Traditional surveillance might mean one CCTV camera per 14 citizens in Britain, or 200,000 such cameras in the city of Shenzhen in China. But parallel to the old forms of surveillance, a new peer-to-peer voyeurism is on the rise. Watching friends, neighbors and colleagues for security reasons — or just for fun — is becoming common.
Take Adam’s Block. This was an open-access site Webcasting a live video feed from the intersection of Ellis Street and Taylor Street in San Francisco for entertainment purposes.
New iWatch Program Urges Citizens to Be ‘Eyes and Ears’ Against Terror Plots, iWatch is a nationwide community watch program
A new program aimed at keeping Americans safe from terror attacks will rely on individual citizens to serve as “the eyes and ears” of their communities.
iWatch is a community watch program endorsed by police chiefs across the U.S. that teaches people how to detect suspicious behavior and report it to police.
BERLIN (Reuters) – For decades, Joachim Fritsch struggled to understand why he was being denied access to higher education and passed over for job promotions again and again.
Then he got hold of a 400-page file East Germany’s dreaded secret police had compiled on him. The Stasi had arrested him back in the mid-1950s when he was just 17 years old and branded him a “provocateur” for failing to produce his identity card.
The arrest left an indelible mark on his record, leading the Stasi to watch him closely and thwart repeated attempts by Fritsch to get on with his life.
This is a quick follow up to the article sharing their Demons on the Web that came out November 13, 2008 in the New York Times.
I don’t know how many of our website visitors out there have had a chance to read and digest this article that just came out in the New York Times and also ran in several other International papers, but I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to shed some additional light on some portions of the article.
The digital age allows critics to quickly find a fair amount of information about their targets. One day last November, at about 11:30 a.m., a blog focused on making New York streets more bike-friendly posted the license plate number of an SUV driver who allegedly accelerated from a dead stop to hit a bicycle blocking his way.
At 1:16 p.m., someone posted the registration information for the license plate, including the SUV owner’s name and address. (The editor of the blog thinks the poster got the information from someone who had access to a license-plate look-up service, available to lawyers, private investigators and police.) At 1:31 p.m., another person added the owner’s occupation, his business’s name and his title. Ten minutes later, a user posted a link to an aerial photo of the owner’s house. Within another hour, the posting also included the accused’s picture and email address.
The SUV’s owner, Ian Goldman, the chief executive of Celerant Technology Corp. in the New York City borough of Staten Island, declined to comment for this article. According to an email exchange posted on the blog, Mr. Goldman said that he had lent the vehicle in question to a relative with “an urgent medical situation” and that he was not aware of any incident. The alleged victim has decided to drop the matter since the damage to the bicycle, which he was standing next to at the time, was under $20. Last month, Aaron Naparstek, editor of the blog, says he removed Mr. Goldman’s home and email addresses from the site after receiving a “lawyerly cease and desist” email asking that the whole posting be deleted.