It looks like anyone can “see” inside any building and recognize / identify people just by how WiFi signals bounce around the rooms.
I wonder if this could be fixed by encrypting this part of the transmissions:
I was joking with the wife about getting some land and building a big Quonset hut and split it between us and the horses. Suddenly, living in a big Faraday cage seems visionary…who knew…
1 Like
Interesting thing I didn’t know about the widely used MCP protocol to help LLM agents to interact with your system – it’s a wide-open security risk that you could drive a truck through. The API basically just passes whatever commands you give it to the OS, so I suppose in Unix, rm -f * is a thing? Anyway it is ripe for injection-style attacks.
Currently I’m testing a new dev environment that has some LLM integration in it as a checkbox feature and I was gratified after raising this issue with the development team that they don’t use MCP, give read-only access by default, and have various other guardrails in place. But I did get them to beef up the docs at least.
Of course maybe none of the above matters anymore because, in the words of Larry Ellison recently:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."
“Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded.” - Edward Snowden
1 Like
If you’re doing nothing wrong then why would you care?
Slippery slope.
Here’s an example I heard of recently of “I’ve got nothing to hide”: A guy was pulled over by the cops for something trivial, like a burned out tail light. The cop then asked the guy if he could search his car. The guy, thinking “I’ve got nothing to hide”, said “sure, go ahead”.
The cop found a bottle of prescription medication in the car. The bottle was labeled from a local pharmacy and had the driver’s name on it. It was medication for IBS. The cop used a field drug test kit on the pills in the bottle and it tested positive for fentanyl. The cop arrested the guy and took him to jail. The bottle was sent to the state lab for testing, but the lab had a many month long backlog. The driver spent a few weeks in jail before being released on house arrest (with an ankle monitor). Many months later the lab results came back and the pills were indeed the IBS medication as stated on the bottle label. Despite this result, the DA still wanted the driver to agree to a plea deal where he’d be sentenced to time served. He refused, and eventually the charges were dropped.
This is why you NEVER relinquish your rights.
“Nothing wrong” is a phrase that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I have posted on this very forum and others, in opposition to Christianity, Trumpism, and particularly the flavor of Christianity most supportive of Trumpism. I have posted in favor of Palestinian rights, green technology, abortion and progressive politics. Not to mention intellectual freedom at universities and a free press.
There’s “nothing wrong” with any of this, but this increasingly totalitarian regime might beg to differ. According to at least some of them, I am an Antifa terrorist, an anti-Semite, and a woke subversive.
Heck, thousands in this country have been swept off the streets without a charge or a warrant just for having brown skin or a hispanic name, or for protesting against ICE with any color of skin. Others have been indicted and spent a small fortune defending themselves only to have the charges dropped when it became apparent to the courts that the government had no basis for the charges and/or lied about the evidence. But the damage was still done.
Presently in your country contracts being let out to Palantir, the same surveillance company the US uses, and it’s being protested. I’m sure very few if any of those protesting have “anything to hide”, but what is illegal or at least what makes you fair game to be fucked with can change in a heartbeat.
IMO the most fundamental and most oft-overlooked right in a free society is the right to be left alone, followed closely by freedom of association and freedom from surveillance.
3 Likes
Ah, now the problem here isn’t surveillance, its a flawed criminal justice system. For example it’s absurd for someone to be jailed without a conviction, unless they represent a real threat to public safety, or a flight risk.
I was talking about surveillance in public, this to me does not involve me relinquishing any rights, now how that surveillance is used might of course, but the presence of it undoubtedly can help fight and prevent crime. In the UK I’d have surveillance cameras in all public areas, especially town and city centres. Where I live the biggest risk is not from the police, you hardly see them these days, it’s from the criminals and chavs who have noticed this, and the police station for the first time in the 60 years I have had a home here, has been moved out of town.
Of course the police in the UK seem to be accountable on the whole, I can’t speak for other countries.
Well of course if you live in a country where your rights are not properly protected, or the police possess too much power, then yes I see that.
Ah then the problem again is not with the surveillance, but how government choose to use it. I am 60, and walk through the deserted town centre in the early hours sometimes making the 20 minute walk home from family who live nearby, cameras don’t make me feel vulnerable, nor would police, quite the opposite, but I guess that is a good sign.
Yes, that is a very grave concern. Can I take a moment to smile at the oxymoron of someone who is (peacefully?) opposed to fascism being labelled a terrorist.
I sympathise, but luckily in the UK this is seldom the case. The police for the most part don’t even carry firearms, hell even the criminals don’t. Crime in the UK has been in a steady decline for 30 years, CITATION.
