I have a tangentially related problem to this, which is that I recently bought a house from a guy that was purportedly some kind of intelligence officer. My new neighbors told me he was often going to “spy conventions.” In any event, the house has around 12 security cameras (that I’m aware of), and a crazy server room setup in the basement.
I’m a technical person, but the reality is that I’m only 90% sure I successfully transferred access to all of this stuff over to me. For the first couple weeks after moving in, we hadn’t even done that.
I’ve literally never looked at any of it. But knowing the kind of guy he was, there’s a part of me is honestly suspicious of not just the cameras, but also things like certain light fixtures. There’s even a clock we hate, hardwired into the wall, pointed directly at the master bedroom shower.
His potential access aside, I’ve said to my wife before that I don’t want our kids growing up feeling like they’re always being watched. Nefariously or not, even just the feeling of assuming that someone is watching has to have a profound impact on the way you develop.
The quick and dirty method is to point your phone at the suspicious device in total darkness. A modern smartphone will pick up the infrared (your eyes won't). Or get yourself a simple RF detector (or even a Software Defined Radio).
That is a crazy situation, which I've never even contemplated!
But:
> There’s even a clock we hate, hardwired into the wall, pointed directly at the master bedroom shower
That wouldn't survive the night in my house.
It's not necessarily about the former owner being nefarious. If they reset devices before moving, or just abandoned the systems, they could be unpatched/exploitable, or even failing "open" from a security perspective.
> I’ve said to my wife before that I don’t want our kids growing up feeling like they’re always being watched. Nefariously or not, even just the feeling of assuming that someone is watching has to have a profound impact on the way you develop.
I grew up like this, and it probably made me more paranoid and prone to rebel against authority. My dad set up security cameras outside and inside the house. I kind of understood the outside cameras, though he only did it after he found out I brought my girlfriend over when they weren't home. The last straw was when he set up a camera behind my desk pointing at my monitor.
I was 16 and already mad I couldn't bring my girlfriend over, but the camera pointing at my desk put me over the edge. So I ssh'd in using the default admin password, rooted it, and rm -rf /*.
> even just the feeling of assuming that someone is watching has to have a profound impact on the way you develop.
This isn't really discussed enough. It's not just an impact on children's development, it's also an impact on adults.
If people think that they're being surveilled (whether or not they really are), that changes how they think and act. They can never really be themselves anymore. That effect is the entire reason that panopticons were invented. It's also a key part of the book "1984".
Personally, I think this means that ubiquitous surveillance is a form of psychological torture. Or, at best, it's a form of psychological manipulation.
It's poison to the very idea of community and society.
> If people think that they're being surveilled (whether or not they really are), that changes how they think and act. They can never really be themselves anymore.
Are you suggesting people cannot be themselves when they are being watched through a camera? Wonder what the implications are in the social media era.
> MCLUHAN: And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity.
> They become alienated from themselves very quickly, and then they seek all sorts of bizarre outlets to establish some sort of identity by put-ons. Show business had been one way of establishing identity by just put-ons. And without the put-on, you're a nobody. And so people are learning show business as an ordinary daily way of survival. It's called role-playing.
> Are you suggesting people cannot be themselves when they are being watched through a camera?
Yes, this is really well established. Not just through a camera, either. This happens with all kinds of surveillance.
For instance, when people are aware of relatively innocuous things such as software telemetry or that streaming services are paying attention to what you watch, they will use the software or streaming differently than if they aren't aware of it.
The classic example of this is from the days of Neilsen TV ratings. Neilsen families would routinely do things like ensuring that they let their favorite shows play on the TV even if they aren't watching them out of a fear that if they don't, they're increasing the chances that the show will get cancelled.
Or a more modern example: how many people have decided to watch or not watch something on YouTube or other streaming service with an eye toward manipulating the personalized recommendations the service provides?
This is also one of McLuhan's points. If we think we have an audience, our thoughts and actions tend to become performative for that audience rather than authentic.
Reminded me of when I read 1984 and thought "how would they ever get a camera into everyone's house" and the answer is "the people put them there willingly"
That’s a scary situation. I wonder how could someone maintain access to cameras without your WiFi login information? Maybe if the DVRs have cellular access, but I haven’t heard of those before. What an interesting problem. You mentioned your kids, but do you think you’ll ever feel like you’re not being watched?
OP said there's a server room in the basement, so if they are just using the servers as they were and connected that equipment to their network, then the guy could potentially access them.
True, but it seemed that OP was implying that he wasn’t sure he knew where every camera was. He clearly seemed to be concerned that there was a hidden camera in the clock. What do you suggest for that situation?
If I had real concerns that my own house was bugged with hidden cameras I would either contract with someone who specializes in handling that sort of thing or sell the house. If doing the latter, consider any applicable disclosure laws and what you do or do not know about the house.
If I wanted to destabilise a country with active pysops, to really
screw with the social fabric, turn neighbour against neighbour, erode
trust, stoke paranoia and lay the groundwork for a "Leave the world
behind" style tinderbox ripe for descent into civil war - then these
are exactly the kind of products and ideas I would aggressively market.
