Thanks to “Homeland Security funds”, Montgomery County, PA is creating a 3-D map of the entire county intended to aid in public safety efforts:
The images will be joined to form a three-dimensional map to help police, firefighters and 911 operators.
“First responders would automatically know the size, shape and location of every building and every square mile of the county,” Sullivan said. “We’re visualizing every police car being able to bring up a picture of the building they are responding to and look at every side of it.”
I’m not going to pretend to have thoughtfully assessed the privacy vs. safety/security tradeoffs of this plan – I just came across a news blurb in my morning review of security news. Two aspects seem notable: one, it’s yet another step in the creep of ubiquitous surveillance; two, it seems like the public benefits of the plan pertain more to safety than security.
In general, there is a useful distinction between safety as those measures that control or manage the risk of bad things simply happening (fire, natural disaster, accidents, etc.), and security as the countermeasures to more narrowly defined set of risks driven by an adversary with an intention of causing harm. While they are often related, safety and security are different, and should be addressed separately. Even if we decide as a society that we’re willing to make sacrifices in privacy or convenience for the sake of security, we might have a different sacrifice threshold as it regards safety. It is troubling that this distinction seems completely absent from this policy.
On a completely different note, and with a seasonally appropriate nod to the Irish, I’m listening to the Pogues and Joey Ramone sing “I Fought the Law”. Well, at least that’s how the ID3 tag attributes it. To be honest, I have no idea where I got this track, and neither do Amazon or Google. Any thoughts?
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