“Multiple UK studies show that CCTV can reduce crime”
I accept that in other countries the use of such surveillance might be cause for concern of course, but I don’t think it is the surveillance per se that is the problem.
Cops here are heavily armed with firearms, tasers, pepper spray, and billy clubs. Their uniforms look more like something military special forces wear. The federal government has had a program in place for a decade or two that gives local police forces surplus military hardware, up to and including armored personnel carriers.
On the other hand, “officer safety” is considered paramount, to the point where dozens of armed officers stood by while a gunman killed a bunch of kids in a Uvalde Texas school.
Cops are pretty much immune to disciplinary action here too, as they have extremely strong unions, and they investigate themselves (and rarely find themselves at fault). In the rare case a cop is actually fired, they just get a job with the police in the next town over.
2 Likes
Your government, courtesy of someone like Nigel Farage getting into power (or Polievere in Canada, etc), could decide on a whim to choose to use it to harm or control you.
Ten years ago no one here thought this would ever be a problem, either. Come 2036 you might be thinking the same, though I certainly hope not.
Back when it was just CCTVs with humans watching a bank of monitors and some videotape archives that were rotated out after a time, this was less ripe for abuses. Now it is all digitally archived and classified by LLMs and increasingly companies like Palantir (in the UK too) are cross referencing formerly siloed government databases. And I don’t at all trust the security around all this either.
1 Like
Well civil liberties are always at risk of course, but again the problem is not with surveillance but who people elect into power. I may be wrong, but I doubt Farage will ever be PM, though reform did alarmingly well in the local elections recently.
Oh to be clear, I always view extreme political ideologies as a threat to democracy, I am just pointing out that surveillance cameras are simply a tool, that can be used to protect freedoms or to infringe on them. I don’t fear cameras, only extremists who might misuse them, if such an ideology took hold in the UK cameras would be the least of my concerns.
That’s fine, nothing wrong with being vigilant where civil liberties are concerned, I just don’t see the sense in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So there are currently laws that protect those rights.
Like the Human Rights Act 1998:
Article 8 protects your right to a private and family life. However, this is a qualified right, so public authorities can interfere if it’s necessary for national security, public safety, or crime prevention. NB To be lawful, surveillance must be fair, necessary, and proportionate.
These laws also apply to private cameras, if they capture footage beyond the boundary of your private property.
Of course there are genuine concerns about potential abuses, but given the evidence they gather to help tackling crime, probably best to focus on the laws that help protect the public from unnecessary intrusion or abuse of power. My own feeling is that they’re here to stay.
In the UK, anyone has the right to object to cameras being placed anywhere, and the right to request copies of any CCTV images held of you. There is also a complaints procedure, and any complaint can be directed to the ICO. It’s not as if no one is questioning how they are used, or if they threaten civil liberties, and FWIW I think that is also a good thing, in a healthy free democracy anyone should be free to challenge how government act, both local and national.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” - Benjamin Franklin, 1755
My concern with the current situation is centered around the nature of the industry. You are not merely surrendering liberties to a government entity, you are surrendering them to a corporation selling subscription services to law enforcement agencies for profit.
Tie this into AI surveillance\tracking networks, also for-profit entities, and you have a perfect storm ripe for abuse.
This is Orwell, with a twist. This is not some totalitarian state prying into your actions, this is “Surveillance Capitalism”. The model is not “obedience”, it is lobbying, government contracts and freedom from judicial revue. Another mythology is birthed under the guise of public safety.
In The Lost Boys, Max tells Michael, “Don’t ever invite a vampire into your house, you silly boy. It renders you powerless” Look familiar?
Ah I’d forgotten that he was an expert on CCTV and its role in fighting crime in the UK. FYI Franklin also believed sitting naked was the secret to good health, he took these “air baths” for an hour each morning. Appeals to authority are not evidence.
Governed by laws in the UK, which is what I was talking about (see above) that help protect civil liberties. CCTV isn’t the issue, its how its used. The US has larger threats to democracy and civil liberties than CCTV, they voted in a power mad narcissist who is happy to wipe his arse on the constitution for a start.
Lets try a simple analogy, CCTV used by Hitler or Stalin is unlikely to be a good thing, used in the UK to help combat crime, with strict laws to help protect civil liberties from excessive and unnecessary intrusion, the evidence demonstrates that it works well and as intended. Caution is a good thing, generic hysteria is not.
Still governed by the same laws mentioned above, cars are dangerous intrusive and bad for us and the planet, so we try to mitigate those risks, we don’t get rid of cars.
I am dubious it is.
This is not true in the UK, which is what I was clearly talking about, the US is a very different kettle of fish.
