them with using them for perving, personal amusement and other such activities.  On top of this, there's been numerous occasions where security staff have become physically abusive in their roles and the company whome the cctv cameras were installed for sat on the footage until it was destroyed as part of the normal procedure, stopping the victim from being able to use this footage as they should have been able to.

It is abuse via these two methods which have been too common already, as well as other potential areas for abuse of such systems that makes me against them.

I'm again not at all Libertarian, but I see this as a severe abuse of privacy. By your logic, why not let them record every room in your house? Why not let them record every phone call you make? Democracy doesn't always work - notice prostitution is still illegal and capitalism is still legal.

It's not a straw man - going by the extremely limited way you are asking the question, what legal activity that doesn't harm others would you be prevented from doing if your entire house was videotaped by the police and ever phone conversation was also recorded by them? There is no national US speed limit (there was until the mid 1990's - it was 55 ) it's made by each individual state.

Installing these cameras in front of legal sex shops, erotic theaters, gay theaters, gay/lesbian bookstores, gay spas or other stores that people wish to anonymously shop at would kill their business. I bring up gays a lot because that is the group that recently has had Canadian censorship laws unfairly applied on them to shut down their businesses and bookstores. I suppose another weapon that the police could use against gay stores is surveillance and outing those who frequent gay stores. I think that counts as a legal activity that I would not want a bunch of random cops and the people they show the tapes to to know about.

This whole issue is about privacy: people want it, this would destroy it. I want to be able to privately, with no one knowing about it, be able to get my girlfriend a gift from an erotic store. I want gays to be able to discretely visit specialty bookstores. I want all people to be able to live their lives with as little surveillance as possible. I understand that a little surveillance in a few sensitive places is needed (like in front of the White House); but I would hate to live in a society in which my day to day activities and movements were monitored.

I am against damaging people's property; but if the police try and break up a protest, they need to send to the hospital. Police teach people not to protest by using excessive force on protesters. Everyone who sees some hippy getting maced and then beaten with clubs on the news will know not to protest unless they want to be hurt badly. We as a society need to teach the police in the same way. If the police try and break up a protest, and then are beaten so badly that they can not return to work for a week, they will know not to mess with protesters unless they want to be hurt badly. Of course, having cameras all over would prevent anyone from ever standing up to the police since they would be able to monitor your doing it. And of course corrupt officers would not be harmed by the cameras since they will make sure no one sees the most damning tapes.

The question was about CCTV in public places.  That  in no way implies the same in private places, so it is a straw man to say that the latter is by the same logic.

There are quite a lot of legal things I can do in the privacy of my own home which would become harmfull if they were monitored.  For example, I could discuss the details of a court case with a barrister but would not have the guarantee of anonymity, and thereby cause harm to a possibly innocent person by, for example, prejudicing the outcome of a trial.

In a public place you acknowledge that anyone within earshot is perfectly entitled to listen to whatever they hear and look at whatever is in their field of view.  That's why we call them public places.

It's not rocket science, but the question was about public places and not private ones.

Having said that, if I were on a government committee and I had to outline the main arguments likely to be put forward by the public against CCTV in public places, the inability of people to make any distinction between what is being proposed and the straw man people like to think is being proposed would make it easier to sell the idea to the electorate.  'For' is the position that can be marketed to people who pride themselves on being able to follow a line of argument.

It may vary from country to country (and I'm only including democratic ones here) but the legal custodian of a picture is usually the person who took it if the person in it gave his/her/their consent.  What is then done with it depends on whether those in the picture gave consent for anything other than private use (so strictly speaking the members of the public seen in the video for 'West End Girls' by Pet Shop Boys could still sue).

If a building is visible from public property, anyone has a right to photograph it, and it seems most countries grant them a lot of freedom as to what they then do with it.  The managers of a conference centre in Cardiff asked the British National Party to remove a picture of their building from the BNP's website, to which their leader pointed out that they had no obligation to do so.

As regards the earlier post about sex shops, you would still be able to visit them.  If the act is legal, it would not be part of the police's remit to do anything about it anyway.  The same goes for gay bars, strip clubs, even Marillion concerts.

