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Comment by bmcusick | Hacker News Reader

Non-Chinese shouldn't kid ourselves. Our governments want to do this too, and probably will. Drones with gigapixel cameras hovering over metro regions. Security cameras and police cars that continuously scan the faces of pedestrians and other drivers. It will happen.

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> Security cameras and police cars that continuously scan the faces of pedestrians and other drivers. It will happen.

It's already pervasive:

1998:"Face-recognition CCTV launched" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/face-recognition-cctv-laun...

2015: "A scheme widely used by UK stores to identify criminals is testing facial recognition technology, the BBC has learned." http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35111363

2016: "Retailers are increasingly using facial recognition technology to track your face. With an estimated 59% of UK fashion retailers doing it, is the anonymity of cities an outdated idea?" https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/03/revealed-faci...

2014: "UK, the world’s most surveilled state, begins using automated face recognition to catch criminals" https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186435-uk-the-worlds-mos...

2014: "CCTV cameras on Britain's roads capture 26 million images every day" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/23/cctv-cameras...

2017: "New York plans to install vast system of facial recognition cameras that matches drivers licenses to social media accounts at bridges and tunnels " http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4167854/New-York-ins...

You can google for more, watch out for those black helicopters tonight.

> 2017: "New York plans to install vast system of facial recognition cameras that matches drivers licenses to social media accounts at bridges and tunnels "

Wow. Just, wow. And I agree: even governments that "don't want to do it" will be compelled to at the first horrific incident that could have been prevented with the technology. The only way to stop that from happening is to outlaw it. I simply don't believe there are very many Edward Snowdens in the world.

Yeah the infamous "terrorist" threat ...

What do you want to say? There is no real terrorism threat? Or what?

That the threat of terrorism can be used to justify everything up to and including a totalitarian government.

First, threat of terrorism is real. Second, monitoring citizens' behavior does not automatically translate to totalitarianism.

Personally I prefer safety. And I avoid showing myself over online for privacy concerns. But I do not call safety measure a poly to implement totalitarian government.

If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly. I personally have no idea how to prevent without close monitoring.

China is different, it has always been totalitarian. It's natural for the government to monitor citizens without much resistance. This is a statement, without value judgement.

If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly. I personally have no idea how to prevent without close monitoring.

Why shouldn't the burden be on the other side? Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism? That states will actually use it that way, when the threat of terror is so politically useful?

Because without making a strong case along those lines first, you can't even take the "I'll trade privacy for safety" position in good faith at all.

The 9/11 attackers were already subjects of surveillance when they attacked. The Boston Marathon bombers were already being closely monitored but were not stopped.

Disciplinarians, cops for example, have dreamed of omniscience since the dawn of time. The panopticon dates to the 1790s! Despite the fact that we come closer to a state of all-seeing every day, I'm not aware of any compelling evidence that it's actually turning out to be very useful to prevent violent crime or acts of terror.

The evidence I know of that hint at monitoring being effective is from the Italians, where they say they thwart terrorism by closely monitoring and infiltrating potential groups. I remember reading that the Italian police says it takes 20 people to monitor one person effectively (will need to find a link). That kind of man-power is hard to scale.

edit: link on Italian anti-terrorist efforts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-...

Further debate on the SlateStarCodex subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6j8703/cult...

Could we stop this racing to bottom debate?

Clearly, terrorism is a symptom. Its cause is not bad people are not monitored, but they have various reason to think harm innocent people is the only way to advance their objectives.

Can anyone address such issues? Unlikely. History has shown that terrorism is seldom solved, they are extinguished, through escalation to war or complete annihilation of the weaker part.

Do I support monitoring? Not always. But if I am not feeling safe, I am OK to sacrifice some privacy and take some risk of being harmed by the government.

I am not saying you should agree with this, but that's my thoughts.

> Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism?

This way of reasoning seems fine, but really is just a way of showing me being using unfounded argument to support my claim. In reality, as I said, solving terrorism is not monitoring's job, but it makes me feel safe, because someone is doing something that can reduce the risk (not substantially).

