Found another interesting article on wired.com about live webcams and surveillance. The subject matter came from a recent Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Seattle this past April.
I posted it on the webcams news archive. The title is Surveillance Works Both Ways…
The basic jist is that even when a webcam is not turned on, it can have effect on the people or subjects being watched. One of the discussions was on the potential use in the prison system.
Allowing gaurds to watch prisoners without having to be physically present could cause major behavioral shifts in prisons. Which is a great idea! I mean, come on, how brutal are we as a society. I think everyone knows that prisons are really more punishment from rape, beatings and abuse/torture than the mere act of being locked up…and that is PLAINLY cruel and unusual punishment. Granted, the violent criminals (rapists, murderers, etc) on some level, deserve what they get coming to them, but there is a large % of the prison population that are not in that class. Do all those other inmates deserve to be gang raped daily, to get beaten and tortured by others? Really? Of course not! This could be a humane way to police and help solve some of the problems that go on in our horrendous prison systems.
However, the article wasn’t totally about just a prison application, it also touched on some scarier social/political issues as represented in this quote from the article:
“Mann quoted Simon Davies of Privacy International, a London-based nonprofit that monitors civil liberties issues: “The totalitarian regime is the regime that would like to know everything about everyone but reveal nothing about itself,” Mann said.”
Well, I hope you enjoyed the recent addition to our news archive on webcam applications. I find this stuff really interesting as technology finds it’s way into more and more of our lives.
type-atcha-later…
