What is their use if they don't record anything? Just to measure current traffic levels? I assumed they were all used as ALPRs. I've seen some cameras sprouting up in my small town and it worries me.
They are essentially a public live traffic report so that the news agencies are not running helicopters amok to get the same footage; and many of the cameras are in tight locations where it would be hard to fly helicopters or drones without irritating neighbors or being a danger to public safety.
The government of NYC has a long history of abusing the rights of its people and engaging in overreaching and unwarranted surveillance. They have not shown that they can be trusted with even traffic cameras. They scan license plates all through the city and use this technology to create a chilling effect which allows their authoritarian regime to remain unchallenged.
Yes, and it's actually pretty rampant in my own current city, it's been a huge sore point for years with activists. The chilling effect is that resistance becomes that much harder as the authoritarian ratchet tightens. When the movements of people can be tracked en masse via some panopticon, it is very easy to prevent them from organizing into any real threat against the incumbent.
> Knowing or suspecting that we're being watched can stop us from engaging in certain kinds of behavior, even when it's perfectly lawful. For example, it might affect our decision to go to a certain barber (what would my other barber say?), meet up with a friend (what would my mom say?), eat at a restaurant (what would my trainer say?), or take the scenic route (is it suspicious that I'm not using my normal route?)
Keep in mind that just a few decades ago we had the Red Scare. We harassed and ruined the lives of people over thoughtcrime, for simply supporting the notion of alternate economies or just accepting those who did. Imagine the scope of that if we'd had the surveillance network that we do today. And there is no indication that we won't have a similar event in the near future.
Lastly, I know your question is in good faith and thank you for asking for clarification. That said, it's important to consider that manufactured normality isn't a valid reason to not question authority. It's quite easy for Corpgov to do anything at scale long enough that new generations are born into it and wholly accept it without question.
All expressions of governmental authority must be constantly challenged and defended, and any possibility of chilling effects should be investigated thoroughly, time and again. This is our duty as The People, the fourth branch of the government. This is the critical check and balance which keeps things from becoming irrecoverably fucked.
People need to understand the danger of the current surveillance infrastructure.
Turnkey totalitarianism.
Totalitarian control is turnkey in America if the "wrong guy" gets in. It's funny because the voters aren't demanding limits, and yet each election cycle is life or death not just because of the he escalating propaganda...
I think voters know that we are close to total oppression, on a subconscious fear level.
Whether in the next four or forty years, someone will do it.
I'm sorry, which part of my post did you have trouble with? I can try to break it down for you further until you understand. What do you perceive to be the moved goalposts here?
I guess I was expecting some concrete examples of this chilling effect you spoke of? Your comment only refers to things in the hypothetical, before diverging off into other related topics.
Do you have any actual examples of "resistance" that have been stifled by this "chilling effect"? I understand your hypotheticals and the point you're making, but we can conjure hypotheticals for any situation or context, all without any specific relationship to truth.
Well, it's not a hypothetical to say that surveillance leads to reduced non-conventional civic participation and reduces the ability for citizens to safely engage in protest.
> Of students who indicate that their school uses monitoring software,
many report a chilling effect on their behavior and self-expression online
— six in ten students agree with the statement, “I do not share my true
thoughts or ideas because I know what I do online is being monitored,”
and 80 percent report being “more careful about what I search online
when I know what I do online is being monitored.”
We can review recent past high-profile, surveillance-oriented regimes like Nazi Germany, or the McCarthy-era Red Scare and Cold War. There is a multitude of personal accounts from that era, where anyone of note had to be extremely careful about what was said, to whom and where.
Over and over throughout history, good things, like giving shelter to persecuted refugees or slaves, has been considered illegal. Citizens were told to snitch on one another. If drones were available then, you'd have seen them in every single nook and cranny.
Politicians today wear nice, pressed suits and often conduct themselves pleasantly. But only a fool would buy into their brand of symbolic mind control. The reality is that many governments today are as evil as ever due to the scale and population today. And the ones that aren't, are in danger of becoming authoritarian. Authoritarian and populist movements have been sweeping through the West.
Any technology we implement today represents codified procedure, whether codified in law or not. And that codified procedure will absolutely be used to enforce an arbitrary morality as defined by the incumbent party. We've seen this for a century with cannabis and the global war on drugs. We see this now with abortion, where citizens in Texas are encouraged to snitch on women who seek abortions.
So looking forward, we can avoid hypotheticals while pointing to clear patterns in history, for those who need empirical evidence. We can also just establish self-consistent, ethical political frameworks which disqualify such unwarranted mass surveillance, simply on the grounds that regimes can change while codified procedure can be repurposed, and that mass surveillance erodes trust, without even needing to point to past atrocities and compromised governments.
Happy to discuss further if this doesn't satisfy you. I can also draw from my own life experiences living under surveillance and child abuse, and the extreme chilling effect it caused, if you want anecdotal data.
Your source doesn't seem to support your claim, though? Being more careful on school-monitored devices seems like an ideal outcome: you want students using school-provided devices to do school-related things, not browse YouTube videos or look at porn. This would also apply in the future on work-provided devices, so it seems like they're learning an important skill in the process?
The rest of your examples have no relevance to the original claim, and are (again), largely hypothetical. They're "real examples", but the connection between them and the original claim is still hypothetical. This is why I called your earlier responses attempts to move the goalposts: you have yet to provide any evidence that directly supports your original claim, while instead providing "evidence" of similar things that aren't directly related except through careful framing.
Do you have any examples directly relevant to the original statement? Here it is again, in case you've lost track:
> They scan license plates all through the city and use this technology to create a chilling effect which allows their authoritarian regime to remain unchallenged.
Please argue in good faith and don't revert to sarcasm. I asked in my last comment for you to specify which part of the prior comment you had issue with, it would have been good to mention the specific part you were challenging at that time and not only just now, as my comment indeed touched on multiple related issues.
So if you want specific information regarding NYC and the license plate issues, I can give you some links from reputable sources. I also recommend following up these sources with more research to corroborate claims or answer any further questions you may have, or if these sources simply do not satisfy your curiosity and rightful demands for hard proof.
"Awareness that the Government may be watching chills
associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal
private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse"
I could point to this and multitudes of other incidents where the NYC government has grossly overstepped their bounds. I can also point to a high-profile case in my old city of Fort Worth where city officials and police were using government databases to stalk and harass individuals, even ex-girlfriends, and the police chief and head IT guy also got harassed and litigated for attempting to expose it:
> "At least three to four nights a week they would have us riding through the neighborhoods," Ardoin said. "If you saw a random black person walking around the street and hasn't done anything, they would tell us just to jump out the vehicle, grab them and pat them down without probable cause. I voiced my opinions several times, and I didn't agree with that."
It's why we called the police the "jump out boys" growing up. I personally was subject to years of targeted police and government harassment in my small town, which severely impacted my life. I shudder to think about what those creeps would do with a full ALPR kit across the parish. My state's police force has repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to follow the law, and they constantly get caught harassing, stalking, spying, selling drugs, guns and more.
You wouldn't understand unless you grew up in a real police state like Louisiana, with an incarceration rate of over 1%, higher than any independent country in the world. You may have had the privilege of not being a targeted demographic in such a state and thus having the law usually work on your side, and so the potentials for abuse, and the inevitability of such, may not seem immediately obvious to you. You seem interested in learning more and I can only provide so much, so I would definitely recommend following up with more research.
If it's the "authoritarian regime" part you want proof of, and my given examples of general corruption of US police forces is not sufficient for you, you can google some NYC-specific cases, but I assume you're more interested in the effects of mass surveillance and ALPRs.
Given your remark about good faith efforts, I'm forced to conclude that was actually projection, and you're not interested in having a good faith discussion.
I read your first three sources (skimmed the last of those, really), and in all three, the "chilling effect" you claim still remains a hypothetical. There's lots of "could" and "can" in those pieces, but no "did". I still see plenty of large-scale demonstrations in New York City, and in fact I hear of more of them, not fewer, at time goes on. Some of that is availability of said information/coverage/my information bubble, but it's certainly not evidence of a "chilling effect", despite the vast increase in city-wide surveillance that New York City has seen over the same time period.
The evidence you present here is worth less than my own lived experience in this case, simply because it tells what could happen without contextualizing that within what has actually happened.