Not only that, but those enforcing the law are no less likely to break it. Giving the authorities this level of power is just inviting the most corrupt and immoral of them to run wild with official immunity.

Police live under a fundamental illusion that people can be divided into good or bad, ignoring the role of circumstances, ease of deniability and special pleading in how it actually goes down. Most of all with their own abuse of power.

> If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly.

Attack the root cause of the problem, namely alienation of youths [0] (Aarhus Model). These preventative systems of surveillance only foment opportunities for abuse.

[0] - http://psy.au.dk/fileadmin/Psykologi/Forskning/Preben_Bertel...

We're pretty much living the century of Minority Report. Pre-cogs are machines that read your thoughts from social media.

What an odd obsession with preventing crime with cameras from the culture that brought us 1984.

It's not odd at all when you consider what works of Orwell are cited in pop culture (1984, Animal Farm) and which ones are not (Homage to Catalonia)

Can you expand more? Is it the difference in opinion of the totalitarianism exhibited in 1984 vs. the anarchism from Homage?

His writings critical of the West go largely ignored in the West, which again isn't that surprising. For example his forward for Animal Farm was famously censored from publication.

Unlike the PRC, most of us live in governments where there is significantly more decentralization of power, and where those power centers are significantly more responsive to public pressure.

It's incumbent upon all of us to apply that pressure and work to maintain that decentralization. It's especially incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems and b) develop counter-measures.

You're being naive. Pervasive LPR and facial recognition technology has been publicly acknowledged and broadly deployed on highways and chokepoints like bridges. I'm sure that pedestrian monitoring has been deployed in facilities like airports and places like Manhattan, although I don't recall seeing any reporting on the topic.

Decentralization isn't as protective as you might think, as most capital funding for this type of public safety infrastructure comes from Federal grants.

Technologists have no professional ethical duties, licensure or other reasons to behave ethically. It's unrealistic to assume that individuals will choose some vague ethical position over money.

You seem to make three points:

a) Western municipalities have deployed similar systems, albeit with massively significant differences in use case

b) Western political structures aren't perfect

c) the professional ethical obligations of technologists have yet to be codified

I'm certainly in agreement with you on all of these points, but I'm unclear on your argument. Is it just that many talented people will happily contribute to building a nightmarishly repressive socio-technical apparatus if the money is good enough? Again, no disagreement there, the article itself, and the many other stories on HN related to the shenanigans of Western security agencies, is ample proof of that.

Without a legal or moral framework that protects civil liberties, individual actors won't make consistently ethical choices because there is no penalty for making an unethical choice and no common understanding of what is or isn't ethical.

If you ask a CPA or Attorney to do something contrary to their professional code of ethics, they will typically tell you "no" -- their livelihood is at stake.

The grey areas in IT are much broader and more situational. Is pervasive surveillance to protect citizens from terrorists unethical? Is it unethical to automatically police jaywalking? Is it unethical for me to use facial recognition to identify people approaching my home? There is no right answer to these questions.

London's Heathrow airport has facial recognition cameras everywhere before the border checkpoint. They consist of small turbine-shaped cameras mounted in the ceiling, with a rotating circle of LEDs designed to catch your attention and make you look directly at the camera.

I've forgotten the company name, but I googled it at the time and it was indeed a facial recognition hardware company.

While NSA and Prism still happened. It's the 'Technologist' that developed it. Who's to say if Snowden didn't whistleblow things might get closer to what's described in the article?

Yes, US is more democratic and power is more decentralized, but without guardians or more awareness from the citizens, it's easily a slippery slope. Think UK and Theresa May. All Powers want more power.

It's especially incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems

Keep in mind, this necessarily includes not building those types of systems for their own use either.

