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Tuesday, August 7, 2012

postheadericon London Police Want To Crowdsource Guilt-Free Surveillance

One of the first proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:



a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. The concept is to allow an observer to observe (-Opticon) all (pan-) prisoners in an institution without being able to tell whether or not they are monitored.

The design consists of a circular structure with a "home inspection" in the center, whose officers or staff of the institution is able to see the inmates who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham designed the master plan to be also applicable to hospitals, schools, nursing homes, kindergartens, and insane asylums, but devoted most of its efforts to develop a design for a Panopticon , and his prison, which is the most widely understood by the term.
Like the rest of the Wikipedia entry on the subject fascinating, says, Bentham never managed to build his Panopticon, despite giving large sums of public money to do so. But his idea not only lives, has come closer, through the implementation of new technologies. Boing Boing points us to the latter approach, based on smart phones and pooling:


The Metropolitan Police expects to use crowd-sourcing to identify persons suspected of committing crimes in the riots last year in London.
officers are to carry up to 2800 CCTV images taken during the disease in August to its application for the smartphone.

What is remarkable about this particular program is the scale:
"My hope is that two thirds of Londoners who own smartphones download, and help us identify people who still need to talk.
Londoners

need to navigate through the application every week or so new images appear regularly. This is a fantastic way for Londoners to help us fight against crime. "


In the case of riots in London, CCTV images can be quite clear about the crimes committed, but the new system is being extended beyond the exceptional events:



The application also includes another 2000 pictures of persons wanted by police for crimes unrelated to the riots.
This is disturbing because there is no way of knowing what these people are accused of - that could, for example, be involved in street demonstrations against the legitimate government of the United Kingdom or against multinational corporations in the United Kingdom, which have been controversial police in the capital. This seems a real possibility, given what Facewatch, the technology company behind the system, says about your service: An online crime reporting for companies to report crimes to provide the complete package of proof required by the police

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