Cute as that is, Jope, and it is cute, but I'm afraid I have to put you on double secret notice with the admins because that is obviously a chipmunk. Your license to cute is going to be under review for an indeterminate amount of time.
Radiolab had an interesting podcast recently, shared from Note to Self, on a type of mass aerial surveillance.
Quote:
In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it. After the war, Ross McNutt retired from the airforce, and brought this technology back home with him. Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from the podcast “Note to Self” give us the low-down on Ross’s unique brand of persistent surveillance, from Juarez, Mexico to Dayton, Ohio. Then, once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.
...I can see how this can be abused, and likely will be, to a degree. But listening to the story I found myself partly resigned to the idea; I see us moving into societies with more and more visual surveillance of the major cities at the least, and don't think that trend is likely to change. And it would be a strong tool for cutting deeply into solving murders, kidnapping, robbery; smuggling networks, human trafficking, etc. The backtracking on a murder in Juarez led to identifying and destroying most of a cartel, for example.
Not to say that professionals wouldn't adapt- crime would go underground literally and figuratively- make switches in tunnels, in malls, huge crowds; find ways to confound aerial surveillance.
I guess I am less worried about the government or private industry taking a photo every second of a city from 30,000 feet up and focusing that tool on serious crime, than I am about mass collection of phone data and installing back doors on computer systems for government spying.
I listened to that podcast last week or something, so I'm fuzzy on the details now, but that part about some local police force using them for things like property crimes was just super sketchy.
Mass surveillance is a drastic measure. There are definitely more worrying implementations that are going on wholesale right now, like you say, but those are horrible, too. And technologies improve all the time, ridiculously rapidly, so what is now a sort of mass uncategorized collection of grainy pictures of pixels that you search and analyze in specific circumstances could become higher resolution, auto-cataloged, centrally stored records of everyone's movements in pretty short order, and there's no official cutoff point where we specify exactly what level of data they can collect or what they can extrapolate from it.
And who would be responsible for collecting and storing that data? Who would have authorized access to it, and who would be held accountable for unauthorized access? I have a super huge, giant problem with institutions being lax and sloppy with the security of people's personal information and then just going OOPS LOL MY BAD when they fail to secure it and it gets out and fucks everyone's shit up.
Maybe in extraordinary circumstances, some limited implementation would be called for, as in the Juarez example. But for property crimes and "Oh, maybe someone will commit a one-off murder or kidnapping and then maybe we can use this to rescue somebody"? Fucking no. You're probably more likely to get someone killed doing shit like that. And also just fucking no because fucking no.
Not sure this isn't off-topic, but it's a necroed thread so I don't care that much, because it's about creeping authoritarianism in The Land of the Free that's happening on Obama's, not Trump's, watch.
Canadian (And English) border services aren't saints, can be rude fuckers and numerous experience stories told to me by Americans I know as well as news bits and internet commentary. The personal accounts and news bits I'm not sceptical about, the internet commentary, the usual grain of salt.
The experience of transiting the USA for other parts can eat a bag of dicks and I've spent extra to avoid that.
A Canadian soccer mom I know with family in Montana got held up at the border by a Dickus Maximus and found out later that it's a thing where if a Border Patrol agent along Mexico has a freak out they send them to the Canadian border to calm down. I suppose it's cheaper to let them scream at meek Canadian soccer moms than provide counselling.
Traveling to the USA, once clear of the OH GOD IS THIS THE ONE WHERE I END UP IN GUANTANAMO WHEN I JUST WANTED SOME SPECIALTY PEANUT BUTTER y'all are awesome. Love you guys, despite the penchant for leaving ammo clips in your living rooms like so many Pez dispensers.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Last edited by Kamilah Hauptmann; 12-03-2016 at 07:08 PM.
I've only ever once been searched at the Canadian border, and that was at BC. I asked them if it was normal and they said they do it a hundred times a day. I told them that even when I crossed over to attend McGill for a year, the agents in Sarnia didn't search my car. But when I read about things like this, I feel very lucky for my experiences. It helps that as a Detroiter, I've crossed the border my whole life, I'm always polite and I don't think of it as a big deal at all.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette