Best way to gain root privileges

[GSO]

> I'm having a awfully hard time figuring out why a home CCTV
> application might need privilege at all.  Are you sure you really need
> privilege?  It sounds to me like there may be some larger design
> issues mandating the need for privilege when it's not really
> necessary.
>

A user login should only able to view the footage.  It's important
that a user login cannot delete any images/video.  This much can be
done with ACL - but having said that a user login would still be able
to copy the images/video, so ACL would work but is not ideal - I could
prevent copying with raised privileges.  If I were to allow a user to
archive footage without using an admin login then that would require
ACL with write access, which is out of the question.

If a camera loses its connection I think it's OK to let a user restart
the camera without using gksu, but this would require raised
privileges.

There are other misc. points where I need write access.  The directory
where images are stored by the live feed can become 'messy' (for want
of a better way of putting it), write access is needed to tidy it up
before live camera images can be viewed, it's not really appropriate
to use gksu here every time a user wants to view the live images.
Also (I don't know exactly how I'm going to do this yet) but I'm
thinking I might use the system log functions (syslogd) as part of a
scheme to ensure the integrity of saved footage and the archive.

As a misc. point, I'm wondering why redhat 6 hasn't included gksu in
with its gnome, policykit is there, but gksu is at this point omitted.
 (The policykit widget is not included with pygtk, or at least the
version I'm using.)  There is a package from another repo (beesu) that
is a gksu replacement, but it's not ideal to be rummaging around in
all corners of the Internet for code as critical as this.