<story><title>New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>asgard1024</author><text>I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. Maybe people will disagree my account, because I was quite young, but it&amp;#x27;s interesting. We didn&amp;#x27;t have gangs and certainly didn&amp;#x27;t have bad neighbourhoods (maybe 1 exception). It was a totalitarian state, and people were very afraid of police, but the surveillance was nowhere as pervasive as it is now in the U.S. (all the surveillance was done by people, not much technology).&lt;p&gt;After the Velvet revolution, it was always argued that the rise in the crime that followed was because it&amp;#x27;s now less surveillance and less totalitarian. Fair enough. Later I visited Western countries and saw they have bad neighbourhoods and gangs, and a lot of surveillance. I have trouble believing that argument now.&lt;p&gt;The point is, &lt;i&gt;you don&amp;#x27;t need all this&lt;/i&gt;, and I want to get this out. History shows, there is &lt;i&gt;probably&lt;/i&gt; a way how to structure society (I mean getting rid of gangs and bad neighbourhoods) without resorting to too much surveillance.&lt;p&gt;I think for a justice system to work, people need to have options. If they have option to have a good life, then they are less likely to commit a crime. I don&amp;#x27;t buy this will reduce crime or gangs or bad neighbourhoods, because these people don&amp;#x27;t have good options to begin with.</text></comment>
<story><title>New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>f_salmon</author><text>The major problem with mass surveillance is asymmetry:&lt;p&gt;Whenever governments get additional power to track what citizens do (and ultimately &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt;), citizens need to gain an additional degree of transparency regarding its government [0], so the system keeps its balance. If that does not happen - and obviously the opposite is the case for a very long time now - the degree of abuse of the new power imbalance will continue to increase, at the cost of the citizen.&lt;p&gt;[0] (This is something the President has emphasized, but his actions have, as we must expect from every politician, gone in the opposite direction - including the persecution of whistleblowers.)</text></comment>