Its been that way since probably the 1960s and has yet to materially impact your life I imagine.

Bold claims require bold backing.

It's also in the country's favor to overclaim their capabilities.

It may have materially impacted many people’s lives by allowing western governments the required intel to sabotage WMD programs of governments who believe in first strike attacks.

I am generally pro-situational-awareness of things in public spaces.

Fair point, its hard to quantify the number of events that didn't happen because of intervention.

"who believe in first strike attacks"

Which don't exist.

In the 1960s, high resolution images were definitely possible (and taken daily from Russian territories), but only when the plane was overhead.

Cameras are so cheap now, and prices will keep falling, that I think in the future pretty much everything will be filmed.

I'm not saying it's good or bad. But it is inevitable, and we need to adjust to that reality.

They are already flying over some big cities and constantly capturing everything in car-level resolution, then when a "crime" happens they can roll the tape back and see the where the car came from.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky-2306

"Persistent Surveillance System" google blackholed of course

This is why everyone should vinyl wrap their cars. Then if anything happens, just peel it off.

A big point from the podcast isn't that the goal is to identify you or your car later as you might think. It's that they can "rewind" the footage and trace where the offender came from and show up at their doorsteps within minutes/hours. It's as much about traceability as identification. A vinyl wrap won't help that.

Also why you should wear a ski mask in every bank, in case “something happens”

Perhaps the fact that it all of a sudden became acceptable (to put it mildly) to cover the lower half of one's face has some benefits after all.

After all, who could object to a safety measure?

Yep, a video about it capturing a murder (blurry video from 7 years ago I'm sure it's even better today):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA

Unless they are using actual film, calling it filmed is not the correct term here. Everything will be recorded. Everything will be imaged. But hardly anything, if at all, space based will be filmed as it is impossible to do in real time.

David Brin has idea after thinking about future making surveillanace unavoidable. The solution is that everybody can spy on everybody else. The problem is that the government and corporations can spy on us, but are immune. I'm not sure if he means it as blueprint or inevitability with the price dropping.

I think he is wrong that everybody spying will help, when everybody discussing online doesn't. But it is useful to think about what world will be like when everybody can surveil.

Cameras are already cheap enough that even fairly poor people can afford 24/7 cameras in and outside their home.

The linked article shows they’re not wholly immune. Some publicly available technologies can be quite powerful as Bellingcat demonstrates.

It’s certainly an asymmetrical field but, especially moving forward, I doubt it will be an entirely one-way street.

The #MeToo movement made me realise that we will probably choose constant surveillance for our own protection, rather than have it imposed on us by some Orwellian government.

Can you elaborate on what this has to do with the #MeToo movement?

The fact that verbal allegations of events decades ago were enough to sink multiple people’s lives.

Hence, people will choose to record every minute of their lives out of fear of something similar happening to them.

The “I should be able to personally launch intercontinental ballistic missiles without being detected” take isn’t one I expected to see today! Less facetiously, this is like complaining you don’t have privacy when turning on your house lights at night because optical satellites can see that there is light. It’s a little silly and honestly you don’t do any privacy causes any favors with this sort of unwarranted hyperbole.

> this is like complaining you don’t have privacy when turning on your house lights at night because optical satellites can see that there is light.

Which is also concerning if the consequence of that mere-observation becomes something like "Oh, the house of Citizen #DYSTO-48195812 had its lights on during interval X-Y."

"Privacy" isn't about the raw mechanics of observation, it's about capabilities and powers and how those might be abused by other humans.

> intercontinental ballistic missiles

Well, if allll someone needs is to detect giant missiles roaring into the edge of space on a pillar of fire, then we should be ultra-suspicious if they start building a system which goes beyond that into, say, following around the hot-spots of individual human heads.

Agreed. I often waffle about whether to blind a camera--not based on where it is pointing but based on where I think the data is going.

If you want to be able to see in front of your business without going outside, fine.

If you want to feed that data into a citywide network which the police can query to see who was where at which time, less fine.

> If you want to feed that data into a citywide network which the police can query to see who was where at which time, less fine.

This is pretty much Ring’s secondary purpose, at least as Amazon continues to loosen their data privacy when it comes to LEO requests.

> Well, if allll someone needs is to detect giant missiles roaring into the edge of space on a pillar of fire, then we should be ultra-suspicious if they start building a system which goes beyond that into, say, following around the hot-spots of individual human heads.

I think you missed another possibility: that they make your head as hot as giant missile. Constant vigilance!

Hence the "tin"-foil hat: Reflective heatsink.

Not sure how people wanting some privacy means that someone

"should be able to personally launch intercontinental ballistic missiles without being detected"?!

They’re specifically complaining about their loss of privacy stemming from an infrared satellite system designed to detect missile launches.

Drops in a bucket

If it can invade privacy that badly, then detecting missile launches was definitely not the guiding design goal.

If you are not criminal you have nothing to hide. Right?

Hide my infrared signature created from my missile launches? This second amendment thing has gone too far…

This is basically what the second amendment was intended for. It starts with a bit about militias and securing the state; the intention is clearly that we should be able to buy weapons of war. Nowadays that includes missiles.

How are you going to secure a free state with a rifle? Any reasonable adversary to the US would have jets and stuff. We should at least be able to get together and buy a neighborhood SAM site.

These HOAs are getting out of control!

Recreational PATRIOT batteries.

This is benign compared to ubiquitous camera phones with unbelievable image resolution and location data, being uploaded for "free" to services with cutting-edge facial recognition capabilities, among others.

Only 9 years? Try 22 years. 9/11 changed the game. PATRIOT Act in the USA is still in effect. FISA courts rubber stamping any search order in the name of “national security”.

The idea of privacy disappeared a long time ago. FB/Cambridge Analytica/IG/TT/SC is just the surface.

There are plenty of places. Under a forest canopy. Underground, under a large overhang from a cliff. And those are just the types of privacy you don't create for yourself, or you don't naturally get through large structures.

They aren't necessarily convenient places. But it's not like you can't find any privacy privacy just because there cameras up high pointing down. It's actually probably far less intrusive and privacy destroying than the electronic device you likely carry everywhere with you that reports you location and could (if it doesn't already) keep track of when it can't report and relay it when it can again.

If you think the trade-offs of that make it worthwhile most the time, consider that there may be trade-offs here that are positive that you are discounting.

How about: walkie-talkie with decent crypto?

Suppose we design walkie talkies such that two or more units can be hooked up together in a daisy chain. While the devices are daisy chained, a button can be pressed on the head walkie talkie which will generate a random symmetric key, like 256 bit AES or whatever. This is sent over the daisy-chained bus to all the others. They flash an LED or something to indicate they accepted the key. After that they can be split up and will all use that key.

Everyone has a walkie-talkie with decent crypto in their pocket already. The problem is portable radios have limited transmission range, so you'd need some sort of a ... maybe network of towers that could pick up and re-broadcast the signal? Hmm.

This satellite can find walkie-talkies