Store owner installs surveillance cameras to spy on police- Reblogged by HD View 360

A Miami convenience store owner is fed up with his employees and customers being allegedly harassed by police. So he installs surveillance video to get evidence against the local cops.

 

 Surveillance is for our own good.

By having everything that we are doing monitored, we can be sure that we (who have nothing to hide) will be safe. At least, that's the logic many authorities offer us, as they spy, pry, and vilify anyone who might feel suspicious. What happens, though, when you suspect the authorities of behaving suspiciously? Is it all right to spy on them?

Miami Gardens, Fla., convenience store owner Alex Saleh decided he'd try. He'd become vexed at what he saw as police harassment of his employees and even his customers.

 So he installed surveillance cameras, with the specific intention of watching the detectives.

He'd become frustrated, you see, about the possibly not coincidental number of times that his employee, Earl Sampson, had been stopped and questioned by police officers -- 258 times over a four-year period does seem a little like overkill. These included 100 searches and 56 jailings. As for convictions, well, they were only for marijuana possession.

Saleh told the Miami Herald it seemed odd that Sampson had been arrested 62 times for trespassing, when the vast majority of offenses were outside the very same Quickstop.

That would be the Quickstop where Sampson worked.

In all, Saleh installed 15 surveillance cameras. Some might find a certain poetry in the fact that he felt the need for them, when he says his store has never been robbed.

The videos make for numbing viewing. In one, a store employee takes out the trash, only to be arrested for trespassing. Others appear to show searches without warrants and police stopping customers without any obvious reason.

Miami Gardens is neither an easy, nor a safe place. But the police's reluctance to so far comment on these videos and the Herald's reporting suggest that some questions might need to be answered.

Clearly, there is a history between Saleh and the police. He filed an internal affairs report against some officers. He claims they retaliated by being more aggressive.

But he's owned the store for 17 years. The fact that he has to install cameras in an attempt to prove what he feels is racial profiling, excessive aggression, and intimidation might be a portent of what is to come, as technology becomes ever more involved in everyday life.

If police officers are to be outfitted with cameras, will citizens feel the need to have Google Glass or its equivalent, just to ensure they have their own filmic version of an encounter with authorities?

Some police officers have aggressively shown how uncomfortable they are with ordinary citizens filming them in the line of duty.

In one case this year, police in Bakersfield, Calif., were accused of erasing cell phone video of an incident in which a man died.

In another incident in San Diego, an officer being filmed making an arrest declared that the Samsung Galaxy in question was a weapon.

Even if we're all filming each other, there will still be questions surrounding editing and other forms of manipulation.

In the search for justice, there's always that nagging question: Whose?

HD View 360 is a Surveillance and Security company based in Miami, FL.  HD View 360 specializes in high end residential installations and commercial Franchise store installations and monitoring.

For more information on HD view 360 products and services visit: www.hdview360.com


source: http://www.cnet.com/news/store-owner-installs-surveillance-cameras-to-spy-on-police/

Privacy Must Yield to the Needs of Security & Surveillance Is Not a Silver Bullet in the Fight Against ISIS Presented by: Dennis Mancino HD View 360

Surveillance Is Not a Silver Bullet in the Fight Against ISIS

Angeliki Dimitriadi is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and a research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens.

Updated November 19, 2015, 9:02 PM

The Paris attacks have prompted renewed calls for surveillance and additional powers to the police in France and across Europe. Yet a quick look around Europe reveals perhaps too much surveillance rather than too little.

What Europe needs right now is not more surveillance but rather better cooperation between the member states in safeguarding the union.

For all the criticism leveled to the United States by its European partners about violating basic rights to privacy, Europeans have been heading for some time on a similar path. Data retention laws, mass surveillance and bulk collection of data, weakened privacy protections and surveillance of those suspected of posing a threat are increasingly proposed and adopted in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, to name a few, with little oversight. As Europe grapples with questions around border security, it is worth reflecting on whether more surveillance, and more draconian laws, can indeed keep us safe and at what cost.

The problem with surveillance is that it relies on availability of data and ideally, relevant data. We cannot track what is not there or if it is lost amid too much information. In the case of Paris, the terrorists utilized communication sources that prevented authorities from accessing them. As technology progresses and attempts to safeguard the privacy of its users, it is also utilized by groups with an extremist agenda. The response by governments to limit privacy further, thereby prompting technology to offer alternative options to its users, raises a question of the measure’s efficiency. It is a catch-22 and one that reveals the limitations of surveillance but also our inherent responses in the face of fear, which is to raise walls, virtual and physical, to protect ourselves.

There is an opportunity here for Europe to learn from mistakes of the past, especially the U.S.’s program post 9/11. Surveillance is not a silver bullet, especially when it is indiscriminate and not independently monitored to ensure accountability. Rather, it has the potential to become a danger to the very society it is meant to protect as well as generate faulty data. What Europe needs right now is not more surveillance but rather better cooperation and exchange of information among the member states in order to safeguard the Union.


From another perspective and one we share:

Privacy Must Yield to the Needs of Security

Anthony Glees is a professor of politics and the director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham in Britain.