Take the second example from your second source, about the DEA planning to use ALPRs at gun shows[1]. If you ignore the sensationalism, the story is actually boring: the DEA and ATF considered whether or not they could use readers at gun shows to help track illegal gun sales. They didn't end up doing it, likely because it would have been illegal to do so.
This is the system working. This is not evidence of a them using this technology to enact an authoritarian surveillance state. This is a state that has broad access to this kind of technology, and then often doesn't use it because it's legally obligated that they not, unless they can provide the proper justification.
It's also an example that is (again!!) unrelated to the claim you are making.
The rest is just more of the same Gish Gallop, and I'm tired of engaging with you on this. Even if your intent about having a good faith discussion is sincere, in practice you are still not engaging in a good-faith way. What I asked for was simple: evidence of a concrete statement you presented as fact. What you've given me is a laundry list of closely related things, but nothing that actually matches the context of the statement you made.
This is not a good-faith discussion in practice, because you refuse to keep the discussion narrowly focused and instead just gesture wildly at a bunch of things that are related (but many of whom are still arguing hypotheticals!), and that you feel should stand in for the evidence in asking for. But it doesn't, and given your repeated deflections, I'm forced to conclude that you don't have said concrete evidence.
It's not gish gallop, I was trying to be thorough. If you don't wish to participate in this discussion, that's fine. But your accusations of projection and my arguing in bad faith are uncalled for. I am allowed to bring up whatever I wish in support of my argument. You come across as insatiable, unwilling to do due diligence, and extremely selective.
You misunderstand the entire chilling effect argument, and are looking for some kind of mysterious hard evidence which you are just going to have to locate on your own. To a rational person, the simple argument of government overreach and regime changes, and examples of such as I provided, and the concept of the authoritarian ratchet is enough to support limitations on mass surveillance. Discounting it all as "gish gallop" is incredibly uncharitable and negative.
No, I understand the chilling effect argument perfectly. Chilling effects are sometimes very real, but more often are invoked as pure hypotheticals that are intentionally structured to be unfalsifiable. They're also often used in places where there's no actual evidence to support such an effect.
Your claim and subsequent lack of concrete examples are a prime demonstration of this. Many of the sources you cited in your last comment contained more rhetoric than logic, so it's somewhat ironic that you're trying to claim to be a rational person whilst being swayed by such arguments.
I made a convincing, well-cited argument as to the prevalence of police and government abuse of existing surveillance tools across multiple US cities, and established that NYC has an authoritarian government. I linked to pieces from prominent organizations specifically dealing with chilling effects and ALPRs, which can be used as the basis for further research. I linked to a Supreme Court ruling in which a judge specifically mentioned how surveillance causes a chilling effect and a reduction in freedom of expression.
You are unwilling to accept any of this and also unwilling to do your own research. You mistake a well-rounded argument for gish gallop. You're looking for "logic" and not "rhetoric", but those are such vague, moving targets. These are all references which I provided you on short notice due to your own refusal to research the subject. These are not the pieces which "swayed" me. I have been reading deeply about this subject for decades and I cannot possibly be bothered to compile an extensive list of books and articles which you will probably discount and not read, I cannot simply transmit my knowledge to you. At some point you have to do the work yourself and connect the dots, if you have a specific form of evidence you are looking for, spend some time looking for it.
It's honestly a given that mass surveillance creates a chilling effect and erosion of trust, and the onus should really be on you to disprove it.
> It's honestly a given that mass surveillance creates a chilling effect and erosion of trust, and the onus should really be on you to disprove it.
But it isn't, and this is the entire problem with your argument: you've assumed your conclusion to be true. This leads you to ignore basic initial questions, like "do you have evidence for this specific claim?"
When pressed, it turns out you don't, and instead you substitute hypotheticals (that you again assume to be true!), but then blame me for not already believing them to be true.
Again, I can point to specific things that call your original statement into question, such as the continued presence of protests and mass demonstrations in the very city you claim to be subject to this "chilling effect". Instead of providing an explanation as to why that's consistent with your original claim (it isn't!), you then point to more sources with the same hypothetical, and expect me to take them as truth.
The problem is, there's a distinct lack of evidence for your repeated claims, and additional hypotheticals do not fill that void.
So no, I do understand, and I understand why your argument is flawed. It's simple, really: the "chilling effect" makes sense on the surface, is plausible as a hypothetical, is sometimes true, and is used frequently by sources you already trust. The problem is that it's just a hypothetical, and there a myriad of counterexamples exist which call it into question as a blanket rule, all of which you discount out of hand with no explanation, or simply refuse to acknowledge in the first place.
It's a hypothetical I've seen repeatedly claimed as truth throughout my entire life, only to see its predictions fail to manifest in the vast majority of cases in which it's invoked. What other choice do I have than to question its validity? Your refusal to acknowledge this lack of predictive power does nothing to convince me, in contrast to my lived experience, that it does indeed have predictive power in the first place, and in fact only does the opposite.
I've also repeatedly told you that I understand the hypothetical, and what I'm interested in is concrete evidence of the hypothetical's predicted effects in a specific place where you've claimed it is present. But instead of providing this evidence, you just repeatedly cite more examples of the hypothetical effect being claimed, along with its implied predictions... Surely you can see that this was not what I asked for, is redundant to your original claim, and does nothing to demonstrate the hypothetical's predicted effects in a specific example where you've claimed it as fact? Why are you expecting me to be convinced by just repeatedly making the same assertion over and over, finally just saying "it's a given"?
You made a claim stated as fact, and I asked you for evidence of that specific claim. You have not delivered it, and instead have made it clear you just assume it's true without any evidence at all! How am I supposed to be convinced by that?
I've been curious about this. Are there leaked LPR databases that can be integrated with NVR's like Zoneminder, Shinobi, Blue Iris, Frigate and such? I know that some of them can read license plates but that's not entirely useful without an actual database of plates behind it. i.e. DMV, associated NCIC data, etc... As many times DMV's in many states have leaked data I would assume this must be a thing.
These cameras in particular would not be any good for that. They're usually mounted super high up and very low resolution, at 0.5FPS, and they are in such high traffic locations that bumper to bumper traffic would just obscure the plates of the cars in front and behind.
What? A majority of New Yorkers don't own cars, and besides that the city government isn't exactly in a position to do much of anything to you if you challenge its "authoritarian regime".
NYC focuses on entry and exit points to track incoming and outgoing traffic, and internal criminal activity such as drug trafficking. Depending on your politics, you might argue that trafficking of certain drugs represents a form of protest against a violation of our Constitutional rights, and therefore the regime of NYC is authoritarian for continuing to oppose sensible governmental reform.
Hochul's support of the IDF and the ongoing Palestinian genocide and attempts to silence and ostracize opponents of the genocide clearly marks her as an authoritarian in my book.
> The authoritarian regime of the locally elected government?
These are not in any way contradictory concepts. New york city is one of the most highly surveilled cities on the planet and has the highest police budget of any metro area in the world. The current mayor is a former cop who gets way too excited about working with the IDF and is super excited about using drones to spy on people even more invasively. Another recent former mayor campaigned on police harassing people on the street for literally no reason. They recently shot someone for fare skipping rather than simply removing fares, even though it's a massive loss to the city to staff the subway just to recoup a small percentage of lost revenue.
Look you can disagree with it being authoritarian, but maybe it'd be worth pointing out how people voted against clearly authoritarian policies. It seems to my eye that people just want a police-based society over a liberal one.
Your post is composed of outright lies and, charitably, ignorant analysis. It reads more like propaganda than an actual argument.
> They recently shot someone for fare skipping rather than simply removing fares, even though it's a massive loss to the city to staff the subway just to recoup a small percentage of lost revenue.
This is an outright lie as you likely know. They shot a man who charged at them with a knife. Don't believe me? Watch the body camera footage.
What's more, no major metro area in the entire world has fareless transit. Fares a key part of funding the operations of the public good and so is not something you "simply" do. NYC MTA prices are already extremely low (compare them against any other comparable Euro system) and have the option for low-income residents to pay half fares.
> has the highest police budget of any metro area in the world.
