There is an effectively unlimited supply of people willing to take sums of money to work on anti-human endeavors, so long as they and theirs are not the humans involved.

They must really love their security cameras to have decided to start decorating them. The bedazzled cameras are lovely to see. My inner 90's child can't wait to apply sparkly plastic rhinestone to their naked exteriors. What's next? Some fake braids and perhaps a troll doll or two?

Also have to commend whoever is in charge of acronyms for this project. I thought I was the most excessive acronym user, but now having read this article, I'm not!

If you fail to read the article you might not realize it's being sarcastic.

Somehow this reminds me to think of Aaron Schwartz.

If you're not bedazzling [surveillance] are you even living [surveillance]?

Has any of this surveillance bullshit reduced the number of incidents that occurred where they have been installed? I find it terrifying.

[dead]

> have set into motion a plan to cancel our subscriptions to 700+ academic journals integral to our research and teaching.

ehh, this part is a weak take. All universities should cancel their journal subscriptions because journal publishers are parasites. Lots of other things are done by universities in collaboration with each other, without allowing some random for-profit company to collect rents. Publications should be one of them.

Every time we fit out an office building we cover it 100% in cameras, both internally and externally.

Fact is, stuff happens. For example: we once had a crazed person run inside and start yelling profanities at people for no reason. Then, he denied it and reported us to the police for assaulting him. He got his girlfriend to act as a fake witness.

Having the cameras was a no brainer for legally protecting my staff, we could just pull the footage and show that no one touched him.

Similar protections for when male and female staff are working together alone. They are both protected from false accusations, one from harming the other, and the other from potentially false reports/blackmail that they attempted to do something.

We’ve caught interns stealing petty cash from people’s wallets (before cameras - caught in the act)

Is it sad? Yes. But it’s the world we live in and cameras are cheap. No such smaller incidents since the cameras went up. People behave better when they’re being watched, or at least they think we’re being watched. Nobody has actually watched the footage for months and it rolls over in about a week.

I keep wondering if there’s some kind of positive correlation between prestige of an institution and level of immaturity and fragility of their employees.

Look, I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever, but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building) in a publicly accessible space on a private university unusual or alarming?

I thought every university had this, but I guess I’m now learning that my university wasn’t prestigious enough to be exempted from reality.

My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?

Keep in mind that pretty much 100% of schools this size have assaults take place every single year on school grounds, in a country where school shootings happen on a literal weekly basis.

Speaking of the supposed cost waste of these cameras: I would be surprised the university can get reasonably priced insurance without them.

Edit: this comment has picked up a lot of attention. I encourage those who are disagreeing with me to go directly to the university’s FAQ on the subject that is linked in the article. They directly state that this surveillance system isn’t new, it merely has some new cameras added to the existing system, audio isn’t recorded, facial recognition isn’t used, AI isn’t used, budget from other programs wasn’t sacrificed to add cameras, and data is stored inside an MIT data center. That’s one reason why I hold skepticism about the objectivity of the authors. I thought the authors were not very generous to the school’s willingness to clarify, and based on that FAQ a lot of accusations/assumptions in the article and discussion seem to be false.

https://evpt.mit.edu/campus-security-cameras-frequently-aske...