 EDIT: Do these boards allow edits in previous posts?  I've just noticed I typed 'libertarian' incorrectly in the first one.

If Canadian police will misuse censorship laws to shut down gay bookstores, you can bet they would misuse surveillance to shut down more gay bookstores. I imagine that the US police would do the same thing: use the threat of outing people to kill the business of gay bookstores and gay spas. Just like in some counties the police post pictures of people caught soliciting hookers as a way of shaming people into not soliciting; they could do the same thing for gay spas and sex stores. So you could technically still go where every you wanted to; just don't be surprised when the local registry of perverts the police puts in the news paper has your picture on it because you went into a sex shop or gay bar. For that matter: why the hell are the police allowed to put pictures of men who solicit sex in newspapers and public postings? That is just messed up, the public need not be involved in these men's private sex lives.

You sure beat the hell out of that straw-man, and sidestepped addressing the issue of police using surveillance to shut down gay bookstores and gay spas like the way they misused Canada's censorship laws to harass gay bookstores.

I think police that assault peaceful protesters deserve whatever is coming to them, including long range sniper bullets between the eyes. Or even a small nuclear device detonated outside their station (say 1/4 of a KT. ) Being a cop doesn't give them dictatorial powers even though a few bad apples think so. I have nothing but respect for the majority of cops who work too hard for too little dealing with pieces of shit, but the bad ones shouldn't be protected.

I stand by everything I said, and by the way I SO wish someone would detonate a nuke anywhere between 1/4 KT and 2 KT right outside the NY stock exchange. I might even have a kind word for Al Quaeda if they did that as much as I'm against them normally. Wiping out the fuckwads that run capitalism would deserve a kind word.

Jormungander, in post 17 you used the words:

"but if the police try and break up a protest, they need to send to the hospital."

and

"If the police try and break up a protest, and then are beaten so badly that they can not return to work for a week, they will know not to mess with protesters unless they want to be hurt badly."

That sounds like advocating violence to me.  There are circumstances under which the police have the legal right to break up a protest (e.g. if planning permission for it has not been granted).

And at the risk of repeating myself, I said it was a matter for the legislators what particular laws were and, by implication, who is allowed to do what with them.  That seems to cover the Canadian issue.

 

I don't see how the question has been changed.

Can you name something legal and harmless you couldn't do if all public places were being monitored?

Another way of wording it but it's the same question.

I might one day find a Libertarian poster on one of these forums who openly states that there are examples of violent political demonstrations whose violence has not been provoked by any violence from the police, but so far I haven't.

I really don't see how that does. Canadian police driving gay/lesbian bookstores out of business in not just some issue that is left up to legislators. The police were clearly abusing certain anti-obscenity laws to prevent gay/lesbian bookstores from importing books concerning sexuality. That is just misusing laws to drive business that the police don't like out of business. Altering their anti-obscenity laws to allow the police to stretch the definition of what is obscene was their first mistake. Sadly it was actually feminists (and ironically a certain lesbian feminist in particular) who got legislators to alter the laws in the hopes that it would allow police to crack down on legal distributors of porn. The feminists seem not to have thought that perhaps the average police officer enjoys watching porn and is not going to drive those places out of business. On the other hand some police officers apparently do not like gays: so arming them with new abilities to block or seize imports of books about sexuality was the perfect way for them to interfere with the business of gay/lesbian bookstores.

Things like this are just an example that we should learn from. We need to have airtight justifications for expanding police powers. We should never just hand over new powers of seizure or surveillance to the police without a great need to. Like I said: no one needs to prove that mass surveillance is bad, the proponents of it need to prove that it is good and not monatarily wasteful.

I would see almost anything as worth it if it would destroy capitalism.

