Why NOT use surveillance cameras in future world

Question

I'm GMing RPG game based on Stars Without Numbers, but its happening on my personal world. It's in the 36th century of our universe and humans are colonizing planets within the galaxy.

In the far future CCTV and other monitoring equipment are very cheap and easy to install, also AI and similar programs make analyzing all recordings a trivial task. Why, in that situation, would the government NOT use it for mass surveillance? Also how to stop private people and corporations from using it apart from outright banning it?

Answer 1

It became a controlled technology when the risk became greater than the reward

Why, in that situation, would the government NOT use it for mass surveillance?

Fifteen centuries is a LOT of time for people to find and execute ways of exploiting AI driven surveillance systems. By then they will have been used by school shooters to ID and track targets, by terrorists to assassinate world leaders using smart weapons, they will have been used to automatically steal people's identities by reading information off of things in their hands, military secrets have been leaked because someone decided to proof-read a report while waiting at a bus stop. They will have been used to automatically find behavioral patterns that suggest people are cheating on their spouses so that you can blackmail people you've never even met, there are even websites where you can just type in someone's name, and the system will start sampling video of them to generate pornographic deep fakes or sex bots of them. As the technology becomes more prolific, the number of people with the knowledge base to exploit it grows until the harm it does is clearly more detrimental than any gain.

As the harmfulness of surveillance increases; so to will its utility decrease. Once a deep fake can no longer be differentiated from real footage, shady defense lawyers just need to start submitting their own versions of events to cast doubt on any video or photos submitted by prosecution and vise versa. Heck, this is so far in the future, criminals probably walk around with portable holographic projectors that can create a bubble of false narrative without ever needed to hack a single system. Together, these will lead to video and photos becoming inadmissible as evidence.

Then there is the issue of whether it makes cops more effective as a response tool. Most "crimes" go unreported because no one wants to press charges. If a person forgets their keys and has to break into their own home, there is no reason for the cops to show up. If a husband hits his wife and the wife does not want to press charges, there's not much the cops can do. If a person causes damage to property that is worth less than a lawsuit, then you are just wasting a cop's time filling out the paperwork. And that is just the time you waste before you account for forged footage. If you can only budget for so much law enforcement, then it makes more sense to dispatch them to places where you expect their efforts to result in a conviction which means going places where crimes have been reported by a person, not just a nosy AI.

Between these factors, video surveillance becomes more of a hindrance than a help as a crime enforcement tool.

In short, public surveillance systems will become the 36th century equivalent to leaded gasoline, asbestos, or blood letting. The tech might still be there in certain contexts, but the very idea that anyone ever thought it's widespread use was at one point a good idea seems borderline satirical.

Also how to stop private people and corporations from using it apart from outright banning it?

The best way to limit it without banning it is by making it something you need a license or permit for. This way, the right to place a surveillance cameras becomes more akin to owning a concealed firearms license. It's not that hard to aquire, but there is enough cost and red-tape associated with it that you start to only see cameras where they are actually needed.

Answer 2

For the same reason it's a bad idea in the present world: anyone who can get access to the surveillance network will have the same world of information as you do, but their goals will rarely be aligned with yours.

Sure, the cameras are useful for public safety, finding criminals, and monitoring those in need. They're also useful for identifying high value targets, finding weaknesses in security measures, and blinding those who rely on it too much. And if there are AIs to process all of the information streams in real time, both the risks and rewards increase dramatically.

Ubiquitous surveillance means you can always find your enemies, and your enemies can always find you. Best to keep surveillance systems separate, specific, and only mildly useful.

Answer 3

Everybody is wearing face masks to cope with the various viral pathogens floating around. Real or imagined. Indeed, they are wearing not just surgical masks, but full face masks covering the eyes. Since it seems the latest corona virus can enter through the eyes.

So facial recognition becomes worthless. Indeed, it might become the fashion to decorate the masks with the face of famous people. So every facial recognition AI starts seeing "Elvis" and "Marilyn Monroe" on every street corner.

Answer 4

One possibility:

Privacy laws

For some reasons humans got really fed up with constantly being monitored, so they simply started protesting and voting until a government got into power which did something about it. The government did not ban it outright, but made the rules and regulations of creating/owning someones personal data on video such a pain that only a select few organisations are able to comply with the rules. For example everyone would need to give explicit consent before being recorded. Definitely not worth the effort on a large scale.

Another would be:

Bureaucracy

Related to the above. As you stated, this takes place throughout the galaxy, what if the rules are so that data can only be analysed on earth or one specific planet? Or has to be analysed specifically by humans do prevent errors? Sending large data transfers throughout the galaxy will take time, and might not be viable on such a large scale.

Answer 5

Nobody trusts video footage

It's so trivially easy to fake footage, insert false video into camera systems or otherwise fool surveillance that video footage is worthless.

It's not admissable in court, and even petty shoplifters know how to deepfake someone else's face onto theirs as they steal. If you're robbed, even having clear footage is no guarantee you know who robbed you or how.

