Seen at ABC News;
Crime-fighting beats privacy in public places: Americans, by nearly a 3-to-1 margin, support the increased use of surveillance cameras — a measure decried by some civil libertarians, but credited in London with helping to catch a variety of perpetrators since the early 1990s.
Given the chief arguments, pro and con — a way to help solve crimes vs. too much of a government intrusion on privacy — it isn’t close: 71 percent of Americans favor the increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent oppose it.
I should admit that at times I’ve caved and adopted the “if I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I be bothered by being watched” mentality that so many folks seem to have.
However, I’ve done some pretty cool things in my day job when going on fishing expeditions through mountains of data, and I can only begin to imagine what could be done with the data and tools at the fingertips of the states or the feds. Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but I don’t trust the governments to not misuse those tools and that information…assuming they could get their act together to make good use of that information in the first place.
I wouldn’t see an expansion of technologies such as CCTV systems to be a big problem if controls were in place to keep that data from being abused.