22 August 2008
You Can't Have It Both Ways.
Just noticed this piece of genius footage over at Devil's Kitchen. I love DK's suspicion of authority, believe it or not I share the same distrust of the police etc - but if you are going to defend the right to film in a public place (which I also agree with), you cannot go around slagging off CCTV like these 'libertarians' do. They are inconsistent and they must know their argument on CCTV doesn't stand up at all from a libertarian point of view.
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When I am taking a photograph of you in the crowd on Brighton beach, I am not taking it for the purpose of seeing if you are behaving yourself as I think you should, or for the purpose of keeping you under control if I feel that you might have breached my standards of decorum
ReplyDeleteHowever, I might just consider it worthy of inclusion in my forthcoming publication, featuring idiots parading in public
scunnered: You defend the right to film in a public place no matter what the justification? Yes or no?
ReplyDeleteIf yes, then you should have no objection to CCTV.
Do you really not understand what I just wrote?
ReplyDeleteyes I do understand. Some people are filming to keep others under control or behaving themselves to their standards. Should they be stopped from doing so?
ReplyDeleteWhen they do so to enforce a single homogeneous set of their own predetermined, or preconditioned standards, on the basis that all should should conform to those, without any due recognition that other people may acceptably behave differently, yes.
ReplyDeleteI would let you walk naked down the beach, but on that I wouldn't waste my pixels
And you think you are a libertarian?
ReplyDeleteWhen the State allows me to monitor them wherever I like, I will allow the State to monitor me wherever it likes.
ReplyDeleteAt the moment, the State may do as it pleases and I may not. I have to ask to film on the States property (or it is simply forbidden), yet it can film me anywhere it choses (including my bedroom), listen to my phone calls, read my mail and email, watch where I travel, check how much I earn and what I spend it on, look at what I voted and bug my house. WITHOUT EVEN ASKING.
I demand the same in return. Or is that too much to ask?
The State is not your friend Neil. It may be an enemy of your enemies but it is certainly not your friend
Don't want to be filmed by a TV camera crew? Cross the road.
ReplyDeleteWant to be free from the all knowing CCTV? Tough shit, and you paid for it too!
I am not particularly concerned about CCTV in itself, though I am concerned about the retention of the recordings and the way that they are sold on to TV companies to make cheap TV. That should not be allowed. We are ludicrously over-reliant on CCTV - are we really that more criminally inclined than the rest of Europe? - but I can support it as a way of providing social employment for people too stupid to engage in any productive area of employment. And it could be worse, they could be immigration officials!
ReplyDeleteBut the irony of course is that as surveillance by officialdom has increased so the hostility of the jobsworth to being photographed has also increased. The scum who tell us 'if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide' are not so quick to apply that principle to themselves.
If 'Cool Hand Luke' were remade today, they'd have him cutting off the heads of CCTV cameras.