A German MP successfully sued for the release of data retained about him under a former German law (see the spoiler), which was the basis for this nifty visualisation:
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
I think the control elements should be fairly intuitive, just remember all dates are in DD:MM:YY notation. On the right you can see additional info about the number of his incoming and outgoing calls (eingehende Anrufe/ausgehende Anrufe) and text messages (eingehende Nachrichten/ausgehende Nachrichten).


And that's just what LS or KE could figure out based on a single commcode. Now factor in three dozen customer profiles, surveillance drones, material links, logfiles of various nodes you interacted with...They know where you are. They also know who was there at the same time, and which SIN exhibited the same patterns when your regular SIN apparently did nothing...

I think my characters need more thermite bars




PS: Also, remember what the TOS say about politics. I know it's tempting

Yeah. It is rather scary how much is actually kept on log.
Imagine crosslinking that with, say, Google's search history. The customer cards you'll have at your local chain of supermarkets. Etc.
Scary, somehow.

The sheer ammount of information tends to make it fairly useless, unless someone wants to find someone in particular though.

And yet, where's Osama Bin Laden? Or the nearly countless number of missing/kidnapped/hiding people around the world?

If people don't want to be found, it's entirely possible. So yes, the police can find you if you're running around making yourself known. Is that really that shocking?

Cursing about the lack of cellphone reception in whatever mountain chain/jungle they're in. Or better yet, power outlets to plug the charger into.

Today certainly, but with a small army of agents or even code sprites...

A friend who plays a mage in my game works for a collection agency tracking down folks who have defaulted on their cars. He often claims he can find anybody, so I dared him to see what info he could get on me.
He came back a week later with records of my home, my credit history, my relatives, their addresses, my work history, the whole nine.
All of it wrong! We were both shocked to learn that not only was I dead, but I was making payments on several homes out of state and I had been married three times. While being a zombie, land baron polygamist sounds dandy, it would really cut into my gaming schedule.

The main disadvantage of the tracking everyone system all the time is that the human operator always assumes the computer is right, because they have no basis for comparison. I don't want to think about someone who was actively trying to evade The Man would do.

Add to that the mistakes official clerks make. I used to be one, and oy, the typos!

Also, a lot of places still use names rather than numbers for issues. And the sheer number of names some people have... It astounds the mind.

I'll take that job!

As far as RL is concerned, yeah, The Man knows more about me than I do myself. Doesn't stop me from looking at gaming forums, webcomics, and weird porn all the time.

As far as SR is concerned, it's pretty much a matter of how bad did your runners cheese off The Man? If the cost of finding you is worth the damage you caused, or could cause, They will find you. I make sure to keep it "reasonable" when tracking people down; legwork, questioning, bribes, Matrix and Astral tracking, and then generally give it an amount of time it takes to pin them down.

I do pretty much ignore the nigh-infinite amount of RFID tags out there, especially aftter the passage in Unwired about the tag in your candy bar triggering an alert when breaking in because its not part of your PAN or some crap.

Hooked up to his dialysis machine, apparently. Thing is, there's a lot of caves and places to hide in the Middle East.

Or, who knows, smuggled to some other country and living comfortably with a cave sound stage for his recordings.

OBL has been confirmed dead by pretty reliable sources since December 2001.. the fact that the US stopped looking in 2k5 is also a big hint.

And here I thought Bruce Willis killed him...

And here I thought Bruce Willis killed him... Twice. Because Bruce Willis is that bad ass.

Ran him over in his 1968 Chevrolet El Camino. Then backed over him again, probably.

No, no. Chuck Norris with a roundhouse kick.

It's ALWAYS Chuck Norris with a roundhouse kick, though.

No, I'm pretty sure I remember Bruce Willis saying he killed OBL, and the US Government was pissed off as he wasn't supposed to have been the one to do it...

Chuck Norris is like 3 and a half feet tall. I auditioned for an under 5 on Texas Ranger and was told I was too tall, and would make Chuck look short...when I was 15! Stupid midget pseudo Christian!