In case you missed it, this is already happening en masse. Follow the bread crumbs for many of the most prolific shit stirrers on Twitter[1] and they are, or lead to Russian sockpuppet accounts.
China does this, too but not as effectively, perhaps due to them not getting our culture as well.
1. This is just from my experiencing chasing sock puppets on Twitter. And sockpuppets are everywhere on Twitter. You've already encountered them. They typically make you mad, or discontent, or angry toward your supposed fellow Americans. Presumably they do this on other social networks, also.
Surveillance may contribute to destroying "community" and "neighborhood" but another factors is architecture, in particular in the U.S., as pointed out by this famous TED talk by James Kunstler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
Fewer pavements to walk and to arrange cafes alongside of, a lack of a market square to meet, more locked doors, more guns, more surveillance, more distrust - all contribute to the distruction of the community.
Some of this seems one-sided. I have cameras, yet I know all my neighbors. I also blacked out any areas of the camera that were catching someone else's property and let them know what I was doing. We have a good relationship with all the neighbors. We even have a cookout every 2-3 years to get people together. Seems absurd that someone would call the police just because they see someone they don't recognize in their neighborhood.
I'm sure that most people don't care or have the technical knowledge to do so. I doubt things like Ring even do it. But people who use their own setup probably would since they're likely to be a little more privacy aware.
Not to mention that in parts of the world where traditional village life still exists, it's well known that grandmothers looking out their windows throughout the day don't even bother with the blacking out bit.
I see this kind of parallel a lot but I think it's missing the key points of "human" vs. "tech" surveillance. Conversations could be overheard since the beginning of time but that would never justify recording every sound you'll ever make just because of the vague apparent similarity. A more vivid example is that being seen naked is very different from being photographed naked.
Ubiquitous high quality equipment, cheap and plentiful storage, access to many different sources of information, and algorithms to process and correlate all that have made surveillance so much more than the natural "I occasionally see/hear something and commit to memory some vague, ever changing info that can never leave my head".
Modern surveillance is in bulk, it stores every relevant bit indeterminately, it can recall in vivid detail, correlate different data points from all over the surveillance network, create patterns across time and space, and easily share all of that. Things that are out of reach for any individual or group of humans.
It depends. What you're describing probably applies to stuff like Ring. It applies a little less to stuff like my own system (not connected, limited storage so it overwrites, all on-site, no audio, limited to my own property, etc).
Yes, scale matters but the crappiest camera (not even going as "far" as a couple of hundred dollars for a few cheap cameras, a Pi, a memory card, a Google Coral, and Frigate) is better at surveillance than a regular human. Saving some simple event snapshots is orders of magnitude more reliable than someone's hazy memory. Even the simplest surveillance system is nothing like a grandma looking out the peephole and more like guards taking shifts to patrol.
Your internal surveillance system is fully within your control and mostly surveils you so that's good and a different world from cloud based external surveillance. But such a system still "surveils" more than a human could when it comes to other family members or guests just by its mere existence. Things that would go unnoticed, or easily forgotten don't have to anymore. That's a danger in itself because it cerates the social acceptability of permanent surveillance. Your kids don't get to break that vase and quickly hide the evidence because your system saved a snapshot. When that becomes normal for a person, being watched by every neighbor's Ring is a tiny extra step.
Disclosure, I run a setup similar to yours based on Frigate while taking great care to not intrude on anyone else's privacy because local laws and people don't take kindly to that. I am feeling that I'm invading my family's privacy though, which is why it tends to be on only when nobody else is at home.
"Things that would go unnoticed, or easily forgotten don't have to anymore. That's a danger in itself because it cerates the social acceptability of permanent surveillance. Your kids don't get to break that vase and quickly hide the evidence because your system saved a snapshot."
Mine is only on the outside of the house. I also don't have it set to alert, so I'm only reviewing it if I discover a problem in some other way - this is actually less intrusive than the grandma scenario. I view private property surveillance as normal - stores have been doing this for over a generation already. I do agree that public surveillance, or the collation/centralization of private surveillance is a big problem.
I understand the difference you're describing, and agree with it; consider the difference between the cost of storage and retrieval to the StaSi and to any three letter organisation today. (One potential small mitigation: if any surveillance streams had to be public, at least the watching might be mutual?)
I had just been considering that maybe we were fortunate enough to live through a local maximum of privacy: people in villages had less, and people in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse cultures much less.
(In https://barykin-pin-up.ru/#/i/neudachnoe-svidanie the young couple seems to have been hoping to get a little privacy via an afternoon rendezvous, but her neighbourhood is as, or even more, curious than the cat...)
> Before Nextdoor existed, you might see a stranger in your neighborhood and assume he’s someone’s guest or a local workman come to fix something. If you were worried, you would call a neighbor to find out who he is. With Nextdoor, your natural reflex is to take his picture and post it to the platform — and perhaps alert the police in the process that someone suspicious has been seen in your area.