Simply taking a total budget and comparing it to other another total budget is at best a poor choice and at worst looks like more of a propaganda choice. Budgets would need to be scaled by population as well as local costs to make them remotely comparable. But what's more, to the extent that it's even true, it's quite marginal. The NYPD budget '25 is proposed at $5.75B[1] whereas, for example, the London MOPAC/MPS budget is 4.36B GBP[2] which converts to $5.5B. This was just the first major metro I checked!
What's more a _perhaps_ more reasonable way to look at this would be police officers per capita. Here we can see that NY is comparable to many other major metro areas [3] and significantly below some (eg Paris and Madrid).
But most importantly, the presence of police officers is not remotely authoritarianism. The enforcement of laws is not authoritarianism. The manner of restrictions, the immunity of the police and authorities above laws, the form of trial system, etc are what make up authoritarian systems and it is quite obvious that none of these characteristics remotely define NYC and it's a comedy to suggest so.
> The enforcement of laws is not authoritarianism. The manner of restrictions, the immunity of the police and authorities above laws, the form of trial system, etc are what make up authoritarian systems
I just don't agree at all—formal democracies and democratic institutions can be authoritarian, too. I certainly don't have the faith in our justice system you have.
Sorry that you don't agree that the enforcement of laws is not authoritarianism and you are currently living in a liberal society. The vast majority of people who have lived in liberal societies for ages unfortunately believe that enforcing the laws that are made by either direct democracy or through their democratically elected institutions is good and just and I expect that will continue for a long while. You will unfortunately have to live in such a world where people are not allowed to do crime.
> Sorry that you don't agree that the enforcement of laws is not authoritarianism
I never said this. Still, you can trivially pass authoritarian laws in an otherwise liberal society.
> The vast majority of people who have lived in liberal societies for ages
Only about 230 years, but sure.
> unfortunately believe that enforcing the laws that are made by either direct democracy or through their democratically elected institutions is good and just and I expect that will continue for a long while.
Sure, that doesn't make this not authoritarian. Sometimes people are just sick, scared, lonely people that are incapable of considering the impact of their actions. That's (collective) america to a T. If you knowingly sell someone snake oil you can't be shocked when they buy it.
> You will unfortunately have to live in such a world where people are not allowed to do crime.
I wouldn't really mind this if the crimes actually seems to correlate with encouraging a more livable society for the most of us.
Just because NYCTMC doesn't record doesn't mean NYC Police, or any other group doesn't... Could have been intentionally coordinated or not at the beginning, but it almost certainly is recorded by several players now
Americans are the world’s foremost experts on branding things.
We literally can brand anything. Obscure pharmaceuticals, campaigns to oppress people, one inch variations in the size of an airplane seat, you name it.
Doing away with the acronym will be the major achievement of some future management types. Relabel some processes, rename come protocols, refresh the livery. KFC so longer stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken, that sort of thing.
1991, the KFC name was officially adopted, although it had already been widely known by that initialism.[36] Kyle Craig, president of KFC U.S., admitted the change was an attempt to distance the chain from the unhealthy connotations of "fried".
The small(ish) town I grew up in started using cameras a dozen or more years ago.
They get used with computer vision to control and coordinate traffic lights (sometimes with the help of inductive loops in the pavement, and sometimes without).
In this particular case: They don't record anything, and their ISM 900MHz backhauls don't have enough bandwidth for centralized video anyway.
(Sources: Background in RF, and I used to hang out with the city employee who took care of this system along with most other things relating to traffic lights there.)
When I'm heading to New Jersey, I often check the Holland Tunnel entrance camera to see whether there's a jam. The intersection only flows well if there's a traffic cop there, which factors into route decisions.
The cameras in your small town are probably https://www.flocksafety.com/ , which are definitely ALPRs. The NYC traffic cameras are to a great extent an anomaly from a bygone era; cameras installed at an exact point in time where real-time monitoring sans analysis or recording made sense.
They still do. While phones can give you real time traffic as well, one with good enough knowledge of the local road system can use the live traffic reports to actively navigate away, sometimes more effectively than the mapping apps.
Yeah, to think that just cause the broadcaster isn't saving it, that it's not being saved? Nah, someone is saving it, they might not use it, they might not keep it, but it's getting scraped, even if by just regular peoples science projects
Isn't the most likely outcome here that the city will simply stop allowing public access to the camera feeds?
This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.
What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it? I'm sure there are corporations and data brokers quietly collecting info on us using every scrap of publicly avilable data including traffic cams, but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers/clients in traffic disputes access to footage that may have captured an accident for exorbitant rates. It's a remarkable little ecosystem of privatized mass surveillance.
You’re framing this like it’s a bad thing, but a video of an accident is pretty valuable to someone falsely accused of causing an accident, and in that case the people with the video aren’t the bad guy, the person lying about causing the accident is. Storing 50 million videos isn’t cheap. The rates seem reasonable considering the volume of data they store, most of which is useless, and the small number of customers in their target market - I see 1 hour blocks of video in NYC cost $250. That’s like 10 minutes of lawyer time, if you’re lucky, and totally reasonable and worth it to settle an accident dispute if the alternative is paying the other guy thousands. I might even speculate that the intended customer here is insurance companies and maybe not individual drivers. If so, insurance companies are well prepared to do their own cost/benefit price analysis. So… why do you think this is bad? And what surveillance uses are you worried about outside of car accidents? The cost of the videos means nobody is doing any “mass surveillance” here, that the vast majority of the video gets deleted unanalyzed and unwatched.
Probably damn near zero if you have time stamps. A couple one pixel blobs would do if all you're trying to prove is that some idiot got dead because they cut a garbage truck off and that the garbage truck didn't rear end them or, or some other simple "he said she said" situation like that
>but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
>Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP "encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior."
> There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work. The value in making that data public isn't so that Joe Average can track traffic volume over time just like the DoT is already doing. It's for transparency and so that the public can find new and innovative uses for the information our tax money is already being spent on gathering.
There's no point if we're not allowed to use that data in new ways and we don't need the kind of "transparency" that only applies as long as the public isn't looking.
If a specific use is actually dangerous then that can be dealt with on a case by case basis, and it's arguable that they were right to send a cease and desist letter to this website, but making the data itself unavailable over it would be an overreaction
> What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work.
Personally I do find it useful to be able to glance at the NYC traffic cams as a supplement to traffic maps, not only because having an actual visual on the traffic can help me decide on a driving route better than red or green map lines or a routing algorithm I know will take me on an inferior path to “avoid” perceived traffic, but also because the cameras pick up other nearby stuff. I like to go on runs over the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s so swarmed with tourists most of the time that I’ll check the DOT cameras so I can see if the pedestrian path is clear enough to run on without being clotheslined by a selfie stick.
I also spend a lot of time north of the city, and the state highway traffic cams are great for checking the plowing status during/after winter storms before setting off for a trip.
This seems to happen every time some stuffy SeriousAgency or SeriousCompany opens something up to the public. The public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it.
SeriousCompany: "Look how cool and in tune we are with the public, here's this resource that you can all use. High five! [...] Oh, wait, no, what you're doing is bad for our image... No, stop, we didn't mean for you to do... No, don't enjoy it that way... Wait, stop, we didn't think of that at all! Oh, god no you're using it to post Amogus Porn! SHUT IT DOWN!!!"
But sometimes SeriousCompany says "we'll provide this public resource so people can do X, Y, and Z", and then someone does A and gets a cease and desist?
It's an open resource, sure, but the provider of the resource can still set limits on its use, even after it's been available for some time. Often that includes things like "don't use our free resource to make yourself money".
That seems like an entirely reasonable request to me?
Something being freely available does not inherently grant you the right to use it however you'd like. It's pretty unhelpful to conflate the two things.
You’re conflating a license to use something granted without charge and something actually free to the public. Licenses come with terms, public resources only come with social pressures of fair use.
It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.
I mean, a license to use something for free can still apply to something that is freely given? There's no conflation, since they're just different aspects of the same thing
And no, that's not unfair, that's absolutely within their rights, as the provider of said thing. What's unfair is willfully taking advantage of a free resource in ways that are explicitly against the reasons the provider is providing the thing in the first place. That's just place malice at that point.
After all, a license is just a social contact that can actually be enforced. I would argue the world would be a far better place if people didn't abuse the unenforceable nature of what you're calling "just a social contract".
> public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it
Because it prompts a serious question: why are taxpayers paying for this?
