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Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

> (Every government on earth) plans to use face recognition to track (everyone) through airports

Fixed it for you. I know for a fact at least 2 asian countries which are either actively using or trialling this, and not just at airports. Both already have fairly comprehensive facial recognition DBs of their citizens (smile for your driver's license picture!)

I've also heard anecdotal accounts of people who stay too long airside at SIN being questioned by airport police. They walk right up to them - pretty obvious what's going on. My only surprise is that they would reveal their capabilities so obviously, but maybe that's a deliberate strategy ("we know everything so don't try anything").

It's only a matter of time before basically all governments are doing this. The tech is there.

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> The tech is there.

This is why comments such "but spy agencies have always been spying, it's their job" have always pissed me off. The spy agencies will continue to encroach on our rights the more "tech is here". We now have "smart" devices with mics and cameras in every room, so they're going to use that.

If 30 years from now we'll use some kind of "bluetooth headset" that actually interacts directly with our thoughts, then they'll use that, too, to screen out thoughts and arrest you for "extremist thoughts". There's no limit for how far these people are willing to go - just because "the tech is here".

And the sad part is the vast majority of people don't understand new tech, so they aren't even aware what's happening until it's way too late. And then it's already "normalized" and the government agencies cry about "how much they need it" and do slight of hand tricks with "look over here, this tech helped us save a kid from kidnapping!" -- "but don't look over there, where we abused it in 95% of the cases for our own twisted and vengeful interests."

Yup. “The tech is there” is just the cowards’ excuse for not doing anything. The tech doesn’t make the difference. England had a police state when the only way to do that was to open paper mail with steam.

This use of facial recognition is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. The government is always trying to do shit like this, and it’s our job as citizens to stop them. The big takeaway should not be this pathetic, wimpy “they’re always going to try shit” as if trying were the same thing as succeeding. The big takeaway should be give your money to the ACLU and the EFF.

> Yup. “The tech is there” is just the cowards’ excuse for not doing anything. The tech doesn’t make the difference.

I feel like you and the parent of your post are misinterpreting what sho said. I didn't read it as him trying to justify it, or even say "the tech is there (so let's just accept it)", I read it as him pointing out that it's not just the TSA (or other US agencies) doing it.

And how do you know that he's a "coward" and not doing anything about it? What are you doing about it, other than presumably giving money to the ACLU or EFF?

> England had a police state when the only way to do that was to open paper mail with steam.

England (I assume you mean Britain) has never been a "police state", however draconian new laws may be in this day and age. What are you talking about?

The appropriate spectral continuum to consider here is Authority vs Liberty.

Some things to specifically consider:

1) 240 years ago, the USA was the first country founded to prioritize liberty. 'Everyone' else had authoritarian monarchs at the time.

2) IMO, 'police' states are fine outside the USA if that is what those citizens want (e.g. Singapore, Australia, etc.).

3) U.K. has way too many public cameras (for me to feel comfortable).

When your "right" to privacy starts conflicting with your "right" to safety, something has to give.

Much of the data gathered by agencies to make us 'safe' is alter used for ulterior motives such as tax collection or, much worse, spreading of propaganda of censoring anti-establishment information. The recent events in Spain being an example of the last case. There is nothing wrong with having to pay taxes, but using information that you gain access to by scaring people into giving up by waving terrorism in their face is not ethical and not what many people signed up for.

Also, there are lots of actually effective measures to improve safety that don't involve giving governments direct access to what everyone says and does.

A false dichotomy should always give first. You can both be safe and have privacy

In my opinion, that's just propaganda. It's not at all clear that all the surveillance is making anyone safer.

Safety is never an absolute. Imagine a world of "very-many-nines" safety, where only once in a century a person died from a violent death, planetwide: the cause of that death would be on people's minds for decades, and any measure for decreasing the chance of it ever happening again would see great support.

Once we have established that safety is a relative term it becomes pretty clear that ruthless surveillance would yield some safety improvement. I think that you can make a much more meaningful stand against surveillance when you acknowledge that, a opposed to outright denying any possible effect.

So far, I don't believe we have much, if any, concrete evidence that pervasive surveillance makes anyone safer. What little evidence exists is self-serving and sounds more like advertising then anything else. These surveillance organizations cost large amounts of money and produce nothing but large backlogs of data that no one has time to analyze.

In my opinion, that only makes it more likely that this data will be misused in order to prove that the dollars spent yielded _something._ That the cry of "safety" is accepted as somehow obviously true is a significant problem and exacerbates the issue.

You'll never seen concrete evidence. Nor is it in anyone's interests to offer it. You have two choices, one at each extreme. You can assume:

- Everyone working for "agencies" do so with no regard for their stated goal and are simply interested in their own personal gain.

- They're genuinely intending to prevent incidents of "crime" and are relatively disinterested in the maintenance of your privacy.

I find the latter more likely than the former, with a mix of the two broadly probable. Given that I find it equally unlikely that they achieve literally nothing. (Frankly even if the former were the truth it seems unlikely they wouldn't prevent something at some point even by accident).

