This was posted on a forum yesterday.
Orwell was wronghttps://www.politico.com/states/new...-cop-demanded-he-call-her-commissioner-381467
It seems that surveillance technologies cut both ways; are the advantages to the central powers helped or hurt by more surveillance cameras?
There is a basic rule of life: with every benefit, there is a liability. In other words, we don't get something for nothing.
With the spread of surveillance cameras, the state appears to get something for almost nothing. This is an illusion. The reason why surveillance cameras are being installed right and left is simple to explain: the steadily falling cost of buying the cameras and then retrieving the data. The main cost is the installation cost. The old economic law holds true: when the price falls, more is demanded. That is what is happening with public surveillance.
But there are hidden costs. This is also known as the fallacy of the thing not seen. These costs are rarely discussed. These are costs associated with evaluating the data and then taking action in terms of the data. At least at this stage of development, algorithms cannot do this. Somebody in authority has to bring charges. That means manpower. Furthermore, for serious charges, it means highly specialized, highly trained manpower. This gets expensive, fast. So, while the government has the ability to observe us, save the data, and retrieve it in terms of time and place, it does not have the ability to take action at a low cost.
There is now an enormous jam-up of data. This is going to increase exponentially. If someone can identify exactly when and where a particular event supposedly took place, the information-retrieval systems will allow the government to verify or disprove the accusation. But some human being has to make the initial identification. There has to be a human witness. Somebody has to identify the time and place at least approximately. All of this takes human labor. It also takes skilled human judgment to evaluate what is on screen. None of this is cheap.
THE SMARTPHONE
Consider the individual smartphone. In any developed economy, over half the population owns one. This is spreading fast across the globe.
An individual makes a decision to record something. This involves human judgment. The person is willing to donate his time to record the video. He may also be willing to post this video on YouTube. This costs no money. All of this is donated time. It has to do with the motivation of the individual who has seen a particular event. He has a tool that enables him to record the event. This is decentralized technology. The ability to record events is now so widespread that the government cannot stop it.
For at least two generations, economists have offered this economic analysis of politics. The individual who seeks a benefit from the government is highly motivated to gain the benefit. He will spend time and money to influence politicians or bureaucrats either to pass a law or interpret an existing law in such a way that it will favor him. There is a specialization of intent. The motivation is high if you're after a benefit. In contrast, the typical voter is not interested much in the day-to-day operations of government. There is no full-time monitor of a request for a specific benefit from the government. In short, benefit-seeking from the state is an asymmetric system. Those seeking benefits are highly motivated and specialized. Those who are going to pay for these benefits are not motivated or specialized. So, the tendency is for government to continue to provide benefits for specific individuals or voting groups. The public does not successfully resist. Government gets bigger.
We are now seeing a situation in which the same economic analysis would lead to a different conclusion, namely, that the government is going to get weaker in comparison to individuals who are motivated to expose government chicanery, tyranny, and plain bad manners. Individuals are highly motivated to get revenge on government agents who push them around or who push others around. They are now enabled technologically to impose negative sanctions after the fact. They are willing to donate time and effort to make certain that evidence of whatever it is that has annoyed them is online permanently. YouTube allows this. Then Google or Bing will retrieve the videos if the searches are specific.
The government is not in a good position to resist this practice. A video can go viral. It can be displayed at a city council meeting. The embarrassment to the government agency, meaning a specific agent, does not go away. He has to explain himself. He finds it difficult to lie about what took place. There is evidence of exactly what took place. The agent faces a rising cost of defending himself either in court or in front of his supervisors. Videos like these put the supervisors' careers in jeopardy. They may even lead to an investigation by the city council. Bureaucrats hate it when the people who pass the budgets and write the checks start investigating the operations of the agency in question.
AN ASYMMETRIC SYSTEM
So, with respect to surveillance cameras, I think the system is asymmetric in favor of the citizen who is armed with a smartphone. He is motivated to get his version of the story in front of the public. The government agent who has violated the rules is motivated to suppress the story, but there is nothing he can do about it, once the video is on YouTube.
Whenever a policeman makes an arrest in public, there may be half a dozen people shooting a video of the arrest. This has never happened before. This moves the evidence away from hearsay. The jury, in whatever form the jury takes, is able to see the video. Seeing may not be believing, but it certainly is superior evidence to listening to a lie by a government agent.
The spread of smartphones favors liberty. It places limits on arbitrary government action that did not exist prior to 2007. The cost of the smartphones will continue to decline. More people will own them. More people use them. The government is already on the defensive. Individual citizens can now take the offense against government agents who visibly violate the rules. This increases the cost of defense for the government. All the volunteer labor supplied by people with smartphones overwhelms the ability of government agencies to defend themselves against YouTube videos.
CONCLUSION
The falling cost of surveillance is asymmetric. The government must bear these costs. The money comes out of departmental budgets. In contrast, the smartphone is close to free for a user of a smartphone. He buys the phone, access to the Web, games, and all the rest of the benefits. The camera is a small percentage of the total costs of buying a smartphone and maintaining access to the Web. People want to take videos of their children and friends. In effect, the surveillance cost of the camera is zero. The main cost is the willingness to take out the smartphone and record what is going on.
With respect to cheap surveillance equipment, the state is on the defensive. The arrangement is asymmetric. This disparity between government surveillance and private surveillance will continue to escalate in favor of private surveillance.
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