While you'll always find some people who don't think taxes should pay for anything ever in this case I think there's clear value in the DoT monitoring traffic volumes so the cameras already exist. It's not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online where the public can easily access them. The footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records.
> not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online
But there is a cost. If it’s not used by 90% of voters, and its trivially use is made known to 60% of them, you have the votes to reällocate those funds.
> footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records
They are a public record because we make them public. And taxpayers fund plenty of non-public information collection. That you wouldn’t vote for something doesn’t make it electoral impossible (nor even not good politics).
> the public is using it - isn't that why we pay for it?
For entertainment. I'm not saying it's a good reason. But I could absolutely see "why are we paying millions of dollars to fund someone's Tik Tok" play well in an election.
> What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it?
Regular people have been using it for decades, though? Scrolling through the comments here are plenty of people who have discovered and put these cameras to use in their daily lives.
Something being freely provided does not inherently grant consumers the right to do with it whatever they please. The producers, being the one freely providing the things, seem well within their rights to set limits on its usage, no? Sure, sometimes things are freely produced with the express point being that they can be used without limitations, but this isn't an inherent property of the thing being freely available.
I mean, why else do we have so many different open source licensing models?
> If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
Average American probably won't be using it.
This seems to be the hole in Kant's categorical imperative[0] - plenty of useful things fail the test of universality, because there isn't one class, or two classes, but three classes of people: those who find some use for a thing, those who don't and thus don't care, and then those who have no use for the thing but don't like it anyway. And in the past century or so, thanks to the role of mass media, that third class is ruling the world.
And so...
> but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
Yes, it is. It's how this has been playing out time and again - once the attention seekers, and people with overactive imagination wrt. dystopias, and maybe the few with some actually reasonable objections join forces, it's better to shut the thing down as soon as possible, to minimize the amount of time your name can be found on the front pages of major newspapers. At that point, there's little hope to talk things out and perhaps rescue the project in some form - outraged public does not do calm or rational, and if you somehow survive the first couple days and the public still cares, you're destined to become a new ball in the political pinball machine. With your name or life on the line, it's usually much easier to cut your losses than to stand on principle, especially for something that's inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.
One by one, we're losing nice things - not as much because they're abused, but mostly because there's always some performative complainers ready to make a scene. We won't be getting nice things back until our cultural immunity catches up, until we inoculate ourselves against the whining.
[1] - Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines", though the (apparently) more accurate version from https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 is even better: "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes." More boring than malevolent, and thus that much more real; it reads like a HN comment.
That is what happened to the local feed for the city I live in. Their mapping data was trash. I went through fixed the GPS, found the typical focalized center of frame, built a basic frontend, and then they shut it all down.
I found the dude that ran it and emailed back and forth with him for a few years. They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.
A bit tangential, but in Poland we also had such traffic cameras with public access (it wasn't a live feed, but a snapshot updated every minute or so). It was provided by a company which won a lot of tenders for IT infrastructure around roads (https://www.traxelektronik.pl/pogoda/kamery/).
What is interesting to me is that the public access to the cameras has been blocked a few months after the war in Ukraine started. For a few months I could watch the large convoys of equipment going towards Ukraine, and my personal theory is that so did the MoD of Russia. I haven't seen any reports about that, just my personal observation.
Would have been a good opportunity to inject misinformation after they noticed (assuming it's what happened)... Convoy passing by? Quick, splice in alternative footage that has equivalent traffic/weather conditions. (Or an infinite convoy to scare them)
Why does NYC even care? This tendency to govern in a controlling way is not just weird but plain unethical. I hope this goes viral and embarrasses them.
NYC government is peculiar, in that its size and scope is like a US state, but it also subsumes the functions of US cities and counties. The closest comparison in the US is probably LA County.
Thinking about it in terms of technology — during the pandemic the schools bought a million iPads. They also run a giant hospital system, the largest police and fire departments in the country, etc.
The net result is administration of a vast, sprawling (both horizontal and vertical) bureaucracy is complex, and the cogs in the wheel of that bureaucracy are simultaneously in your face and detached from reality. So you have a group of attorneys who see a threat in people posing in front of a camera.
You first paragraph raises some interesting points. It makes wonder if NYC police and fire is larger than that of some smaller countries in Europe, like Belgium or Netherlands. My guess: Yes!
Indeed, the NYPD has 33,000 officers and Belgium's armed forces have 24,000 serving plus 6000 reserve. They also have very similar budgets: $6b vs. €7b.
Agree in spirit, though again if it does go viral and they become embarrassed the most likely thing is they'd shut down public access to the cameras - which would be a lousy outcome for everyone.
My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.
This is an opportunity for bullshitters (in a "bullshit jobs" sense) to be seen as "doing something" and get pats on the back without significant effort - at least less effort than doing other, actually valuable things.
I think we're in agreement. The "that's why we can't have nice things" argument happens at the end when traffic cams' public access is taken away because some clever soul found a novel use for the publicly available information (i.e. taking selfies), and the authorities were put out by it. So, public information gets locked down on spurious grounds, and the same clever soul is wrongly blamed for it. That's not fair, but someone will say ".. and that's why we can't have nice things", and others will say "yeah. that guy ruined it for everyone".
It's a bad argument as it ends up putting the blame on the wrong party.
But in these cases, it is the "clever soul" who's to blame, especially if they cannot be legally restricted from being "clever".
Like I said in another part of this thread: we should not be confounding "freely available" with "free to use without limitation". The various forms of open source licensing are testament to this concept: some things are indeed freely offered; others stipulate that you can't use them to make money without also offering your source code freely, etc. In both cases, the code is offered freely, but in the latter case, you're not legally allowed to use it without limitation.
Public information is often taken down because it can't be limited in such ways, and it relies on an honor system of sorts. Once people stop being honorable, there is no other choice but to take the resource away. The fault there absolutely rests with the individuals that have violated the implicit honor system.
This "clever soul" is trying to monetize this work, and encouraging others to do the same, which is pretty sketch.
It's pretty clear that the providers of a key piece of their endeavor aren't happy with them using the public infrastructure in this way. Is it not dishonorable to go against someone's wishes when they're providing something charitable?
When the public infrastructure is cameras that are constantly broadcasting the people nearby, and the use is saving a frame when you're one of the people nearby, no I do not see that as dishonorable. The intent of the provider only goes so far when it comes to super straightforward uses. And it's not a burden on the system. And if anything, now they're getting permission to take photos of that person in that moment (which is nice even if they don't personally make recordings of the broadcast).
I think the provider's concern is that a) it will become a burden on the system if this usage becomes widespread, and b) it encourages people to engage in risky behavior in order to have their image captured on one of these cameras.
Both of these are valid arguments, which you seem to discount out of hand, as if the provider's concerns are inherently invalid.
Let me flip the question: should anyone who captures an image of you in a public setting be free to monetize your likeness? If you are arguing that the provider's concerns and wishes are irrelevant, would that not also apply to every person who leaves the privacy of their own homes? That they, too, would have absolutely no say in how their likeness in public settings is used?
I feel like we've already established a precedent that yes, you should have some say in how your likeness is used, even when it's captured in settings where you are freely putting it on display in public.
Why does this not apply to other resources that are just as freely given?
The idea that it might become a burden seems unrealistic to me.
And banning pictures is a bad way to keep people out of traffic.
As to your flip... it really doesn't make sense to me. This art project gives people control of their own images! The city is trying to stop them from controlling their own images.
Saying the provider's wishes don't matter (which is a pretty strong exaggeration of what I said) does not even resemble saying the subject's wishes don't matter.
It seems like you intentionally missed my point: when you're in public, you are the provider of some non-trivial amount of data. There is no distinction between subject and provider in that case.
To follow your logic in that case is to argue that you should have no control over how your likeness is used once you provide it to the public by simply being in public.
This is nonsense. The provider of the information being collected should generally have some say in how that data is used; and if we want a respectful and kind society, we should respect those wishes so long as they are not unreasonable.
It is not unreasonable for NYCDOT to ask that people not use their traffic cameras to take selfies. Encouraging people to flout those wishes, even in the name of "art", is to encourage a society that does not respect other people's wishes.
I think we should draw a distinction between information provided on purpose or not. And other distinctions based on who is in the information. So I see your point now, but I think the calculation goes differently because my argument is not nearly that simple nor entirely focused on that specific aspect.