Claiming they do _nothing_ is ill founded. The more valid argument is "But at what cost?"

I strongly disagree with the idea that revealing ways in which pervasive surveillance provides us all with greater safety will somehow nullify that very benefit. This is clearly a simple and straightforward way for those who are performing the surveillance to excuse the fact that they are not, in fact, saving us from anything at all.

To be honest, the only way I might even consider that this kind of surveillance is helping would be to see some concrete examples of them literally saving lives.

I do not believe that those performing the surveillance do nothing, on the contrary, I believe they may be responsible for any number of harms (leaking private information, having that information stolen, becoming a party to blackmail, etc.) But I certainly do not believe that they are making any of us safer.

> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Quotes aren't arguments. They are quotes, and often sound like an appeal to authority. And it is further weakened by the weasel words _essential_ and _little temporary_.

this statement is predicated on the violation of our right to privacy having a significant and causal impact on our safety.

I am something like 100x more likely to get struck by lightning _twice_ than I am to be killed by a terrorist

While I don't disagree, it's still hard to turn a blind eye to the Texas church shootings, or the Las Vegas shootings, or the NY park pickup truck slaughter. Any politician that just throws up his arms and says "it all just statistics" is likely out of a job.

Privacy invasion has to be stopped by law. There is no way, currently, for a person who has public safety as a responsibility to say "no" to this kind of technology.

It's much the same with businesses invading user privacy and using it to drive profits. Without a law forbidding it, everyone has to keep up with the profits of the most "evil" corporation.

We need explicit laws.

That is perfectly fair, but I think to a larger extent than they realize politicians drive public discourse and narrative. I'm not saying do nothing, i'm simply saying that more often than not the TSA and their methods have been shown to be utterly inept. Just because it is logistically simpler for me I bring 'contraband' on every flight I take...hundreds of flights, never even been noticed. (Most/Many) of us live in a state that declared war on a plant and is losing and the majority of people accept it for no other reason than its the narrative presented to them.

I'm not against doing something, I'm against counting doing anything as equivalent to doing something productive.

I'm against counting doing anything as equivalent to doing something productive.

I completely agree with you.

> Any politician that just throws up his arms and says "it all just statistics" is likely out of a job.

They get away with that when it comes to gun control, why not with privacy too?

NRA yearly budget 220-250musd

EFF yearly budget 9musd...and they have a complicated history with active political engagement.

ACLU yearly budget 133musd

Both the EFF and ACLU do a lot more than just privacy. The NRA does one thing...and they are really good at it. They also have language in the constitution they can mis-interpret. For privacy we are left with the abstractness of unenumerated rights.

And the govt. controls the lightning man...

The tech is not there, actually. Facial recognition is absolute garbage. It borders on being completely useless even in ideal circumstances. Airports might have a slight advantage since they have a list of people they expect to be present (people with upcoming flights) and such, but in my experience systems like what the TSA uses are obstinantly terrible. They most likely have a commercial product purchased from some vendor deployed in ways it was never meant to function with management types forcing everyone to ignore the utter uselessness of the solution. They're going to make their career on deploying the system regardless of whether it works or not.

"Facial recognition is absolute garbage."

Yes. And so is a human's ability to predict who are good and bad actors in a given situation. The statistical mathematics is very deceiving to most people.

See "Base rate fallacy" for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

They should require voxel video of a subject going through various motions as part of the passport photo and or checkin process. Maybe updated automatically when you get your boarding pass. Have the user repeat various lines from a teleprompter while a time of flight camera records a 3d scan of their face. If the lines to be repeated are well crafted enough, the eye dilation and pulse response should determine if they are patriotic enough.

Could automate much of the TSAs job.

I never understood why they don't OOR (optical object recognition) the items going through the xray scanner.

[0] Emotions via Eye Tracking http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.492...

[1] Eulerian Magnification http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/

Eye dilation and pulse response for determining patriotism!! Have you ever considered satire as a career path good sir?

Making it slightly easier is that they have multiple points where a person is matched with a name during their time in the airport. With that and good enough coverage they could make the recognition better with continuous tracking. Even without an explicit name attached to a person just knowing all the places a person has gone could be useful for flagging 'weird' behavior.

It's almost as if some people are taking the poor state of the technology being proposed as some challenge, when most of us simply do not want to live in a police state.

Do. Not. Want.

How about using a VR display to give them a mediated representation of the world that constrains them to the allowed route? Put on the helmet and walk forward, looks like I was wandering down a beautiful meadow when I am really just walking to my gate. Objects would enter the VR world that you would need to avoid in the real one.

> Facial recognition is absolute garbage.

The problem is that people believe it isn't garbage and give it more credibility than it deserves.

Some lidar manufacturers are now working on trialing software (in airports and government building) which identifies people from pointclouds from many lidar units and tracks them. Fused with even poor facial recognition could make a quite powerful/scary tool.

There might be problems with the laws still. I.e. Polish constitution has 'Public authorities shall not acquire, collect nor make accessible information on citizens other than that which is necessary in a democratic state ruled by law.'.