Answer 6

The Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex has a character who manages to remove his face from all recordings from cameras in real time:

He is an expert hacker, able to hide his physical presence by editing himself out of video feeds and cybernetic eyes, concealing his identity by superimposing an animated logo over his face, and hijacking cybernetic brains altogether, all in real-time.

In the Watch Dogs series of games, the protagonist is also able to evade detection by CCTV cameras while being in plain view.

In real life, people have successfully interfered with facial recognition software by using carefully tailored makeup on their faces.

---

The kind of security we're talking about is always a cat-and-mouse chasing game between those who wish to gather data and those who wish to remain anonymous. If you get enough people educated about CCTV's and they don't want to be seen, then the ones with the cameras will be playing a losing game.

Answer 7

A few ideas

A: The world is populated by clones, everyone looks the same. Video surveillance is effectively useless

B: The everyone in the population suffers from visage fluidity — their entire appear spontaneously transmogrifies every few hours. Video surveillance is effectively meaningless

C: Everyone is invisible in the spectrum of EM radiation the camera sensors can capture. Video surveillance only shows a bunch of doors opening and empty jogging suits running down the street.

D: Every body is super radioactive and emits ionizing radiation that fully saturates at camera sensor. Cameras only show bright fizzly sparkles when some is imaged.

Answer 8

Because democracy works in the 36th century and the majority of citizens voted against it.

cue incessant laughter

Answer 9

A world like that could easily appear if taking photos of people was a cultural taboo. For example, if a wide-spread religion on the planet believes that if any photos of a person exist it will prevent them from being at peace in the afterlife, then it would be impossible for the government to implement surveillance without widespread revolt. Cultural conformity would strongly discourage individuals and corporations from implementing any surveillance, even if it wasn't outright illegal.

Answer 10

"We fought a civil war not to have cameras!"

People have talked about rights, but here is now you could have it in a more believable way than just "rights". What if it went too far.

Over years and centuries surveillance grew. There were cameras in businesses, then in public streets. Soon enough there were cameras in our homes. An AI network watched everyone, and automatically wrote you a ticket for jay walking, or smoking a cigarette in your own house.

Things got worse. There were morality laws declared. Cameras were added in bathrooms. The AIs would write tickets for not saying "bless you" or for running the water for over 15 seconds when washing your hands.

There was the day people had too much. Everyone tore cameras out of their homes and burned them in bonfires. Then they marched on the streets tearing down cameras. Riot police was called in. Things went down very V For Vendetta. In the end the people marched on the government and demanded a ban on cameras.

In a month all security cameras were gone. At least from anything that's not a private business considered high security, never being placed where it may record a non employee, and it's video could only be reviewed in combination with a warrant.

These days video surveillance is a word like slavery or genocide. An unspeakable evil people died to stop.

Answer 11

The top reason surveillance isn't adopted now is cost.

Not the cost of cameras, which can be very cheap. In addition to those cameras you need storage - which can get expensive. You will also need transmitters, power (this stops many police departments who insist on dedicated transmitters, or pay engineering firms for custom solutions). There's a non-trivial amount of system architecture also involved : what does the camera do when connecting to the central server is impossible - does it try backup communication methods, compressing local storage, alternative destinations, increasing the spacing between frames or decreasing resolution to increase the time until local storage is full.

Especially in space, where time delays can be extensive and clocks can mismatch due to gravitational and velocity-based relativistic effects, it would be good not to trivialize how much effort is required to get reliable (authenticated and high quality) data into the system.

On the server side there's also a lot of decision-making (and cost). How do sensors prove who they are? What do you do with data that has arrived out of time because of broken communication? What do you do with multiple pieces of data claiming to come from the same device and time? Can anyone edit videos? How is access to the server auditable so that you can trust that what's on the server isn't deepfake? How do you associate metadata (officers and device, location and device)? How do you search through the video? What processes grainy or poor video? What do you do with the raw feed? Keep it, in case of questions? Dump it?

Who maintains the cameras - cleaning dirty ones and servicing or repairing broken ones? How do you know which cameras need attention?

Especially as the volume increases : processing raw data to add meta, fix errors, and searching become the greatest single costs.

Cost could be driven way down by a shrink-wrapped solution. However, most places want some custom answer to these questions, which usually costs more than most organizations want to pay. Even shrink wrapped, the operating cost is high - which is why many places install highly visible cameras of such poor quality as to be essentially useless.

Here's an idea of how this scales : Bandwidth = resolution x frame rate x number of cameras.

For a simple building with a hundred cameras, Macintosh 120 frames per second, and 3 megapixels, that's 3.6 Gb per second. Running that building for one year generates 108 million Gb of raw video on disks. That's only a single building with a modest number of cameras. Scale this up even further to a single planet of a modest 7 billion buildings, and now the total is very close to the number of molecules in 22 liters of gas, and approaching real physical limits on data density. But add in 9 planets and maybe 100 moons, dwarf planets, smaller bodies, and a few thousand ships and vessels in a single solar system - that's a lot. And it wouldn't be cheap.

Answer 12

Because enough people wander around with T-shirts depicting the Langford Death Parrot (or equivalent that works on the AI monitors) that monitoring CCTV becomes too dangerous.