You have control over your likeness because it's your likeness. If you provide someone else's likeness, you deserve much less control. If they want to control it, you deserve even less.
> The provider of the information being collected should generally have some say in how that data is used; and if we want a respectful and kind society, we should respect those wishes so long as they are not unreasonable.
I'd give a lot more leeway for going against the wishes of the provider in particular. I don't think they should get a very privileged position. It's not burdening them, and it's not their personal information. They can ask but I don't think polite society requires agreeing in this case. It's nice of them to be worried about other people's safety but it's a pretty minor safety issue and the person walking around is the one who gets to make the decisions about their own safety.
I think I agree that there's a distinction to be made between information provided on purpose (or for a purpose) and not. However, I think I come to the opposite conclusion: information provided on purpose should have stronger guarantees in favor of the provider's wishes, because purpose implies intent, and intent requires effort to turn into action.
Your likeness, on the other hand, is freely given to all observers, at no real cost or effort to yourself. You just are, and it is. In fact, you touch on this when you talk about "burden" on the provider.
NYCDOT might not be providing their personal information, but effort and cost is required to maintain this infrastructure, and I think the effort begets respect, at the very least.
While I agree that someone should always have some level of input into how their likeness is used, because it truly is no burden on them to provide it, I think respectively less weight should be given to it. I think the best effort should still be given to respecting a person's wishes when it comes to their likeness, of course, but perhaps comparatively less than when someone intentionally shares something that took effort to create.
So it appears in fact I agree with your logic, but have somehow arrived at the opposite conclusion. Perhaps because I consider "burden" more broadly than just the marginal effort of supporting an additional viewer of a camera feed?
The impact on their server is barely anything. Itty bitty fractions of a penny. So the amount we need to respect their wishes specifically for burden reasons is negligible.
Control over your own likeness is not "burden", but it's important too, and in this situation I would say it's orders of magnitude more impactful and important than the server costs of a few seconds of viewing.
> Perhaps because I consider "burden" more broadly than just the marginal effort of supporting an additional viewer of a camera feed?
The reason they set it up is not for selfies, so I think the marginal cost of selfies is the right metric. But even if we look at total burden to set up the system, that's divided over a ton of users, so the person taking a selfie is still looking at a minuscule fraction of it.
> The impact on their server is barely anything. Itty bitty fractions of a penny. So the amount we need to respect their wishes specifically for burden reasons is negligible.
I don't think you can amortize "burden" across the number of consumers like that. If you want to take that approach, then you also seem to be arguing that the more people who see you in public, the less your likeness is worth--but I think empirically the opposite is true.
> Control over your own likeness is not "burden", but it's important too, and in this situation I would say it's orders of magnitude more impactful and important than the server costs of a few seconds of viewing.
But, why? If the marginal cost of someone taking a picture of you is next to nothing, why is control over that more impactful and important than server costs, for the same duration of viewing? If the marginal burden of someone viewing your likeness is approximately 0, and you're weighting the producer's preferences by that marginal cost (below), does that also not imply that the more people who see your likeness, the less your wish for control over your own likeness matters?
> The reason they set it up is not for selfies, so I think the marginal cost of selfies is the right metric. But even if we look at total burden to set up the system, that's divided over a ton of users, so the person taking a selfie is still looking at a minuscule fraction of it.
Again, I think this is the wrong way of weighting it. I think the preferences in general are an indivisible quantity, and the same regardless of the number of people must decide whether or not to respect those preferences. It's a preference, and each potential consumer must decide for themselves whether or not to respect those preferences. Having more consumers does not "cheapen" the weight of a producer's preferences for the next marginal consumer.
A model in which you weight preferences by marginal burden subsequently cheapens all preferences based on the number of potential consumers of the thing you're sharing. This makes no sense, and empirically--as in the case of "control over your own likeness"--more consumers seems to make that preference even more important. By amortizing the weight of preferences across the pool of potential consumers, you're essentially arguing that if your likeness were to be made available to everyone, for free, your own preferences regarding control of your likeness would become irrelevant.
I don't necessarily think that all preferences are equal, but I also bias towards weighing everyone's preferences as worth respecting, unless there's a compelling reason to assign more or less weight to those preferences. For example, when preferences are legally protected or morally aligned, I tend to weight them more; while preferences that are simply asinine or I consider to be immoral are similarly downweighted. I don't feel like this is a radical viewpoint, though?
Use of likeness does not have a negligible marginal cost. Every use matters. So I don't think my argument breaks down the way you're suggesting.
> I don't necessarily think that all preferences are equal, but I also bias towards weighing everyone's preferences as worth respecting, unless there's a compelling reason to assign more or less weight to those preferences. For example, when preferences are legally protected or morally aligned, I tend to weight them more; while preferences that are simply asinine or I consider to be immoral are similarly downweighted. I don't feel like this is a radical viewpoint, though?
When there is a public broadcast, I think the right to watch it should automatically be bundled with the right to take pictures of it. At least as far as the rights of the entity making the broadcast go. So I do find the disconnect somewhat asinine. And when someone is just showing me factual content, I don't particularly care about their preferences as a default, just their burden.
> Use of likeness does not have a negligible marginal cost. Every use matters. So I don't think my argument breaks down the way you're suggesting.
But now you're just making an arbitrary distinction? That seems suspicious.
> When there is a public broadcast, I think the right to watch it should automatically be bundled with the right to take pictures of it.
You might, but there are numerous cases where this is illegal, which means the legal system disagrees with you. You might disagree with the legal system, but that does not give you the right to disregard it.
> And when someone is just showing me factual content, I don't particularly care about their preferences as a default, just their burden.
Your likeness is also "just factual content", so by this logic, no one should care about any of your preferences regarding it. Your only way to resolve this contradiction is apparently to arbitrarily define the things where you think preferences should matter as "not having marginal cost".
The only thing you've made clear with this line of reasoning is that you feel free to disregard anyone's preferences if they're inconvenient to you.
> But now you're just making an arbitrary distinction? That seems suspicious.
Maybe? I don't think it's very arbitrary.
> You might, but there are numerous cases where this is illegal, which means the legal system disagrees with you.
Situations like what? Time-shifting is very well established as legal.
> Your likeness is also "just factual content",
No it's not. There are moral rights and privacy rights involved.
> Your only way to resolve this contradiction is apparently to arbitrarily define the things where you think preferences should matter as "not having marginal cost".
I said it does have marginal cost. After you brought up how a server request in this situation pretty much doesn't.
> The only thing you've made clear with this line of reasoning is that you feel free to disregard anyone's preferences if they're inconvenient to you.
It's hard for me to believe you wrote this description of my argument in good faith. I have never even looked at these cameras, and if someone else's right to their own likeness got in the way of my own projects I would respect that right a lot. My own convenience has absolutely nothing to do with my argument. This is all about principles.
But, for a lot of things, we have to exist in the gap between ethics and law. If someone, with access to ostensibly public NYCDOT information, uses it for "dishonorable" (not illegal) purposes, the DOT has three choices: legislate its use, remove it completely, or ignore the issue. Whatever they do, with the exception of the ignore option, will result in the vilification of our clever soul. That person did not make any of the decisions that caused the removal of the previously accessible public information. They just had a thing, they used it, and something happened. Could that have been foreseen? Maybe, but marginal. Guaranteed? Probably not at all. I just don't think that blame is fair. Let the NYCDOT do what it'll do and the rest of us can replot our courses if necessary.
OSS libraries, released to the web or wherever, have the same set of choices; and the authors can do as they please. It's their stuff, and their right entirely. But, blaming someone who acted "dishonorably" and resulted in a novel set of legal restrictions on an OSS library doesn't seem right either.
If someone took an open source library that had a restrictive license, and used it in violation of that license, if it can be proven that they did so with the intention of ignoring the license, they can be held accountable. In this case, even if they were ignorant of the license, they can still be held accountable. We can definitely assign blame to these people, and more so in the case of the one doing it with malicious intent.
So why is the same not true of these cameras? Especially if now this person has been informed that their usage is against the wishes of the provider; even if it's questionable whether or not the initial usage is "dishonorable", once the provider's intentions have been made clear, if the "clever soul" persists, it's not out of malice, which is definitely dishonorable.
