I think that these are legitimate and interesting questions but I'm nowhere near having to worry about such issues yet. kadrey asks: The whole idea of setting up video surveillance seems to have touched a nerve with people. I suppose part of the concern is that once you set up the system, it's possible to lose control of it.

One wants to set it up in such a way as to minimize that possibility. For example, the cameras have to have a power source. Presumably that is going to come from inside the house. So you can shut off the cameras on your house just by pulling the plug. Beyond that, I think that crypto will be a really important part of making this a responsible system.

It is all about tradeoffs. When people see crime in their neighborhoods that have all kinds of reactions. Many of these are pathological in my opinion.

Hiring rent-a-cops, raising tax rates to beef up the size of the police force, moving out to gated communities in the suburbs - these are all responses to crime that give me the willies for one reason or another. I'm trying to dream up a response that is more community-based and benign. stac asks: ISDN is prohibitively expensive here 0 400GBP for installation -

about 600 dollars - and the penetration of Net-savvy types, while growing, is still as far as I know, low. Wouldn't the effort put into GNW be more useful directed towards traditional Neighbourhood Watch schemes, which have proved fairly effective (at least over here)?

By all means. I think it would be a waste of time to begin fooling around with all of this technology until the neighborhood was well organized and had set up its own schemes for discouraging crime. Once that's done, GNW can perhaps offer some additional security if it can be done wtihout spending a huge amount of money.