Yep, that's more or less the only option. IF you crank up the "surveillance society" theme to the maximum there are few ways to hide - especially since the corps will probably be satisfied if the list of suspects can be narrowed down to something like ten people. If there are ten Sarah Connors and you don't know which is the one you are looking for, though luck for nine of them

And they'd use a phone book, too.

Story of my life. I'm an investigator and that lexis shit is often times dead wrong or misleading.

In Shadowrun this is what would happen, in RL well it depends which country you're in i guess.

Well, to give an example of how inadequate omniscient surveillance is... Graffiti has been put up in London (The city with the most Anti-Crime Cameras in the world!) proclaiming "Big Brother is Watching" and other such 1984-references.

One is a huge mural (Admittedly stencil spray-painted, but still) that was done in view of the camera it was referencing, and police are baffled as to who did it. (Well, except for the artist's "Tag", they still don't know who the blighter is. He's been on the scene for decades.).

RC has a good spiel on it, summed up "Yes everything is recorded, and it's very unlikely to be terribly useful to anyone unless you're stupid"

A little bit of net chaff goes a long way.

Chaff, ECM, and flares if you do it right.

Thank you thank you THANK YOU for using the Oxford comma!

Seriously, I'm OCD about that sort of thing in an almost clinical sense.

I work with cctv cameras, if used correctly they can be a great help but the way they try and use them there is a waste of time normally.

How's that?

Thank my English teacher in High School. Or, to be exact, the only one that was worth listening to as I had to take five English Classes.

Waste of time, all of them. I'd have rather taken more tech classes, or maybe an easier "Introduction to French" class as an option.

I'm an English savant; I can't help it, bad grammar/punctuation/etc. makes me squirm :-/

You should see me watch "Hacker" movies.

The Hulk has a calmer temper than I do.

You mean real life hacking doesn't consist of A) a beautiful, custom user interface (usually on a Mac) where you just have to wait for the animation to finish or B) a single, simple, word-based password on a military-grade system that you can guess after two or three tries?

I find that very hard to believe.

My AP Stylebook negates your serial comma. Journalism is alive and well.

RAY SMASH PUNY PLOT HOLES INTO HUGE PLOT HOLES AND TEAR HOLLYWOOD NEW HOOP!

I think the extra comma was excessive.

From Wikipedia

University of Oxford Writing and Style Guide

As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c’. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used – especially where one of the items in the list is already joined by ‘and’:

They had a choice between croissants, bacon and eggs, and muesli.

"check please"

The problem is most people don't bother to make this important distinctions, and at least with the technical documents I'm accustomed to reading, it can make meaning very hard to divine. I will continue teaching the oxford comma, just like I continue to teach people they aren't feeling "good", they're feeling "well".

My AP Stylebook definitely trumps Wikipedia!

Most cameras are set up to cover a specific area, but unless they are being constantly monitored you will only find the images you need if they are either (a) set up to alert an operator if sensor driven (this is what i do for a living) or (b) you know the exact time an incident happened, most groups, like the police will spend hours pooring over cctv for a serious crime but, for example the graffiti above won't have the manpower to sit there watching hours of images for minor things like vandalisim.

Even if it does cause a major media blitz showing the ineptitude and inability of the police force and the farce that is "The Big Brother of London".

I also know of a few cases where CCTV recordings were unable to be used to prosecute because the relevant time was... Missing. It just "Happens" that all those times I've heard about involve Police or Security as the Defendants, and could have easily cleared them, or confirmed their side of the story.

Funny that, eh?

Wow! Thank you for contributing to my petty crimes ;P

So CCTV doesn't catch much and witnesses don't remember much... What's the solution?

There isn't one. That's why we're Shadowrunners.
The actual solution is that criminals are generally pretty dumb, otherwise they would find legal ways to make money. The biggest mistake criminals make is telling too many people and one of them either gives him up for the reward or, more likely, for a reduced sentence when he gets pulled over with a glove compartment full of blow ala True Romance.

The problem is that security is usually handled by people that THINK they know what they're doing. Really, the same way criminals THINK they're good at doing what they do.