Intentionally violating someone's expressed preferences is often legal, but I think it's almost uniformly seen as a negative (i.e. dishonorable) thing. Except in the most extreme cases, where someone's preferences are generally considered unreasonable, we have good reason to treat those who ignore preferences as untrustworthy or unjust.
So there exists a fourth option: NYCDOT makes a plain request that this kind of usage stop, and then rely on people to honor those wishes. This is like basic social reciprocity, so I'm constantly amazed by how many people argue that we shouldn't engage in it. At the end of the day, that's what you're saying we should do: be fine with people who are asked to stop, and who respond with "no, you can't make me". It's not unreasonable that NYCDOT ask that their cameras not be used to gain people likes or viewers or money; but it does strike me as unreasonable to applaud people who intentionally ignore (and even flout!) the lack of enforceability of that ask.
Tangential, but I'm a subscriber to a YouTube channel called VRF - virtual railfan - that shows essentially "traffic cams" of trains throughout North America. People do take selfies for the cam but always from a safe location.
Over the years, the cams have caught some extraordinary events: maintenance equipment starting fires, trains on fire, numerous derailments, and, I'm not kidding, probably about 100 occurrences of people driving onto the tracks and getting stuck. A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
> A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
Without knowledge of the crossing, it's definitely possible. Some crossing designs are better than others, and changing the design of a crossing can be very difficult depending on the site details. Changing the path of rails is always difficult due to the constraints of trains, so a poor crossing will almost certainly need to have the alignment of the road changed, but sometimes there's not enough buildable space around the crossing to build an over or undercrossing (grade separation) and it is expensive and disruptive. Sometimes it's possible to close the road if the crossing is bad and the road is deemed unnecessary, but it's pretty rare to deem roads unnecessary.
> and, I'm not kidding, probably about 100 occurrences of people driving onto the tracks and getting stuck. A disproportionate number of them occurred at Ashland, VA. Which makes me think it's a bug in the traffic design.
Can't speak for Ashland, but... educated guess, too steep elevation on the crossing, either from faulty design or bad road maintenance (the segment of road outside the compacted zone surrounding the rail settles from the load of the trucks).
In Germany, we solved that issue mostly by demanding automated radar or manual visual (direct or by camera) checks before clearing a crossing for the passing of a train at intersections that carry heavy haul traffic. However, we have on rarely-used crossings no monitoring, sometimes even no signalling, and just a day ago a freight train absolutely demolished the shit out of a rubble hauler [1].
many of the drivers simply couldn't get back on the road. If there were a ramp instead of a drop-off, the could have, however it would have been at the extreme risk of backing into traffic. Probably due to coincidence, train tracks are the perfect height to prevent drivers from turning (to drive over the rail). Some very determined drivers have done it, but probably 1/10 of the ones who become trapped.
Oh, I didn't understand what you had meant by driving onto the tracks.
I've been at least one crossing where I almost turned left onto the tracks instead of left onto the street before or after the crossing [1]
If this is happening much more often at one crossing than others, there's probably some feature of the crossing design that is encouraging this improper use. It's possible an inexpensive intervention could help a lot: painting lane lines and dashed turn indicators from the left turn lane could help.
Otherwise, it might be possible to put a gate over the rails, that was down at rest, and only raised when a train is crossing; but I've never seen that outside of rails at a park of some sort.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Vrz5HtB23dDV3mcg7?g_st=ac I think this should be a link to the street view. If not, Sunnvale Ave and Hendy Ave in Sunnyvale, CA. Heading south on Sunnyvale. I feel like this intersection has changed since, but I'm not sure.
For anyone wanting to look at traffic cameras across the US states, almost all are now available in a readily consumable GeoJSON format (with webcam URLs as properties) at [1]. There are two "Intelligent Transport Systems" software providers with 50%+ of US market share and the remainder of states generally use a custom developed website.
It seems like it's not. Nobody has ever prevailed in court for the "you can't deep link to our website" clause. There is a circuit split on "you can't embed images from our website". In the 9th Circuit, Perfect 10 v Google establishes precedent that you can <img src="someone else's site"> if you feel like it. In the Southern District of New York (2nd Circuit), Nicklen et al v. Mashable, Inc. defines precedent that you can't. As far as I know, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has not said anything about that. Either way, the next person to encounter this issue probably goes to the Supreme Court.
I think the department of transportation is overreaching. You can link to the location of the traffic cams and the video feeds. If they want to make that information private, then fine, they might be allowed to do that. But telling people about something that's public isn't illegal. That people are disrupting traffic by standing in the street having their pictures taken is too bad. They can increase the refresh rate to avoid that problem, or they can remove public access, or they can have the cops write people tickets for blocking traffic. Of the cameras in my neighborhood that I looked at, most of them can take your picture on the sidewalk and all of them can take your picture in the crosswalk during a walk signal.
Overall, I get why the DOT doesn't like this site, but I think it's kind of too bad for them. The DOT wants to maximize vehicles per hour. Residents want to take back their streets. Sorry, DOT. Evolve or die?
They are not. Or rather they have generally been deemed unenforceable as such (at least in the US). You can, of course, be banned by the service for violating them.
This is similar to signs regulating behavior that businesses might put up. By and large those are not in any way legally binding. Generally all the proprietor can do is ask you to leave. But since they can and often do ask you to leave, people generally abide by the posted requests.
In a similar vein "not liable for THING" signs are more accurately read as "we don't wish to be liable for THING and are going to attempt to refuse if at all able".
Not familiar with this project but I’ve taken a “selfie” with Seattle’s live traffic cameras and it didn’t involve violating any traffic laws. The video lag was such that you could wave at the camera halfway through a crosswalk, get safely to the other side, then pull out your phone and see yourself waving back.
This reminds me of an old sci-fi story, whose name I forgot, which had a world building aside that the government had 1person moviebooths stren throughout the cities where people could pay a quarter to see a 1 minute snippet of the surveillance feeds of every public place. The goal was to see yourself, or at least someone you recognized.
The cameras are old, some are black & white, and often they’re over or underexposed with all the interesting video artifacts that entails.
Unlike the webcam access at https://webcams.nyctmc.org/ the cameras update at realtime rates (30 fps) though some are slower.
Sadly, they don’t make the realtime camera cycling available to live stream that I’m aware of. I wish they would for homesick NYers. They don’t even show channel 72 in the Live TV tab of the Spectrum app (perhaps it works when using Spectrum Internet access).
“””
Kolman’s mother is a former newspaper writer who was dubbed "The World’s Worst Mom" after she let [his younger brother] ride a New York City subway alone at the age of nine. She parlayed the infamy into a reality TV series of the same name, wrote a book about over-parenting titled Free Range Kids and now travels around the world lecturing on the topic.
“””
Nice to see independence-focused parenting churning out some high quality adults.
This reminds me of learning the term "culture jamming", and the antics of a group that would perform silent plays in front of surveillance cameras, not knowing whether someone in a security booth was even watching.
At the time I wondered if they might've anthropomorphized the camera itself as the audience, to be able to emote to it and not focus on the uncertainty of whether there was anyone "else" in attendance.
Nextdns is awesome and I highly recommend it. That said, DNS level ad blocking is pretty limited but it often is enough for journalism sites like this one. You also get privacy benefits since it's quite good at blocking trackers and even bandwidth improvements since your device spends less time spewing logging requests.
I use DNS level blocking on my home network at the gateway level, but I also use AdGuard Pro on iOS for my powerful ad blocking. With this level of ad blocking you can do more than what DNS level blocking does. There's rules like "hide any element matching this selector" or "block XHR queries to this particular path". (though still not as powerful as uOrigin blocking! Which you need for big sites with anti-ad-blocking measures like YouTube or Facebook)
tl;dr; There's lots of options for iOS ad blocking and they're great for dealing with spammy sites like this one.
"From the experimental School for Poetic Computation, which describes itself as dedicated to “the study of art, code, hardware, and critical theory through lenses of decolonization and transformative justice."
I find it odd that we've conflated political statements with art.
I'm not saying art cannot or should not be political, but rather that not all forms of political statements represent art just because they are political. For some reason many people think they do to such an extent that my position would be borderline blasphemous in art circles.
(This is more a comment to the whole thread than this one comment that initiated it)
There is no clear answer to what art is, but there are many approaches to try to answer it. That is essentially what Theory of Art (or Philosophy of Art) is concerned about as a field of study.