Answer 13

From the mind of Charles Stross:

In order to prevent a hacker emulating a basilisk attack using the in-built FPGAs.

Answer 14

Because it is unnecessary

A lot of answers here give very good reasons why it wouldn't exist, because it became not feasible anymore (due to moral or technical circumstances) which all work quite well.

But here's my different approach which is rooted in it being surpassed by a better method. Which is IMHO the only realistic way that authoritarian technologies will be discontinued in this world.

Picture that: everyone has a chip implanted at birth. You need this chip for everything, shopping, transport, getting into ANY area (the world devolved into basically nothing but gated areas joined together) so except for the uncivilized wastelands there is no way for an unchipped person to be within the city.

Now, since you always know where who is anyways with these chips, WHY go through the hassle of installing widespread video surveillance? It's just unnecessary.

Sure, like supermarkets akin to the queless Amazon stores will probably still have cameras, but those spots will be few and far between

Answer 15

There is a theoretical practical limit to the amount of surveillance you can do effectively

Artificial Intelligence has a hard limit: the human interface

Even a super-advanced AI still has to be given instructions from humans (what to look for) and communicate its results and alerts to a human. The AI will have to contend with vague and conflicting rules created by humans. When you have very large amounts of footage to work with, even an infinitely intelligent AI will still have to be able to articulate to its human handlers what exactly is suspicious about a particular alert in the footage. When you have a million hours of footage a day, the AI will have to discard thousands of hours of mildly suspicious footage in order to display all the really suspicious footage.

Who Watches The Watchers?

Governments, individuals, and corporations may find, that even with the help of AI, there is an asymptotic limit to the number of surveillance cameras that can be effectively watched without the watchers and the watcher's bosses being overwhelmed by false negatives and false positives, driven by errors, biases, hidden agendas, and direct adversarial attacks.

Answer 16

well, have you ever been to a place called China? I was born in a small city there, and I have been living in Australia and Canada for the last decade. Every time I go back, I see more and more security cameras everywhere. The traffic light outside my parents apartment building is holding 11 cameras! And government officials have access to your social app data, even all these companies are private. And hence now people there reply heavily on those apps, such as wechat for everyday living (purchase anything you need for example), the government knows what you eat and when you eat stuff. In addition, the national ID card has been implemented since day 1 of the country, so they know where you are, who you are with etc.

I think BBC did an experiment in Shanghai, asking the police using AI powered facial recognition to locate a person in Shanghai while asking the person to commute in the highest population dense areas, it took the police less than 15 min.

On one end, this has made China extremely safe,if a thieve wants to pick a lock or someone's bike? Most likely they can be located within days. But when it comes to "rights and freedom", you better hope your individualism aligns well with the scope of the government.

Answer 17

traditional camera are old and quaint.

They switched to full 3d scanners that can probably even read your DNA from a distance.

Also total visual reconstruction from a single strand of DNA.

Masks and other primitive techniques will all fail.

Answer 18

Liability, incompetent law writing makes it a crime not to turn in video footage of criminals. Sure you didn't review the video and no one knew who the criminal was at the time, but at the end of the year when the local cops come to archive your footage...

Eh mate, looks like you had caught the Rotterdam Kidnapper on camera but didn't turn 'em in. That's a felony don'tcha know. That'll be 1000 future bucks or 7.543 space years in the prison chamber.

To avoid the fines insurance companies mandate 0 cameras on businesses they cover.

Answer 19

Crime is how civilization copes with bad laws. Both in that it ameliorates them and in that it gathers the data needed to discover they're bad and get rid of them. So long as law-makers are fallible, too much law enforcement breaks civilizations. Imagine what would happen to Earth's scientific research if everyone who used sci-hub got caught.

And prosecutorial discretion is no solution, because it invites too much corruption.

The first dozen planets to implement total surveillance refused to believe this. They collapsed. Billions of people died. In some cases, the planets themselves were rendered uninhabitable. People still tell horror stories about the law-enforcement nanites of Elbulon D, hopefully all destroyed when its star was deliberately supernovad, but if even one survived and reaches an inhabited planet...

But the thirteenth planet to reach that potential, blessed with detailed recordings of the first dozen collapses, held back. They deliberately underpowered their police.

Successive governments have shown varying degrees of wisdom. Enough for data-driven sociologists to calculate the ideal effectiveness of law enforcement. And universal surveillance, while not a death sentence for a civilization, is still substantially too much.

Answer 20

There's ZERO reasons for that.

Not a single advancement/technology that increases control ever fell into disuse for any reason in all humanity's history and I don't see it happening 1500 years later.

In some points in the past, when such systems couldn't be mass-produced and were one-off you could've a plausible excuse of losing know-how of closely guarded secret for such surveillance with the death/assassination of key inventors behind it. But today it is out of question for a long time already: the information is just too widespread.

Mass-surveillance provides way too much advantages. If any government won't use it for some insane reason, it will simply fall at the hands of another big agent - other government or corporation - who won't have such reservations.

It's pretty much the same with power projection advancements, like modern weapons: if you won't use them - you will fall to those who do.

Not using those is pretty much giving up on your continued existence as relevant entity.