Once a private entity has collected some juicy data, the government gets roll up and say "I'll help myself to some of that." And at that point the company has also preemptively conceded the vast majority of principled opposition to government use of such systems by exploiting them for commercial reasons.

what would be a "socially acceptable" counter-measure to getting your face scanned randomly out in public?

a visor with (very, very) bright IR LEDs over your face could hide you from camera sensors; i've seen something like this used to defeat license plate scanners, and i know that LEDs have greatly improved power efficiency in the last decade, but i don't have any experience in this kind of thing. maybe someone can pick up this idea and run with it if it's feasible.

this wouldn't defeat something like gait detection though: http://www.geradts.com/html/Documents/gait.htm

Do remember IR can damage your (and other's) retina even though it can be hard to see.

I am sure the camera would detect a person with an unreadable face and alert the cops or something

This is an interesting link: http://gajitz.com/about-face-defeat-face-recognition-softwar...

Purportedly there are non-obvious sunglasses/frames that attempt to make it more difficult for such scanners to operate. The success rate of these devices ranges from "not at all" to "seems to work".

Decentralized observation, citizens watching citizens, citizens watching the powers that be- and if necessary decentralized anti-terrorism surveilance. That is acceptable.

Depending on the details of how the system is used and the availability of political remedies (or lack thereof), I think direct action would be justified.

A particulate filter mask, maybe combined with a cheap plastic sunshade visor?

Be a female muslim who chooses to wear a burka.

...until gait analysis is incorporated.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528835-600-cameras-... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925574/ [3] http://www.ai.mit.edu/research/abstracts/abstracts2001/visio...

Confound gait analysis by putting a pebble[1] in one of your shoes.

1. A character in a Cory Doctorow novel does this for the same reason.I can't remember which novel though.

They already do. They are just not as open about it. Here in the us when you get your drivers license, or state ID they ensure the photo is optimal for facial recognition. I also wouldn't be surprised if they where starting to do the same thing for student IDs in middle & high schools.

I agree it will happen. We will become better and better at building hardware and making that hardware do what we want, it will become easier and easier for a government to create such a surveillance system. Still, efforts to protect the privacy of citizens are worthwhile.

In addition to trying to protect the privacy of citizens, we should also be trying to make our government as transparent as possible. Ideally, the people would have the government under surveillance more closely than the government has the people under surveillance.

Relevant Radiolab episode and followup:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-eye-sky/

Damn I wasn't aware of gigapixel cameras unless you're talking in the future. I tried to look that up and "gigapixel" photos came up (although none of them/links seemed to work)

Trying to stop this stuff is like trying to make DRM effective unfortunately.

But probably not openly, at least not for a while. Can't imagine that the US or a European country could display the faces of jaywalkers on the street without large scale protest (especially since this is not really considered a crime).

There...

> (especially since this is not really considered a crime)

The seed is already planted: it is ok to display the face of a citizen, as long as he's a criminal. No debate about what kinds of public need does supersede the privacy rights of the individual citizen, or what kind of crimes would justify this kind of behavior from the part of the government. It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays.

All they have to do now is to lower (or I'd say, keep lowering) the threshold; jaywalking is right around the corner.

>"It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays."

Whether you display them publicly or not, if they broke the law, they should be punished. We can't live in some magical limbo situation where we simultaneously have laws and not enforce them most of the time. I.e.: If the tech is there to apply the laws that have currently been "agreed" by the public, then there should be no question or overriding factors to consider.

Talk of privacy and "individual rights" is just distracting fluff in that context. We've already decided that certain actions merit punishment. We're just now upset that the coming omnipotent presence of surveillance can actually make us adhere to the things we've been whacking other people over the head with. You know, the ones that "got caught" doing it.

Either that, or simply start repealing all these non-sense laws that we don't actually want to punish people for. The third alternative is a gigantic mess of exceptions and "buts" that want to enable us to eat our surveillance cake, and sometimes keep it. Make no mistake, that is exactly what the "privacy" folks are advocating for. More bureaucracy.

In reality, it doesn't even require that one be a criminal, merely a suspect.

I got screamed at by a police officer here in Austin TX for jay-walking. It was only my de-escalation of the situation that allowed me to escape with a warning, after about ten minutes of haranguing and accusatory questions about what I thought I was doing.

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