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Agreed regarding surveillance. In my book, working on Landsat, JWST, or LISA = awesome.

I will only direct expertise toward an imaging system like Keyhole or targeting/guidance systems if our society faces a clear and acute foreign threat.

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What about street level city/town surveillance? Of course all the cop shops want to feed all their wants/warrants into it. I have no problem with this if there is a legal framework that supports it. More importantly, there are toddlers that get loose from their mothers because they are fundamentally greased pigs, or there are older members of our society who may be prone to wandering off in a daze - the ability to locate them within a very few minutes would be a good thing indeed. My own take is that I will look, I will try and recognize, but I will NEVER target. Machine is too good, sacks of meat like us have no prayer. That said, I've talked to a couple of cop shops, my position is that I will work with them when there is a framework that defines a legal basis for that level of tracking of people who clearly wish not to be tracked, even if they are bad actors. It's not a question of how far away you are, its a question of what you will track, why you will track, and what structure our society has put in place to get the benefits, not the risks. Looping back to the main point of the post, looking is OK, tracking requires societal governance, and any autonomous lethal capability, never mind action, should be absolutely forbidden, not just by law, but because we don't all want to die.

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