Well, I wrote the software, not the article. It's a catchy headline sure, and the apps are called Cop Recorder, which a lot of people see as anti-police. But, there are lots of cops who use the software too.
We are not an anti-police project, we are a pro-data project! There are good police and bad police, and we publish recordings of both.
ok, so that concerns me, because i am not convinced that "more data" is a good thing. more surveillance in general is, it seems to me, going to help those with power rather than those without - they have more resources, for example.
what i thought was good about your app, from this article, was that it was intended for the underdog - that something about the process to combine data, say, was intended to provide a counterbalance to the abuse of police power.
but now you're saying you're neutral about it. that you're as happy for it to be used by the police against others, as for others to use it against the police. doesn't that mean that you're likely making things worse?
and what about other morally questionable areas? mob-justice, for example. what are you going to do if a bunch of people start pooling observations of someone they are calling, say, a paedophile, when there's no conviction against them? or gays? or people of one race or another, asserting that they commit more crime...?
just arguing that "more data is good" seems horribly naive. data a tool that can be abused in many ways. if you're choosing how to shape that force, and choosing well, great, but if you're going to ignore the moral responsibility that comes with the data, what makes you think you are helping?
Now imagine a world where anyone could enter a gps coordinate and height and see the activity there, at anytime in the past. You think we'd have TARP? You think we'd be at war in afghanistan? You think we'd have priests fucking children? Lynchings? Drunk driving?
Many think this would be a dystopian future that forces everyone to conform. I believe that if all those people who only pretend to conform were actually required to conform, we'd suddenly see a great debate on what "normal" should actually be.
Asimov wrote a story about this, and seemed to suggest that his view was that the end of privacy would be a bad thing (but maybe I read it wrong).
[edit: i was wrong; it wasn't bradbury, i'm remembering the asimov work you mention - an excellent story, i agree]
but it ignores the existing power structure. everyone knows that banks screwed up - but who is in jail? same thing goes here: it won't be an equaliser; only the little people will be punished. most people won't be using their viewers to avoid a war, they will be watching infotainment on 3d tv.
if you don't explicitly challenge the existing power structure you implicitly strengthen it.
To paraphrase the police, if police officers are doing their job with in the letter of the law then they have nothing to worry about being recorded.
I'm not sure why the framing is 'spying' on the police, as the police should welcome such monitoring to ensure that all officers are performing their public duties to the public, tools like these are extremely helpful in weeding out the 'bad apples' and I fail to understand how recording a public police force in public performing their public duties could be considered spying.
Surely, the police would welcome evidence of the overwhelmingly positive effect they have on society being made more public. The police know the value that CCTV can bring to the public, these tools help the police realize the benefits of constant recording of their own members and should welcome efforts to verify that their records match 3rd party records so they can weed out those who would seek to distort the record. It's well known that the police sometimes have problems with evidence going missing, these tools help restore the evidence that understandably goes missing during an investigation.
Tools like these are a great way for citizens to help the police do their job, and aid the police in collecting evidence that might be cost prohibitive in the current economic climate. It would be great if the police could distribute these tools from their websites and make them more available, perhaps on the back of their business cards they could make this information available.
The Vancouver angle is especially interesting, as in the heat of the moment RCMP members in the Vancouver area often remember a different version of events than was recorded.
"Robinson, in a bid to get his driver’s licence returned, told a B.C. Supreme Court that he had two stiff drinks at home before returning to the scene of the accident, which caused him to fail a breathalyzer."
Got any questions?