[ExI] The NSA's new data center

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sat Mar 24 15:46:27 UTC 2012


On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 11:28:29AM -0400, David Lubkin wrote:

> I could envision that being taken by courts as rebuttable evidence of police
> or custodial misconduct.

Empirical evidence suggests that not to be the case. Always assuming
the matter lands before the judge, and the judge would be at all interested
(are you, a common criminal, actually bringing up charges against a cop?)
in digging in too deep, and find things which might bring trouble to him.

> For inmates, I'd like mandatory live streaming to public web channels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

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

The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" 
at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are 
able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. 
Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to 
hospitals, schools, poorhouses, and madhouses, but he devoted most 
of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and 
it is his prison which is most widely understood by the term.

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining 
power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."[1]

For some unfathomable reason this concept did never fly.

> (A publicly available real-time stream of LEO is a problem, since their work
> often depends on ne'er-do-wells being unaware of their location or presence.
> That's already an issue, thanks to rubbernecking and press coverage.)

Again, you're the hen in the henhouse asking the foxes in charge to
play fairly. I gather you never had direct experience with the seedy
underbelly of the judicial system?



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