Updated November 19, 2015, 9:02 PM

The Paris attack on Friday proved that the Islamic State can strike, at will, in the heart of Europe. But it was also, self evidently, a massive French intelligence failure, as many analysts now agree. States have a core duty to deliver security to their citizens. Arguably for the fourth time in 2015, France has shown itself to be incapable of doing so.

The best way to keep safe from jihadist terrorists is to intercept their communications and act against them before they act against us.

The best way to keep safe from terrorists is to intercept their communications and act against them before they act against us.

For more than a century, governments have been exploiting their ability to covertly learn the secrets of their enemies by tapping into their communications, whether they are sent wirelessly or by cable. No country knows this better than my own, the United Kingdom, where Bletchley Park has become the symbol of effective intelligence gathering that has benefited all civilized people everywhere. Without it the Nazi Third Reich would have been much harder to defeat.

President Hollande said that the Paris attacks were planned and steered by the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria, and implemented by French-speaking jihadists from Belgium and France, possibly with a German link. The set up and execution doubtless involved countless communications, via the Internet and even, perhaps, the chat button on a Sony Playstation, over many weeks, within France and between France and other countries.

There may have been countless opportunities for intercepting these messages and preventing the terrorists from realizing their murderous plan. Just a few days before the attack, on Oct. 28, the French Senate finally agreed a new more intrusive interception regime should be lawful, still apparently unsigned by the president and then doubtless to be challenged in the French courts and the European Court of Justice.

And why has France resisted taking these steps? Because the French, unlike the British, have (until very recently) placed a higher value on their privacy than their security, a dreamy premodern view that was strongly reinforced by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Snowden managed to convince millions of people, not just the French, that they were under constant surveillance by "snooping" intelligence agencies. He also alerted our enemies to what we could do.

Of all the ways of defeating Islamic State attacks, getting hold of their communications and exploiting them offers the best chance of success. Hopefully France has now learned this lesson.



source: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/19/does-europe-need-a-new-surveillance-system/privacy-must-yield-to-the-needs-of-security

HD View 360 is a Miami, FL based Surveillance Firm specializing in high end installation and equipment. We service small B2B, coast to coast.

For more information visit our website at www.hdview360.com

Trump calls for surveillance of ‘certain mosques’- Presented by Dennis Mancino HD view 360

iNEW YORK - US Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has stepped up his rhetoric against Muslims in America, saying he will like to monitor their mosques.

In a rally at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump dismissed accounts of his apparent support for creating a registry of Muslims in the United States as an effort by the news media to entrap him.

He then attempted to clarify that idea on Saturday, saying he wanted a database of refugees entering the country from Syria and adding, “I want surveillance of certain mosques, OK?”

“We’ve had it before and we’ll have it again,” he added. Trump has recently spoken of the New York Police Department’s use of informants in mosques after the Sept. 11 attacks. On Thursday, Trump said he would be open to having a “Muslim database” in America for security reasons, two days after he said that the US would have “absolutely no choice” but to close down some mosques.

Hours later, Trump doubled down on his previous remarks when asked by NBC News if he would create a national database to register all Muslims living in the US to protect the country against terrorism. “I would certainly implement that, absolutely.” Trump’s comments came in the wake of the Paris attacks that left at least 130 people dead and hundreds more injured on November 13.
Speaking in Birmingham on Saturday, the billionaire businessman also linked current terrorist concerns in the US, following the attacks in France, with 9/11.

“I watched the World Trade Center go down,” Trump asserted, adding he watched in New Jersey, “as thousands of people were cheering as the building was coming down.” Trump’s comments have drawn strong criticism from his White House rivals.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders called Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric “shocking” and “outrageous.” “This is shocking rhetoric. It should be denounced by all seeking to lead this country,” Clinton tweeted on Saturday. “What an outrageous and bigoted statement. @realDonaldTrump should be ashamed of himself,” Sanders tweeted.

Republican presidential candidates have also criticized Trump over his controversial remarks.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush called the prospect of a registry for Muslims “abhorrent.” Florida Senator Marco Rubio said the idea was “unnecessary” and not something Americans would support.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has largely avoided criticizing Trump throughout the presidential election campaign, said, “I’m not a fan of government registries of American citizens.” New Jersey

Governor Chris Christie said creating a national registry based on religion and closing mosques “will do nothing to keep us safer.”

Ohio Governor John Kasich said requiring people to register with the government because of their religion “strikes against all that we have believed in our nation’s history.” During the campaign rally,  a fight broke out between a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protester and other event attendees. CNN reports that the man appeared to have been shouting “Black Lives Matter,” a slogan that was also printed on his shirt. The network reported that at least six attendees pushed and tackled the man when he refused to leave the event.

One rally attendee can be heard on camera chanting “all lives matter” as the protester was later escorted out by police officers. The scuffle drew enough attention that Trump interrupted his speech at the rally to address the fight. “Yeah, you can get him out,” Trump said on stage, referring to a protester. “Yeah, get him out. Get him the hell out of here.”

Birmingham Police Lt. Sean Edwards confirmed to CBS News that three people were asked to leave the event after the skirmish broke out. All three departed, and no arrests were made. Later, Trump appeared to justify the roughing up of the black protester. Asked by Fox News for his comments, Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up. It was disgusting what he was doing.”

 source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/donald-trump/12011616/Donald-Trump-I-want-surveillance-of-certain-mosques.html