Vampires aren’t real, and the UK law wouldn’t allow anyone to position any CCTV that surveilles you in private without your consent or good reason as described in the laws I cited in the post above.
What should be feared are laws that allow abuses of power, CCTV in the UK clearly are governed by strict laws to prevent this.
Until someone decides that the words the laws consist of don’t mean what they say, or just to ignore them. And it’s stunningly simple to do so.
These doorbell cameras everyone has – Nest is a popular brand here – were supposed to be a convenience so the homeowner could see who’s at the door, and for someone at work to see who’s at the door, that sort of thing. Come to find out, Nest has a contract with Flock, which is putting cameras all over public spaces in the US (including our city) that use AI to store images of your car, license plate, other identifying stickers and markings and put them in a database so that it is possible to know your typical movements, and things like, say, whether you attended a protest.
Now every delivery driver, ever visitor, every passer-by, that is in view of your doorbell camera is also digitized and classified. This in turn is shared with law enforcement for supposedly legitimate law enforcement purposes (package thieves or outright burglars, etc) but it’s now being used to figure out where and when to apprehend Carlos the delivery driver so he can be disappeared into one of the ICE warehouses.
Sure it’s “illegal”, even in the US, but if the government flouts the law at scale, they’ll get away in practice with most of it.
And this is another thing about laws that supposedly protect you. The courts move slowly and deliberately (as they should, in many ways) and in the meantime you can experience all sorts of harms. Also some judges are sympathetic to the regime, or to ideologies adjacent to it, and are happy to overlook your rights on thin pretenses. (And of course I’m assuming any given individual can afford to hire a lawyer and fight something in court; a political candidate in Chicago was recently acquitted of bogus federal charges for protesting at an ICE facility, but only after spending tens of thousands of dollars in court, which she’s now fundraising to pay back).
Please, please PLEASE don’t think “it can’t happen here”. Or that the groundwork isn’t already in place to erode the rights you now enjoy.
Yes cameras (or any technology) is morally neutral and it is people’s use of it that’s the problem. My argument is that people will abuse some technologies more than others because it’s irresistible, law or no laws. The tech that de-anonymizes our everyday activities deserve particular restraint in their deployment.
1 Like
It was the sentiment, not the man.
Agreed. In America we felt this was amusing fiction for years. Times change.
You are not immune to this development, either. You have Live Facial Recognition (LFR) tools deployed on public streets. Blue Light Commercial established a £20 million national framework to allow all police forces across England and Wales to seamlessly buy AI facial scanning tools. NEC Software Solutions, Digital Barriers and Bedroq are making bank on this framework.
You may feel different, but it’s the same troth, same pigs.
Agreed. We have laws that prohibit police from performing an illegal search without first obtaining a warrant. Surveillance and AI facial recognition are the loophole in these laws.
The UK is not immune either. Feel free to look up these two legal actions:
- R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis (April 2026)
- R (Bridges) v South Wales Police (2020)
The UK Data Protection and Digital Information (DPDI) law abolished the independent roles of the Biometrics Commissioner and the Surveillance Camera Commissioner.
Awareness versus panic.
It says here it was with amazon ring, and that it was cancelled after a public backlash?
“It added that the integration of its cameras into Flock’s systems “never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety”.”
I seriously doubt that is the case here in the UK, I listed some examples of companies falling foul of those privacy laws.
I can’t speak to the US, but I am dubious this would be the case in the UK.
Well this would apply to all laws of course, and laws that protect privacy from excessive or illegal CCTV footage are no different, again the evidence in the UK shows they are a massive help in fighting crime and catching criminals, I am not aware of any cases of them being used to violate human right with impunity.
I never try to predict the future, but that second claim requires evidence?
Well that’s a claim not an argument, but again I am unaware of any serious breaches of civil liberties in the UK by CCTV that have gone unpunished, perhaps you could offer some examples?
I am not convinced this is what the majority of CCTV public surveillance in the UK is being used for, there are many ways to track my movements now, credit card phone etc etc, the only way this would be a problem is if a) I was breaking the law, or b) someone else was using the technology to break the law. I am not going to do the former, and have seen no evidence for the latter. The technology warrants watching, and laws have to keep up with technology, so far in the UK the results seem beneficial and the laws effective.
TBH I am more worried about utility companies bumping direct debit amounts to steal cash and use my money as their own, their fuckers…my electricity supplier is about to get a rather terse ultimatum.
Yes, I stand corrected, it was Ring.
I don’t have much reason to believe their claims it was never launched but they intended to and it took a strong public reaction to nix it.
Right now in the US we are fighting on dozens of fronts at once so it’s a bit overwhelming.