South Florida cops claimed they were “forced to fire” at a 32-year-old Black man named Donald Taylor in August because he was armed and would not follow commands.
But newly surfaced video contradicts those claims, showing the Black man walking away from cops with his hands raised to his sides showing no gun in his hand when a Hollywood police officer fired a single shot as Taylor had his back turned to the cops, killing him.
The problem with mass surveillance is that, for it to be impossible to abuse, it both must be and can’t be publicly transparent.
If access is only provided to a small group and they are corrupt, it will be used against the out-group while denying the out-group any hope of using it for justice against the in-group. This is the current state of affairs right now with big tech, digital surveillance, and government CCTV.
If all the data was publicly available without safeguards—which is the only way to prevent the above problem—the problem shifts to it being used by bad actors for harassment and blackmail. No matter who you are, if you’re always watched by a camera, you will be eventually be recorded accidentally or intentionally breaking a law or some moral code. For digital surveillance, something could easily be taken out of context and used to irrecoverably damage your reputation before you get the chance to defend yourself.
When the solution to either situation is the same problem causing the other, there is no middle ground or way to reconcile them. The only way to prevent both is to just not have mass surveillance, and instead provide a framework allowing the public to create recordings that can only be used to protect themselves.
It’s in public: no expectation of privacy exists. This could in principle already be done.
You’re right, there’s no expectation to privacy in public.
HOWEVER, if I follow you around in public, every time you leave your house, all day, every day, and record all of your public activities when I do so, that’s still a crime, and it’s called “stalking”.
Furthermore, when there is no reasonable suspicion a crime has occurred, merely investigating that public footage would be akin to following that person in public, which is defined as a “search” in the eyes of the law.
So, the sticky legal issue is, you can legally record it. But, unless you have a reasonable suspicion someone has committed a crime, the fourth ammendment prevents you from watching it. If all one needs to do is watch a video to violate our rights, its perfectly reasonable to expect us not to want that video watched.
-Cardinal Richelieu
Be very careful with that desire of yours to be able to watch all people all the time the second they step out into public. Even in a magical world where all laws are sensible and just—which is, notably, not the situation in the real world—it is still possible to do a lot of harm with that kind of information.
The knowledge that someone is being recorded in public spaces doesn’t make them cognizant of every possible law they may be breaking or prevent them from breaking one unintentionally.
There are different laws at different levels of government, and it’s unreasonable to expect somebody to comprehensively know every law on the books for everywhere they happen to be. For example, you have likely broken a city bylaw you weren’t even aware of. And unfortunately, ignorance of the laws is typically not an absolute defence when breaking them. Furthermore, there are tons of archaic laws still on the books that are absurd by today’s standards. They’re not worth the cost to waste time investigating otherwise-innocuous civilians over, but that calculation changes when there’s an army of volunteers doing it for free.
But, let’s assume somebody does know every law—they’re still human, and humans make mistakes. Opportunistic blackmailers could use the public camera pointed at this person’s house to record the 50 instances where he/she accidentally parked two inches past the driveway and onto the sidewalk.
Would the city care if someone handed them an envelope of timestamped, verifiable evidence of finable offences? Maybe! It’s free money and little effort for them to act on, and you can’t run under the assumption that they will act in good faith when presented with evidence used as blackmail when you can’t even trust them to act in good faith when they’re the only ones with CCTV access. And even if the city won’t care enough to follow up with such a tip, it doesn’t matter as long as victims think they will.
No matter which way access is regulated, mass surveillance networks only create more problems than they solve.
And in the US, police will look for any possible interaction to charge you with if they decided they want to.