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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

>being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost

Is it a bad thing though? Imagine that everything on all streets is recorded, and when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019".

Technology changes the balance of power in different directions. The police used to be able to tap phones, but now whatsapp is pretty much out of reach, this hampers one of the venues. To keep up the police would need new methods, and it does not have to be phone intercept, maybe post-factum external surveillance would suffice.

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It is a very bad thing since it gives power to abuse with selectivity. It is just automated enough to maximize the abuse potential essentially to turn into rule of man. If everyone is doing something 'illegal' than it gives great power to those who can enforce it. Sure everybody smokes a joint after work. But the guy who cut you off in traffic? Check him to see if there is something you can ruin his life for - ah there it is. Bingo. And that is just petty abuse instead of orchestrated ones. If things were fully automated such that it was impartial it wouldn't have those problems. You could be the mayor of New York City and the traffic cameras automatically fined you for going 27mph in a 25mph and an appeal was a process that was absolutely ironclad with no room for judgment (Was the camera accurate? Did you have extenuating circumstance such as fleeing from immediate violence or rushing someone to emergency medical aid? If yes ticket dismissed. If no ticket stands.) that wouldn't be abuseable. It may be contrary to intents and would be a royal pain in the ass and may likely get changed to at least give it a margin of 10 mph over the speed limit but it couldn't be abused.

> It is a very bad thing since it gives power to abuse with selectivity.

That can't be why it's bad.

Because all power can be abused selectively.

Maybe, if they actually had to get a warrant. My understanding is that they don't need to do this for street cameras because there's no expectation of privacy in public spaces. But before massive camera deployments there was also an unstated expectation that there was some kind of cost to collect information on any particular person.

Still, one of the things to keep in mind about mass surveillance (or mass censorship) is that once the apparatus is built, policy can be changed relatively cheaply. And it's highly unlikely that law enforcement agencies are buying equipment that requires configuration changes to be signed by a court's or legislature's private key.

We have managed to keep due process alive and well for hundreds of years without cryptographic signatures.

Due process was looking pretty anemic if you were black or left-wing in the 50s and 60s.

Due process looks pretty anemic if you're black today.

I'd say it looks anemic even if you're a middle class, middle aged white male. It's weaker if you're young, or black, or brown, or female. It's damn near dead if you're a young black male or appear vaguely Arabic.

You can even be rich and politically affluent. I mean, this was "due process", warrants and everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...

True, but if there's anything today on the scale and invasiveness of COINTELPRO, it's not public knowledge.

COINTELPRO wasn't public knowledge at the time, and many massive surveillance systems operating recently and today are known, e.g. PRISM.

Good thing we leave officers to rely on their intuitions, their biases, and secondhand accounts, instead of video evidence.

Our past laws and conventions — such as the third party doctrine — have not yet caught up to the digital age, and if due process has been preserved it’s because of strenuous and constant pushback from civil rights advocates, against far smaller proposals than a vast always-on surveillance apparatus

>Is it a bad thing though? Imagine that everything on all streets is recorded, and when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019".

The laws were written assuming that they wouldn't be perfectly enforced. We'd never have consented to many of them if we knew they'd be 100% enforced.

Increasing surveillance is a back-door in democracy that grants the government new powers w/o going through the legislature.

Hence my proposal to rewrite the law - we grant the police their dragnet video recording, in return they must obtain a warrant or show probable cause to get the footage.

The law can raise the bar for obtaining a warrant to an arbitrarily high level to cover minor daily infractions. For example, today police aren't allowed to stop a person for driving without a seatbelt, unless a more serious crime is being committed at the same time.

I'm surprised you place so much trust in our system of laws. With that proposal, we'd be one small step away (e.g. terrorist attack, etc.) from something truly Orwellian. Look what happened with 9/11 and see how fast our civil liberties can go down the drain.

The government would never use the system to help you either. They're utterly incompetent. They would only use this to imprison you.

Machine guns and prison camps are a lot more damaging to personal liberties and have more significant potential for abuse by government, and yet we're managing just fine for the last 100 years, thanks to our system of laws.

Pre-arrest probable cause in the current judicial system is a joke.

Search warrant requests rarely get denied, often the approving Judge isn't even capable of understanding the probable cause argument in the warrant (particularly in cases involving technology)

They rely solely on the sworn statement of the police office 'your affiant' and a rubber-stamp from the local State Attorney's office.

There is little incentive for the judge to deny the warrant, and, could face significant backlash if they do deny a warrant that may have enabled law enforcement to stop something from happening.

LEO would simply draft a warrant 'Your affiant has been in law enforcement for 25 years and has taken this training class and that training class and has this certification. Your affiant knows from his training and experience that a crime happened or likely happened at this date and time. Your affiant requests all video for the time period of 7 days from cameras 1472 - 1499 which cover a 2000ft section of Rodeo Dr.'