Living Free

Seriously... i have wild delusional thoughts about become a tyrannical overlord of earth and not even i would attempt shit like this

There are legal things people wouldn't feel comfortable doing if they knew they were being videotaped.  This should be perfectly obvious.  Regardless of promises that the tapes are destroyed after two weeks, or that no one looks at them unless a crime is reported (neither of which would certainly be the case in reality), people act differently when they know they're being videotaped.  Perhaps someone wouldn't feel comfortable performing a public display of affection?  People may not feel comfortable attempting to get through an intersection with a camera trained on vehicles (People break a law for running a red light, but they're also avoiding rear-end collisions caused by stopping to avoid getting caught on camera).  Protesters may be made to feel like they can't protest or demonstrate as they like, even when the activity is legal.  Even the most mundane things that people do in public could be curtailed by such video cameras.  I am sure there are other examples that you could come up with on your own.

What about illegal things that people do in public that are harmless to either themselves or others?  That is, people who smoke pot while taking a stroll, or pick up a John, or a trick.  (There are prostitutes who use my relatively quiet side street here in the gay district of Canada's largest city as a point for making transactions and I would rather them be here, unfilmed and relatively safe, than for them to have to move off to another, potentially dangerous area to commit their 'crimes'.  It's gone nearly as far as cameras to control prostitution in this area, but the community even discouraged extra police patrols and private filming of the streets to let the perfectly harmless prostitutes stay.) Television cameras could put an end to harmless jay-walking (jay-walking is illegal).

The point is that surveilance of the public curbs behaviour that people would do, legal or illegal, simply because of the way that being filmed affects people's behaviour.  A point in case that being filmed does affect people's behaviour is that when surveilance is installed in areas prone to severe and violent crime, crime rates fall in that area (and sometimes rise in adjacent areas).  That's not surveilance for the sake of it though and I'll bet that if no one knew the cameras were unwatched or non-functional (which they sometimes are) crime rates would have fallen anyhow. 

But where are you proposing the cameras go?  Right now they tend to be employed in areas rife with crime or in busy urban centres at intersections trafficed by thousands of people.  Are these proposed cameras supposed to survey every street in a city?  Would they actually be effective at their purpose (which is?) or would they serve only as a psychological barrier effectively limiting the legitimate freedoms of people to do what they wish regardless of the law?

What is a 'tuppence-ha'penny?' Is that some non-American term, or is everyone one else as befuddled as I am? I didn't realize that libertarians were like single issue groups. I thought that libertarianism was a very broad and varied political ideology; as broad and varied as conservatism or progressivism. Though I am afraid that I am one of those tuppence-ha'penny university-students that you lack respect for. What did us tuppence-ha'penny university-students ever do to you?

But seriously: does anyone here know what tuppence-ha'penny even means?

We are all in agreement there. I believe that in an earlier post I said that you would still be physically able to enter a sex shop or a gay bookstore. It is just that now almost no one would: because they might end up letting everyone know about their private purchases thanks to the kind of surveillance you describe.

I have not seen this to be true. Blair lost power because he didn't listen to the people. And it is the USA which has seen a massive erosion of civil liberties, not Britain.

If a driver rear-ends you it is because they are doing something illegal (speeding, not maintaining the propper stopping distance etc).  It's an example of a crime that people get away with because it's so difficult to get evidence that is admissible in court.  That's one thing more surveillance would help with.

You may be interested to know that road deaths are the tenth biggest killer worldwide, according to WHO figures.  Sadly for Libertarians, being seen on a CCTV camera doesn't make the top ten.  Still, at least you have the freedom to kill, and that's the main thing, isn't it?

Tuppence ha'penny is the same as 'they're ten a penny'.  By the way, although I'm still a British citizen I don't live there any more.

Why do I want CCTV?  Put it this way, if it were suggested that all public places were going to be covered by it, I can only think of cost as a possible objection.  If it didn't cost me any more taxes then I certainly wouldn't voice the slightest objection, or change much about how I acted in public places (the one change being that I might alter my route home so as to be in the CCTV zones).

This is the first time that I have seen a straw-man/accusation of being murderers. It is a little over the top. I really wonder what libertarians did to Young to make him so angry at us. I really think you should tone down the vitriol David. Do you really think we value our "freedom to kill?" I though that "don't initiate force except in self defense" was a mantra for many libertarians.

Cost, police abuse and loss of privacy. The last two parts are the important ones. But yes, this would also give the government a new excuse to frivolously waste money (while destroying some of our privacy, it would be a win-win for all!).