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Comment by blackbagboys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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".

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

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

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.

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

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