The warrant gets rubber-stamp approved, and, even if they don't find what they were looking for, they can single out anything of which the 'incriminating nature is readily apparent' that they observe, and go after that. And that 'incriminating nature is readily apparent' bar is pretty low and generally subjective based on the officer, or 'a reasonable person'.

How well has this 'dragnet surveillance' worked out in the FISA court? A system like this would be ripe for abuse. And what about securing it? So far our government has a pretty crappy track record for securing even info that is classified and top secret. How secure would this dragnet video surveillance be?

> Increasing surveillance is a back-door in democracy that grants the government new powers w/o going through the legislature.

I think a lot of people forget what this means.

It isn't just domestic influence. It is foreign influence too. I'm sure (close to) everyone on HN realizes there is nothing that isn't hackable.

Domestic influence also includes malicious people, not just governments. You're telling me that this system isn't going to be exploited? That stalkers aren't going to use it? That syndicates aren't going to use it to track adversaries?

You're going to have a hard time convincing me that these perform more good than bad. That's even without the overhead for abuse by people that have legitimate access to these streams.

I don't like talking about our own government abusing its powers. Though it has, people seem to be complacent with this. But there is also just as serious of a threat from foreign powers and domestic criminals. Why isn't this also talked about?

After having talked to the office of my local federal representative this morning about another matter, the conversation got around to talking about surveillance, encryption and privacy. The attitude portrayed was ignorance of foreign government, foreign company or criminal organisation being able to use such systems for their purposes against the normal citizens of the country.

It almost seems like that since it is not discussed, it is not important and as such it is not relevant enough to be discussed. Sort of Catch 22, I suppose.

> It almost seems like that since it is not discussed, it is not important and as such it is not relevant enough to be discussed. Sort of Catch 22, I suppose.

I just don't think they think about it. At least from my experience talking to people in different agencies. There job is to catch people. So encryption is a barrier to them in that respect, so that's how they frame it. But they don't connect all the benefits that they themselves get from it because it isn't obvious. Most people don't realize when things are encrypted because a lot of times it is the norm.

Similarly I think people don't think about privacy in general because how it is framed. We are coming from a world where privacy was the norm. It is all about how the discussion is framed. We constantly talk about how encryption is a hindrance to police. About how more surveillance can help us catch criminals. And all this is true! But few people talk about the drawbacks (except specifically government overreach, but we're in a country where people trust the government). But you can't make informed decisions that way. You need to know both sides. Benefits AND detriments.

> Domestic influence also includes malicious people, not just governments. You're telling me that this system isn't going to be exploited? That stalkers aren't going to use it? That syndicates aren't going to use it to track adversaries?

Arguably they would have an easier time with cameras in both laptops and cellphones.

Providing more attack vectors doesn't seem like a good idea though.

Good. Imperfect enforcement amplifies law enforcement biases. All must be equal under the law.

> We'd never have consented to many of them if we knew they'd be 100% enforced.

Like what?

Times change with technology, whether we like it or not. Thankfully, laws can adapt too.

> when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019"

I don’t think these cameras require a warrant prior to “collection”. That’s the problem.

> The police used to be able to tap phones, but now whatsapp is pretty much out of reach, this hampers one of the venues.

And before they were able to tap phones, a lot more conversations were person-to-person, and also out of reach in practice. So it was a venue that technological progress created, and further technological progress later took away. Why should we implicitly assume that its existence was a good thing?

That's a good point. One only has to imagine an alternate reality without technology where every conversation between two people has a cop nearby listening in. If that creeps us out, why not widespread technological surveillance?

> One only has to imagine an alternate reality without technology where every conversation between two people has a cop nearby listening in.

Listening devices have long been a staple of the police. The FBI took out many a mobster with a bug in a lampshade, say.

Good question.

1. No phones, no whatsapp. Criminal talk in person, police eavesdrop in person. Parity.

2. Phones, no whatsapp. Criminals talk on the phone, police eavesdrop on the phone. Parity.

3. No phones, whatsapp. Criminals talk on whatsapp, police eavesdrop in person. Imbalance.

Recommended solution to imbalance: counteract technological barrier with a different application of similar technology. E.g. dragnet video recording.

We just need to have one of these flying over every major metro area. Uses regular cameras found in cell phones. Once you have everybodies location recorded, you can go back in time to solve crimes. I shudder to think how much more advanced this tech is now, since this was 5 years ago. Now, just throw in some AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8

> Once you have everybodies location recorded

You don't need anything flying to do that. The location of evert cell phone is already tracked both by the phone's telemetry[1] and deduction based on tower usage[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684

[2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-i...

Sure, assuming you're carrying a phone on you. As we continue down this path we seem to be racing towards, I'm sure gait detection, facial recognition, etc., will be in full force in combined systems, sharing data, and they won't need phones to track your movements. They just follow you out your front door and wherever you go, passing whatever license plate scanners/facial scanners they have along the way.

How is that working in the UK right now?

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