Those approaches appear at distinct points in time and their ideas are rooted on the art and context of that time.
If you want to look at this site like Kant looked at art, from a pure aesthetic form, then you will say it is not art. You may even be offended that the question is asked.
But look at it through the lens of modern art theory, where art is communication, where art is experience, where art is interaction, where art is more about the content than the form, then it is definitely art.
If Kant had access to the Internet and was concerned about privacy, he might have found it to be art too :)
Thanks, I sincerely appreciate this comment. I think the prevalent opinion is that viewing art through aesthetic or formalist perspectives are "outdated" and that we've replaced them with a more refined, more evolved, deeper understanding of art.
I am mostly arguing that modern/contemporary art theory is just one alternative - it's not "above" more traditional views of art, and there isn't some linear progression from Kant to Rosalind Krauss.
I think the more modern view has dismissed beauty as some lower form of making and understanding art. As something superficial and entirely optional, perhaps even discouraged by some.
I'd prefer to synthesize the more traditional perspectives on aesthetics with some of the modern insights, rather than assuming newer theories must supersede older ones.
One book in my to-read list is After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History by Arthur C. Danto. I hope it is going to hit this nail right in the head.
I mean this is kind of trivially true so I'm not really sure who you're arguing against— "I think we should have lower taxes" is a political statement that isn't art. But for the most part if you believe what you're doing it art, it's art— this is for sure a performance piece.
I know a few local galleries that would trip over themselves to do an exhibition with this photo set.
The artist is not consuming them for free. He spent their time and effort creating something. They are not monetizing what is provided for free, but their creation. If someone wants to pay him for his work, what is it to you?
Separately, based on my life experience, this notion of "exploitation" is truly harmful to those who subscribe to it. You'll never outdo your limiting beliefs. You don't have to take my word for it, but I encourage you to explore who was it that instilled that belief in you and what you stand to gain from subscribing to it. I mean this in earnest, as advice from a stranger, for what it's worth. <3
They could spend the same time and effort arranging blank slides creating the exact same thing without the pictures, and it would have far less value
The value does not come only from the arrangement of the pieces, but also from the pieces themselves. To say the only value comes from the artist is just as wrong as saying its only value comes from the source material.
A painter cannot paint a picture without a canvas, and yet the canvas itself is generally not free, with the canvas-maker earning something from the sale of the canvas itself.
The rest of your comment is wildly condescending, and while I am open to reconsidering my beliefs, I generally do not follow the advice of condescending people. My life experience tells me such people are generally both more close-minded and more morally bankrupt than those who can evangelize their beliefs without condescension. Perhaps consider changing your approach to providing unsolicited advice?
> But for the most part if you believe what you're doing it art, it's art— this is for sure a performance piece.
I understand this is the prevalent view in the 21st century. I'm not convinced it is true. And similarly just because I rent a place, put up a sign saying "Art Gallery" and put some things up for display, that doesn't mean those things are works of art. The emperor has no clothes and all that.
If you took the time to rent a place filled it with something and then hung a sign that said “Art Gallery”, I would argue that for sure is art. It may or may not be good art but it is art
I know you and others would "for sure" argue it's art. That's precisely my point. I'm not convinced art is in the intent. Personally, it feels like Marcel Duchamp and others have conned everyone into believing that, though again I'm sure you'd disagree.
But it's definitely not "for sure" anything, as in it's not obviously, axiomatically, intrinsically, self-evidently the case. Even if the art scene today has collectively agreed on that view for the most part.
I subscribe to a more formalist or conservative view of art, particularly Roger Scruton's. Art is based on its intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits. Meaning the artwork’s formal or aesthetic aspects are central. It's those things that make it art and give it value, rather than whatever the artist intended to say or do.
If you subscribe to this view—which to me is what the average person would subscribe to, or the "common sense" view—then the photos in the article have very little aesthetic value and elicit no contemplative experience. At best, they promote discussion about state surveillance, which is a political but not an artistic endeavor. It's not just "bad art", but rather "conflating political statements with art", as I said at the top.
I understand the semantic argument you're trying to make.
I think you have more to gain from loosening your grip on the boundaries of the word "art", for purely selfish reasons. It makes the world more nuanced and interesting.
For similar reasons, I'd recommending widening your lens of what is considered political. All art is political, even if it's not the artist's "intention" or within their awareness. Because it's the production of a political context. There's no such thing as an apolitical life or human act.
You can argue against it for semantic reasons, but again I'd challenge what value you gain from leaning on those semantics, beyond sorting a gloriously continuous and analog universe into artificially-exclusive categories.
I should first note that I sincerely appreciate the thoughtful reply and how honestly you've engaged in this conversation. It's why I love coming to HN, so thank you.
I used to have very loose grips on the boundaries of the word "art". I've been there and done that. Then I realized that humanity has more to gain from holding art to higher standards than it does from the "anything goes" approach.
I did note that art can be political. By all means it should be political in those situations where the artist has a certain objective in mind and believe art can be a meaningful way to make politics. I have nothing against that and I appreciate the historical and current relevance of art as as means of being and acting political.
If you're keen to understand my position as explained by someone much more knowledgeable than me and much more studied in art and philosophy, I encourage you to watch this remarkably interesting video essay by Roger Scruton: https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999
Your sense of aesthetics is not objective, so I refuse to base any definition of art on it.
The piece that this article is covering (not the individual photos, but the whole project) is clearly making people in this comment section contemplate the role of these cameras and the policy surrounding. It’s also made you pretty contemplative on what qualifies as art.
What makes this contemplation political and not artistic?
> Your sense of aesthetics is not objective, so I refuse to base any definition of art on it.
Do you find this artwork aesthetically interesting? Pleasing? Intriguing? Which aesthetic properties does it have that make it worthwhile? I'm not arguing you should define "art" on my specific aesthetic sense, but rather on anyone's (everyone's?) collective sense.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find even one person saying this specific artwork is aesthetically interesting. The bar shouldn't be that everyone must find it interesting. We can debate what the threshold for "aesthetically interesting" or how prevalent that view must be among receivers of the art, but clearly my 3 year old's drawings and Vermeer's body of work are in different categories, so the distinction does exist somewhere.
> What makes this contemplation political and not artistic?
For starters, the fact that the contemplation is about "the role of these cameras and the policy surrounding" and not about the artwork. And what made me contemplative on what qualifies as art is the general insistence on labeling any type of creation as an artistic one these days, which is something that I have thought about frequently in the last 2 years or so.
I'd flip that around and say why not include aesthetics in the definition of art? Doing away with it entirely makes for a less beautiful world and our brain is wired to appreciate beauty.
No, it's self-evidently agreed upon, but not self-evidently true.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw
It’s not. Nobody debates whether most things are art because most things aren’t noticed. The fact that someone got you to give a shit enough to protest it’s not art is self-evidence of its influence over, at the very least, you.
I didn't say most things are art. I say people conflate political expressions with artistic ones. As someone who loves art, I find that somewhat disheartening, so I thought I'd debate it. It doesn't magically make the non-art from TFA into art, though. Certainly not if you start from the premise that art must have aesthetic merit.
> not if you start from the premise that art must have aesthetic merit
This is a semantic punt. "Aesthetic merit" is no less subjective than "art."
If there are grounds to debate whether something is art, it's almost always art. It may not be fine art. (Or art to your taste.) But there's a reason those are qualifications.
Functionally, I think arguing about what is and isn’t art broadly diminishes support for the things you probably consider “real” art. It makes it unnecessarily pretentious and gate kept.
I'm not even sure what a semantic punt is, but having "intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits" (my quote from earlier in the thread) is clearly less subjective than just "art" which has no inherent meaning.
To be clear, my definition is a set of observable properties about some object. You can debate who should to the observing (I argue "no specific person but the collective"), but it's still observable. "Art", on the other hand, has no inherent meaning. It's an assigned value.
> If there are grounds to debate whether something is art, it's almost always art.
I'm not convinced and I honestly don't see how that holds logically. I appreciate the fact that people are taught as much these days. Doesn't make it more truthful, though, just more collectively agreed upon.
> Functionally, I think arguing about what is and isn’t art broadly diminishes support for the things you probably consider “real” art. It makes it unnecessarily pretentious and gate kept.
