Cybernetic Hate Crime

David Brin's Transparent Society also comes to play here. As he points out the choice we have is not, "Will there be widespread surveillance or not," but, "Will we acknowledge that widespread surveillance is inevitable and sit down to work out the social norms needed to make this tolerable."

IIRC he had three scenarios for how things could go:

1. We say, "No! This is intolerable and must be banned!" In which case the rich and powerful will still make use of surveillance technologies, but will place a high emphasis on hidden surveillance to do their best to avoid being caught. Average people will be legally locked out of using surveillance technologies to socially beneficial purposes (uhoh, you just recorded an officer beating a non-resisting person? Guess what, *you* are the one going to jail).

2. We don't ban the technologies, but just muddle into the future. Most of the benefits will fall to the rich and powerful. Most of the emphasis that activists take goes to seeking accountability for the government and business cameras.

3. We don't ban the technologies, and enough people pay attention to the coming future that we don't merely allow cameras to show up in public but start demanding more than mere accountability. Much like people are now starting to demand open publishing of research that was funded by tax dollars, people insist that tax payer funded cameras in public areas be made public resources.

One legal idea I liked from scenario three was to rule that if public access to a camera was cut off by the government they do so at the cost of not being allowed to introduce what it recorded as evidence at trials. So in something like recent occupy protests they'd have to either allow the public to view online the behavior of both the protesters *and* the officers, or be required to state in court that they weren't introducing video evidence because they'd blocked public oversight of the surveillance.