The companies that do handle proper security and are trained and experienced in issues don't have the issues mentioned above.

The solution? You get what you pay for.

Cam's do not help stop crimes.
MAYBE they help SOLVING them.
Still a case of spilled milk in my eyes . .
Also, i work for Arcor/Vodafone, one of the worlds biggest ISP's . .
I can track people's phones and monitor who they called when for how long from where, using what phone . .
Of course, doing this would be highly illegal for me to do, but the technical things are still there.
We can even see if somebody is using VOIP Software on his 3G contract or teethering hos phone to his laptop.
Same for 3G internet usage. Same for E-Mails/DSL/fixed line phone activity. We can access our routers from the outside.
I can see the IP's and forwarded Ports OF COMPUTERS BEHIND THE ROUTER.
I can see which ports have been opened by UPnP by what software.
I can see forever!
I can push new software to a Router.
I can change the phone routing.
I can change the line speed for both DSL and 3G.
Believe you me. 1984 was just a rough guesstimate of what's possible today even for a small light like me . .

And yet there are still about 32,000 abducted children a year who are never found.
Get on that, will you.

Very true, we do monitoring and on the cctv side of the business we work with roughly 40 installers based on how well they set up and maintain the equipment for their clients i'd trust about 8 of them to do the job properly.

Very, the footage should be kept for 31 days under UK law by both the site & monitoring station, it can be kept longer if the police or other agency has asked for it.

I know equipment can go wrong but in the time i've been doing the job i can only think of 1 instance of it happening. I know of more cases where footage cannot be used because the people responsible for it haven't got the correct license for taking the footage making it inadmissable in court.

"Let there be a chicken in every pot, and a cellphone in every pocket!"

Sorry, I should have stated that the stories happened in the USA, where the rules of "Public Recording" and "Expectation of Privacy" have been confused heavily recently due to the proliferation of cell phones, and typically in the favor of the Police. And the "Deleted footage" I heard about involved the severe beating (To death) of a protester (IIRC), and the footage could have proven the police side of the story, while the lack of it gives the other protesters a lot more credibility.

Some states are attempting to shoehorn "Wiretap Laws" to protect police officers from being recorded at public places, to prevent the footage from being shown in court.

I won't try to paint the US with a wide brush, however, as the RCMP tried similar tricks to prevent footage of them tasering a person to death who was not being a direct threat in an airport (Where he had been detained for hours without explanation, or even a translator for his language!) when, again, cell phone recordings showed a guy that was just pissed off at being held for no reason and was mad as hell and not taking it any more, but not being a threat to anyone or even anything.

1984 didn't think about it from the other angle, and I think it's taken a lot of people by surprise.

Thirty-two-thousand?! Maybe if you include every African child soldier, but even then it sounds inflated


@CanRay: Yep, always fascinating how the "if you've got nothing to hide..." crowd suddenly discovers their love for privacy and temperance in data collection when it comes to sousveillance
Which leads to an interesting (and less OT) question: Since cybereyes and private drones are everywhere in 2070, wouldn't that also mean that every instance of police misconduct would end up on MatrixTube ten seconds later? Thanks to the wireless matrix, even confiscating recordings would no longer be an option...sounds like something good might come out of this dystopia, after all.

Only problem, digital footage can be easily doctored in a realistic fashion, and the public knows this. Video footage is no longer considered as reliable as it once was. An good artist with an Edit 6 Program can make anything look like anything.

And you better bet the Corporate/Government Shills are on that fact like stink on a ghoul whenever something incriminating comes out, and any bit of data corruption "Proves" it was doctored. While their own evidence is worked on with MilSpec Edit programs that can't be found to be doctored at all from any way, shape, or form, even in "Raw" feed.

That's why film has come back for certain things, as it's easier to prove it's real or doctored. At least in court. Digital recordings, no matter how good, can be thrown up as "Reasonable Doubt" to a jury by even a half-decent lawyer, while film... That's old technology and who would bother learning to fake that? And, if they did, it'd be so obvious...