I think not arguing about what is and isn't art makes it so "anything is art" for which a corollary is "nothing is specifically art" and therefore art has diminished value. There's no gatekeeping, just a desire to value and treasure artistic beauty.
> having "intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits" (my quote from earlier in the thread) is clearly less subjective than just "art" which has no inherent meaning
Does it? Aesthetics and experience are as inherently subjective as art. We're having a contemplative experience in this discussion, after all.
> appreciate the fact that people are taught as much these days
Most people have zero art education.
> not arguing about what is and isn't art makes it so "anything is art" for which a corollary is "nothing is specifically art" and therefore art has diminished value
I'm not convinced. One can meaningfully discuss the ontology of art--and its meaning, impact and value--without needing to precisely delineate its boundary.
Some things are absolutely art. Some things are probably not. In between is ambiguity. That doesn't diminish the value of anything; hell, that ambiguity applies to almost everything we treasure, from literal treasure and love to the internal distinctions between forms of art.
> Art is based on its intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits.
Would that mean that you don’t recognise the existence of bad art? Because that seems to be the consequence of what you are saying.
> or the "common sense" view
Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know you are the resident common sense expert this week. Next time i will make sure to ask you what i should think before i think.
> then the photos in the article have very little aesthetic value
What you seems to be missing is that the photos here are not the art. This is not photography. The whole package together is what is art here. The story behind the photos, what they did and how they did it. This is a sort of performance art.
The photos are just an aspect of this performance art. Imagine that you would hear the sound recording of a dance performance. Shuffling feet, occasional stomping. Would it have an aesthetic value? It might or might not. But that doesn’t mean the dance wasn’t artistic. Similarly to this case the audio recording is not the art piece, just an imprint of it. Part of the whole package, but not the package itself.
> and elicit no contemplative experience
Lol. You are just wrong on that. I’m here contemplating the whole thing since half an hour at least. But you sure seems to like to just declare things.
> > Art is based on its intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits.
> Would that mean that you don’t recognise the existence of bad art? Because that seems to be the consequence of what you are saying.
To be honest, I can't think of anything that would constitute "bad art" in accordance with this view of art. It's an interesting question, and maybe it does exist, but right now I just can't think of anything that qualifies as such. To me, there's "art" and "not art", though I admit the line dividing the two is fuzzy. "Bad" would require some form of ranking, but it's hard to imagine an adequate criteria even before factoring in different art forms.
>> > or the "common sense" view
> Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know you are the resident common sense expert this week. Next time i will make sure to ask you what i should think before i think.
I went out of my way to say that it doesn't matter what I personally think, but rather the aesthetic properties of the artwork and the contemplative experiences it evokes on the receivers of the art in general. And the choice of the words "contemplative" and "experience" are not accidental. This feels like a bad faith rather than a charitable interpretation of my position.
My use of "common sense" (in quotes) was perhaps a poor attempt at saying that, if within a given social and cultural context there exists some moderately agreed upon view of what is and isn't "aesthetically interesting and a contemplative experience", then this may also be applied to a broad enough social and cultural group to arrive at a "common" view of what has artistic merit. Ask a million people if Vermeer is art. I can't imagine a significant number of them will say it isn't.
> > then the photos in the article have very little aesthetic value
> What you seems to be missing is that the photos here are not the art. This is not photography. The whole package together is what is art here. The story behind the photos, what they did and how they did it. This is a sort of performance art.
I'm saying it has very little artistic value even if it might have meaningfully political value. It can be a political performance. A form of protest, even. It's just not art, performance or otherwise, according to the model of artistic reality which I espouse.
> The photos are just an aspect of this performance art. Imagine that you would hear the sound recording of a dance performance. Shuffling feet, occasional stomping. Would it have an aesthetic value? It might or might not. But that doesn’t mean the dance wasn’t artistic. Similarly to this case the audio recording is not the art piece, just an imprint of it. Part of the whole package, but not the package itself.
That's a strawman. My argument goes way beyond claiming this isn't art because the photos aren't artistic enough. Even with the performance, the project, the bringing the people together, posting, getting reactions from people, it's all just a cool project with a political bent. It still doesn't qualify as aesthetically interesting.
> Lol. You are just wrong on that. I’m here contemplating the whole thing since half an hour at least. But you sure seems to like to just declare things.
It's quite remarkable how visceral of a reaction this causes on people. This whole response just reads like cognitive dissonance, but particularly this final bit. My arguments have generally been about art and aesthetics. I rarely used the words "you" or "your", except to point out what I perceived as less-than-adequate debate manners for the most part. It would be nice if others would extend me the same courtesy.
> I can't think of anything that would constitute "bad art" in accordance with this view of art.
Many can. It is everywhere. Trite poems, uninspired paintings, thematically muddled novels, boring photos. The people who made them aimed at creating something great and kinda missed. Either by a litle or a lot. I call that bad art.
> I went out of my way to say that it doesn't matter what I personally think
But you also said your view about what art is is the “common sense” view. In other words you are right others are wrong. Which is what i take an exception with.
> Ask a million people if Vermeer is art. I can't imagine a significant number of them will say it isn't.
Why would that be at dispute?
> My arguments have generally been about art and aesthetics.
You postulated that this work of art has no contemplative value. As if you are the final arbiter of that. If you would have said “folks, this doesn’t do it for me”, I wouldn’t have cared. But you choose to pontificate on it in absolute terms. As if your analysis is going to have universal value.
I still wouldn't call any of that "bad" art, because that term means more than just "failing to achieve greatness".
> you also said your view about what art is is the “common sense” view. In other words you are right others are wrong. Which is what i take an exception with.
I questioned whether the general public is right while the art world can't see the emperor has no clothes.
> > Ask a million people if Vermeer is art. I can't imagine a significant number of them will say it isn't.
> Why would that be at dispute?*
Great, now ask a million people if Duchamp's Fountain is art. That's what I mean by common sense. That's what's at dispute.
> You postulated that this work of art has no contemplative value. As if you are the final arbiter of that. If you would have said “folks, this doesn’t do it for me”, I wouldn’t have cared. But you choose to pontificate on it in absolute terms. As if your analysis is going to have universal value.
I'm really repeating myself here, but to be clear I'm not saying I am the one who is deciding its artistic merit. I'm saying works that evoke no contemplative experience through their aesthetic characteristics shouldn't be called art, even if they evoke contemplative experiences through other features such as political relevance.
This is certainly not pontificating in absolute terms. It's just debating Theory of Art. My analysis doesn't have to have universal value to be logical and cogent.
I'm aware that goes against the contemporary view of art in the art world, which seems to equate artistic intent with artistic expression (or some other long form variant of that statement). To me that's just a charade, a long con, a hack. It solves for high-browness at the expense of beauty. But b e a u t y m a t t e r s.
And that's what I take issue with, hence this thread. If you're allowed to challenge my view, why am I not allowed to challenge yours?
I never claimed that my analysis would have universal value, whatever that means. What I am trying to do is to arrive at a definition of art through first principles. But the cognitive dissonance is deafening in this thread, so most of my energy has been spent trying to explain why I'm allowed to even present an argument instead of actually debating the issue. Oh well.
> I never claimed that my analysis would have universal value
Let me quote your own words to you: "It still doesn't qualify as aesthetically interesting." and "photos in the article have very little aesthetic value and elicit no contemplative experience" These are your opinions masquerading as universal truths.
> What I am trying to do is to arrive at a definition of art through first principles.
And you ended up with "art is what people call art"? Deep.
That still doesn't make it aesthetically interesting or contemplative. It's a cool project about an important topic! I haven't disagreed with that once. I just don't see how it can be art.
I wasn't quoting you but an actual piece of art I saw a decade ago in Art Basel that made fun of people pretending something is not art for any reason they can think of, including that their kid would be able to produce it.
It doesn't really fit in this conversation because that's an attack on the quality and value of a piece of art, which is not at all what airstrike is talking about.
TIL NYC traffic cams have a live feed on the web
"NYC DOT traffic cameras only provide live feeds and do not record any footage. There are 919 cameras available via the NYCTMC.org website."[1]
random traffic camera https://webcams.nyctmc.org/api/cameras/a8f2d065-c266-4378-ac...
[1] https://webcams.nyctmc.org/about