[extropy-chat] Transparency vs. terrorism

[Dan Clemmensen]

As a society we in the US have shown a distressing tendency to give up 
freedoms to counter terrorists.As long as we are going in this direction 
anyway, why not go a bit further. If we give up the (non-existent) right 
to privacy in public, we can make it much harder on terrorists.

Survielance cameras are relatively cheap. Monitoring surveilance cameras 
is relatively expensive. Let's put cameras damn near everywhere, and 
allow anyone who so desires to monitor them. Ten million snoopy little 
old ladies (LOLs) can easily monitor a million cameras, and they will do 
it on a volunteer basis. Each LOL monitors ten cameras at once for 15 
minutes/day. A US population of 380M must have at least 38M available 
LOLs (some are actually men.) Teenagers and adults might want to 
participate also, and many LOLs will take multiple 15-minute shifts. We 
can trade hours with European and Asian so nobody needs to monitor at 
night unless they want to.

When a LOL sees something suspicious, they push the "alert" button. The 
problem is flashed to a hundred other LOSs at random, and if at least 
ten of then agree that a problem exists, the alert for the camera is 
flashed to the professionals.

As the program becomes more mature, we can use really dumb automatic 
filtering to remove most of the cameras from consideration most of the 
time. Even a simple motion detector would increase the LOL productivity 
by a factor of ten or more.