[extropy-chat] Many eyes

[Joseph Bloch]

David Brin, who has written on the subject of the changing 
(disappearing) notion of privacy, covered this explicitly in his novel 
"Earth".

He posits a future in which private surveilance (by cameras embedded in 
sunglasses, which transmit in realtime to secure data archives) causes a 
drastic drop in violent crime. If every potential mugging victim is 
recording everything he sees, muggers become a lot less numerous.

The classic response to questions of "what happened to my right to 
privacy?" in Brin's world, is "What do you have to hide?"

Joseph

Enhance your body "beyond well" and your mind "beyond normal": 
http://www.humanenhancement.com
New Jersey Transhumanist Association: http://www.goldenfuture.net/njta
PostHumanity Rising: http://transhumanist.blogspot.com/ (updated 6/14/05)

Dan Clemmensen wrote:

> The Linux community has an aphorism:
> "Many eyes make all bugs shallow."
>
> We can extend this concept to anti-terrorism. The London police are 
> currently asking the public for any video records they may have of the 
> time surrounding the London bombings. We need to train the public to 
> immediately begin taking pictures whenever something bad happens in 
> public. The basic rule should be: If you cannot think of something 
> more useful to do, take pictures. When taking pictures, if you do not 
> have and obviously important subject, then take a multi-shot panorama.
>
> If every Londoner with a cell-phone camera had taken a 10-shot 
> panorama at the time of the bombing, we would almost certainly have a 
> picture of at least one of the bombers.
>
> To speed the analysis, we should also add a volunteer analytic 
> infrastructure. If every relevant Londoner made panoramic pictures, 
> there would be far more pictures than police analysts could process 
> quickly. But each photographer could add the pictures to a distributed 
> database, and each photographer (plus innumerable volunteers) could do 
> a preliminary analysis.
>
> Similarly, pictures from all the security cameras in London could be 
> made public. This would permit volunteers to assist the police in the 
> analysis.
>
> To increase pre-explosion coverage, the public should be encouraged to 
> make random pictures in public places, more or less continuously. If 
> nothing  interesting happens, most of these digital pictures will 
> never even be stored. If something bad happens, the pictures from 
> prior to the event would become available for analysis.
>
> Privacy? Sorry, These are pictures taken by individuals, in public 
> places. There is no right to privacy in this venue.
>
> I live in the Washington DC area. I thought of this  concept during 
> the ugly "sniper attack" situation last year.
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