At the price of our saftey Steve!

I enjoyed Mann's sarcastic tone in describing the "totalitarian surveillance" and the "representatives of the surveillance superhighway" in his anti-surveillance manifesto. The first part of the article about different proposals on visual surveillance and environmental intelligence read like a science fiction novel by paranoid writers like Michael Crichton, it was eerie when I realized these were real proposals: I never thought getting your coffeemaker going in the morning is such a hassle that we would need to spend few grands on a technology that would make sure our coffee is super freshly brewed, and camera that could see thru clothing...oh, I'm sure that nobody would ever abuse this power!!!!! These ideas are absurd, not to mention very disturbing.

Even though I agree with his notion of reflection ism, I don't see how the WearCam helps alleviate the problem of breaching of privacy. I understand his point about collection evidence and making it virtually indestructible and accessible as in the case of chained fire doors. However, in dealing with surveillance he is only proving that no one likes to be watched but making a few customer service people uncomfortable about their job is not going to solve the problem (and it might lead to clinical depression due to job dissatisfaction.) Moreover, he does not offer an alternative to surveillance as a measure of safety.

Don't get me wrong, I find his ideas and experiment very interesting especially "Maybe Camera" and "Probably Camera". I'm always curious to know how people react to authority or a threat, when do they decide to obey and when do they decide to challenge the imposition? This goes back to the whole surveillance tower idea, it's hard to tell really, but I find that in America compared to other countries people tend to be more submissive to authority as long it is presented to them in an apologetic or for-your-own-good manner. If you say "I'm sorry but we have to ask you to leave because we have this room booked for an event" or "your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes" people would rarely challenge you and ask you to prove yourself. I found the two camera pieces a good example of this sort of pseudo-threat that works. Yet I don't see how this will create a significant wave of social change as far as intelligence is concerned.