There are many techs out there that are quite dystopian (face scans, mass surveillance, etc.) or outright evil (alleged organ harvesting of death row inmates in China) but yet the governments aren't doing it. Even that article in Polish constitution smells (to me personally) like it came due to secret police back in communism collecting 'dirt' on people, that required 0 tech, just secret informants with small monetary incentives or who were blackmailed with dirt already collected, telling little bits of 'innocent' things and yet I can't imagine many (if any) countries Western democratic doing that.

> other than that which is necessary in a democratic state ruled by law

Well the thing is that is open to interpretation. You can define anything as "necessary".

From what I have heard the typical "foot in the door", if you will, is AML/KYC. There's a convenient intersection there between anti-terrorism (national security) and the everyday (banking). Bring those together and now you have a perfectly plausible excuse to build a biometric database on everyone with a bank account - ie, everyone. And once you've got that DB, wouldn't it be positively remiss not to start using it at the borders?

This is the legal basis of the DB in a certain large asian country you've heard of and, on information and belief, it's being expanded to airports too under the guise of national security. The DB has never been announced or confirmed but its existence can be inferred from KYC banking processes there. The future is now!

> but yet the governments aren't doing it

I would be very surprised if a biometric database doesn't exist in most moderately wealthy countries, even in Poland. They may not (yet) be able to use it legally but knowing the general climate you'd think the various intelligence organisations almost aren't doing their job if they didn't have it.

That was just an example of such a line since I know only Polish constitution.

I know that everything legal is open to really wide and crazy interpretations already but if there weren't such a line to interpret there would be no chance for an anti-scanning interpretation. It could also end up being limited to foreigners since the line protects citizens specifically.

It depends what do you mean by biometrics database, i.e.: Polish passports are 'biometric' and have two index fingerprints stored in them for a few years now. I have no idea if the passport database is accessible to police or if there is any face scanning going on.

I'd say the foot in the door is airports themselves. You already need a passport or ID there so the face scan is literally no new information and only confirming what the papers say. The real creepy tech to me is mass country wide face scanning to track everyone everywhere 24/7 and see what they do, who they associate with, etc. and possible future airport brain scans (like MRI to detect positive or negative emotions in response to a country flag or a picture of state head for example).

While a lot of Central/Eastern European countries are wary of this having had history with pervasive surveillance under the Soviets, many are also very nationalistic and right-wing.

All it takes is some demagoguery and opportunism to convince the populace that it is in their interests, like what has happened in the UK and US.

They will become less wary over time. The same thing happened in Western Europe: policies which governments didn't even dare proposing a few decades ago (because of experiences in WW2) are now being pushed through without much resistance under the guise of terrorism or child pornography.

I don't even think it's an organized effort to create a totalitarian state but more how such a state will emerge from the interaction between public, media and politics.

> outright evil (alleged organ harvesting of death row inmates in China)

Why is this necessarily evil?

- Consent violation: important part of medical ethics.

- it provides an additional financial incentive to execute inmates

If they're dead, why is their consent required?

Are you suggesting the state has a right to execute any inmate because they will not object after they are dead?

The prime minister needs a new kidney and we’ve found the perfect match. But he is on prison for robbery. Well, just upgrade that robbery to capital offense and kill 2 birds...

Brilliant, Watson! I’ll inform the prime minister’s family immediately.

Yes and of course that only occurs in horrible corrupt states - never in our back yard.

You're going to have to be specific about who's backyard. Western Europe doesn't allow executions. The UK doesn't accept organ donation from executed prisoners due to moral perceptions. And the US flat out doesn't do it because the AMA will have no part in it. So if there is evidence of prisoner organ donation please present it.

Denigrating the US whenever you can works very well on reddit and instantly makes your comment a star. I think they hoped it would work here too.

While if done properly, this isn't in and of itself evil, it leads to a slippery slope. Larry Niven wrote stories of a future where the organ banks were always empty, and the population voted the death penalty in for lesser and lesser crimes. The tale I recall has a man trying to escape from his capital trial for running a red light.

sounds like an episode from black mirror.

They wouldn't be red lights anymore, they would be organ donation lights.

Ok, so it's fine 'cause everybody else is doing so. A perfectly mature statement, furthermore supported by anecdotal evidence.

Why on earth every single time the US government does something that is, err regretful, there's always a bunch of white nights ready to point out something of the sort 'but all the other kids do it'? Sounds like a recipe for societal disaster indeed.

What we should we at the very least considering is whether this is what we want as a society. Who knows, maybe we do - but not because somebody somewhere is/would/might do the same.

I didn't get the sense that they were implying that it was acceptable at all. My understanding of that comment was that they were pointing out that the problem is international, and doesn't only exist in America.

This comment would be far more at home on reddit, where deliberately misreading what people say seems to be a pasttime. Or, would you mind quoting the part where OP said it's fine? I don't believe I see that anywhere, so some help would be nice.

Have some respect for the intelligence of your peers.

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