For starters, totally agree with your points that this is about gathering data. Furthermore, it will probably like most things in 'Merka be administered by some sort of unaccountable Public-Private Partnership which will provide the data to the Government and also sell it to data brokers to improve ad targeting. And of course law enforcement will want to root around in it, and they will be allowed to do so without warrants, because "where you go on public roads is public data," just like they get away with widespread deployment of license plate readers.

That said, dragging gun-confiscation into the argument triggers the Slashdot Fox News Filter, but since it's already triggered... Illinois, where I live, has required FOID cards for quite some time, and recently strengthened the law to enhance background checking on private sales and to improve the CONFISCATION!! of guns from people whose cards get revoked due to criminal convictions (or presumably due to the failure to pay their annual bribe to the administrative state). The state hasn't been particularly interested in confiscating guns from people who follow the prescribed procedures to possess and register one in the state, though there's a good argument that the state having a list of people with guns might lead to the state wanting to extort those people for an annual payment under the threat of confiscating their guns. As is typical of regulation, it does tend to burden law-abiding folks more than it burdens criminals.

The Illinois measures probably won't do a lot to stop gang shootings, since people who know they shouldn't have guns don't much care about regulations and will find places to get guns, as long as lots of guns exist within the country. But tightening requirements for legal purchase and possession might help reduce the number of random nutjobs who shoot up their workplace or a school, because THOSE people probably have no idea where or how to get a gun illegally and wouldn't dare set foot in the neighborhoods where one can be had for $50 on the street corner. Thus we can address the scary thing that doesn't happen very often but garners headlines and affects suburban white voters, and then once we have that taken care of we can address the Sandy Hook that happens every day in Englewood and Austin. But that will have to be addressed in different ways.

I've actually done that, it's... interesting. Get really weird looks from the occasional cop driving by. Much of what's going on is gang beefs, ever since the Feds split up the GDs into a million little factions that each rule two blocks and hate each other, and a random white guy passing through is sort of a novelty and not in much danger. It'd probably be much more dangerous as a random black person, since the aforementioned balkanization of the gangs has created the attitude that anyone who looks like they belong but isn't recognized as a friend is probably an enemy.

Got more stink-eye walking along 35th from the lakefront to the Red Line, for some reason.

... via Englewood. See quite a few uncomfortable tourists with out of state plates around there.

SEGA Lawyer: "Our engineers used a cryptographically weak PRNG. A truly skilled player could observe the millisecond variance in control response, deduce the random seed, predict the next value and act accordingly. Ergo, it's a game of skill. The defense rests."

So last night's image plus replaying the append-only journal up to the point of corruption, then?

This is a rather run-of-the-mill story and not huge news to anyone in the security field, and those outside the field probably don't care, because they're taught that in the Land of the Free, the only thing that can protect them from evil is the surveillance state.

That said, a few comments.

As other posters have noted, cameras are mainly a deterrent to lazy amateurs. Resolution generally sucks, even with the 5MP class cameras, and unless the burglar is nice enough to look right at the camera or park in front of it, or happens to be a neighbor you'll recognize, you're not identifying anyone. Furthermore, any serious attacker isn't going to worry about being recorded, they'll wear a face covering and take the usual precautions.

An attacker who does care about cameras enough to perform this traffic analysis might actually be deterred by the results, in that they'd know that their presence will be detected and the property owner might be alerted remotely.

A more interesting case is mob action and looting. I do security for a business that was looted in recent unrest in Chicago. There are a ton of cameras. They did fokkol to deter anyone, but some of the looters WERE nice enough to park right in front of them with license plates exposed, and quite a few looked right at the cameras with sort of an "is that thing on?" expression. (yes, it is.) Some were also so thoughtful as to post oblique references to the looting on Faceplant, next to their profile photo. There were several arrests and a fair amount of property recovery as a result. These are on a sort of DIY cloud, recorded to an onsite server in a secure room and synced offline over a VPN.

I'm no fan of the mass-surveillance state in which every move in public is recorded for posterity by one camera or another, but they do have their place in scenarios where they are carefully aimed to protect private property without undue capturing of random public activity. CPD is of course a huge fan of video, and apparently does solve quite a few cases using their widespread pod cameras to follow vehicles and pedestrians around (see the fake-assault case involving the Empire guy), although this is mainly in high-profile cases, and their res kind of sucks too.

Meanwhile Linux and co. have a wonderful FOSS decoder in ffmpeg, and all the browser developers actively make it difficult to obtain or compile a browser that will support HEVC on Linux. Sure, it's a nice idea to push open codecs without patent encumbrance, but good luck getting makers of cheap SOCs to support those. And until they do it takes hours of misery and gigabytes of downloading to produce a Linux browser capable of rendering the output from a $30 Chinese webcam.

Sir: Please stop using the term FEMININE as it is highly offensive to nonbinary biological entities as a constant reminder of society's arbitrary categorization. Thank you! More seriously: Slavery was a thing. It still is in some places. It was and is abhorrent, and its full, unvarnished history should be taught in elementary schools alongside the teaching of steps we can take to address its lasting impact and stop it in the present. That said: master/slave is pretty much the ideal term to classify the relationship between devices in technical spheres. In those cases where the terminology is semantically accurate, it ought not be replaced with less semantically-accurate terms for emotional reasons.