> suspicious
"I don't know this person, ergo they must be suspicious." WTF, no, stop it. People have a right to be on public property and easements like sidewalks. They don't have a right to loiter, but they have a right to pass through the area. Yes, criminals do it, but so do teenagers having fun, and so do people with more legitimate reasons to be somewhere, and we can't be interrogating all of them all the time, and we (society) don't have the right to be detaining and interrogating people who have not yet committed a crime or conspired to commit a crime, or even people who have -unknown to us- committed a crime for which we have zero evidence, not even probable cause.
This sort of paranoia can lead to completely unnecessary encounters with police that can escalate when the person refuses to go along with unreasonable police demands for ID or whatever, then end up being a police abuse victim.
One certainly has the right to "loiter" (even the word is an affront) in many parts of the world. Its prohibition in (apparenrly mostly anglo-american areas) is ridiculous.
If you walk beyond your own street you'd be "suspicious" in TFA's eyes (or of the people TFA is describing) because we really can't know all our neighbors beyond a block or two.
I briefly tried out NextDoor but noped out right away after about two weeks of comments that were 30-50% "Look at this picture I took of a black person in the neighborhood. Stay safe, everyone!!" Total dumpster fire of the most awful, paranoid people in the neighborhood.
I know a case where a legal colored immigrant's father was severely harmed by police (who responded to a neighborhoods call) while hes walking on a sidewalk.
I surveil my property, but only outside. I do it, not because I'm particularly concerned with knowing the comings and goings around me, but because I want evidence in case anything ever happens I separately become aware of, like a break-in. I also want to know when a package is dropped off. That's about it. I go out of my way to minimize the privacy impact on neighbors, like having one of the cameras inside my garage but nothing for the driveway. I'm mostly concerned about covering ingress/egress points of my home from the outside, not necessarily what's happening anywhere beyond that.
Anyone who has ever experienced even petty property crime knows that the police are nearly useless and if you don't hand them all the information needed to recover your losses on a silver platter, they won't bother. The reason I invest in surveillance at all is to ensure I have something to cover my bases when I need to file an insurance claim and involve the police, but only when an /actual/ crime against my property or person has happened. I am not at all concerned about random people walking down the sidewalk and I can't imagine why I ever would be.
The arrow of society doesn't just inherently point forwards. The briefest glimpse at history can affirm this clearly enough.
Imagine we all had cameras attached to us streaming every moment of our lives to a server 24/7. You'd have suddenly eliminated nearly all crime outside those of passion, because the chances of being caught would be essentially 100%. Mandate everybody wear full-on biohazard suits outdoors anytime you're in public then you would have effectively eliminated any sort of spread of communicable disease.
These would be amazing achievements, far greater than many of the undesirable solutions might even imagine achieving. Yet paradoxically these actions would also make life far less worth living. Put more succinctly, how do you know we aren't currently going backwards?
> Imagine we all had cameras attached to us streaming every moment of our lives to a server 24/7. You'd have suddenly eliminated nearly all crime outside those of passion, because the chances of being caught would be essentially 100%.
This sounds absolutely worth the "cost." If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear; for this reason I fully embrace total surveillance, online and offline, of all citizens, 24/7.
> If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear
What if you're in a country/locale that, for example, makes same sex relationships illegal? You do have to hide it now, and so you do have to fear. Who gets to determine what has to be hidden?
Perhaps in a fascist or authoritarian society. For social democratic nations that have been educated out of such bigotry and have responsible people wielding these tools using due process, I don't see the problem.
Governments and societies do not act according to their defined type at all times. You assume a "social democratic" nation does not sometimes act in "authoritarian" or "fascist" ways, which is plain wrong. Either you're a deeply fearful person, a fed, or incredibly naive. I'm glad your view is not common.
First we discover, then we research, then we implement, then we assess the implementation.
Sometimes the assessment shows us that the implementation was incorrect. Sometimes the assessment shows us that the original discovery or research was incorrect. Sometimes the assessment shows us unintended consequences for our actions and implementations.
Ever see a city that closes down roadways to vehicular traffic, so that bicycles and foot traffic are more prevalent there?
I didn't find this piece particularly compelling. As opposed to a thought piece, this is more like a feels piece with the usual gestures at how "technology is changing us", without hard numbers or proof. Not impressed!
"Interpersonal surveillance technologies have rendered us far more visible to each other and given people a sense of security and safety when it comes to protecting their homes and loved ones. But they have not helped rebuild the one thing that human beings need to live together in peace: trust."
I’m a technical person, but the reality is that I’m only 90% sure I successfully transferred access to all of this stuff over to me. For the first couple weeks after moving in, we hadn’t even done that.
I’ve literally never looked at any of it. But knowing the kind of guy he was, there’s a part of me is honestly suspicious of not just the cameras, but also things like certain light fixtures. There’s even a clock we hate, hardwired into the wall, pointed directly at the master bedroom shower.
His potential access aside, I’ve said to my wife before that I don’t want our kids growing up feeling like they’re always being watched. Nefariously or not, even just the feeling of assuming that someone is watching has to have a profound impact on the way you develop.