China takes surveillance to new heights with flock of robotic doves | Hacker News Reader

China takes surveillance to new heights with flock of robotic doves

scmp.com

72 pointsknown51 comments

Url changed from https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-testing-creepy-dove..., which appears to be a shameful ripoff of this.

A reader helpfully emailed to point this out, but unfortunately we didn't see it until later.

This made me think of the Black Mirror episode, Hated in the Nation (1). If a bad actor gets control over these drones, it can wreak havoc.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation

I recalled a short story "Watchbird" by Robert Sheckley:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

I was taking a walk recently in a relatively industrial neighbourhood, around which were fields often buzzing with recreational/sport drone flyers (pushing us plane nerds to higher ground, naturally), and I have had the thought many times that there are already opportunities for bad actors to do things with drones in such places. The rec- flyers are but a hairs-width away from high drama, alas. RC/multi-rotor tech has just gotten incredibly high-performance, to a quite new market of people.. It will be interesting to see how much this drone tech will be canned.

Its all fun and games until someone weaponises it at mass scale.

Everyday news:China is bad,it tell you what they want you know,then some day they are going to have war with China,you will support that war.

So is there no negative news that can come from China? I am bombarded by good news from China every time I get another low-price electronics package in the mail. It's really quite out of balance. :-)

30 minutes on a battery charge. They're going to have to come up with some way for the birds to roost and recharge.

Social credit in exchange for roosting assistance. It's like quartering troops.

You mean, something like this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cS01HWTcxSnFQV2c... ?

Wants a login.

Ray Kurzweil introduced the idea (to me) that aliens might roam and observe this planet in the form of insects.

And as octopus, perhaps dolphins, definitely tardigrades...

Countries are turning into concentration camps more and more...

Birds aren’t real

Our daily anti-China clickbait!

Oh but it looks like US Military was doing this first... "Yet China isn't the first place innovators have sought to build a device to resemble a bird: in 2013, the U.S. military acquired more than 30 drones from Florida-based Prioria Robotics, designed to look like birds of prey. "

I'll take the troll bait. So if the US military does it then it's perfectly fine?

No, but the narrative being pushed is that China is creepy and authoritarian for using the same tech and doing the same things everyone else is.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems every day similar articles are hitting HN’s front pages .

Is the U.S. military turning this technology against its own citizens.

The US military from what I've seen takes Posse Commitatus fairly seriously.

Even the Director of the NSA will tell you that!

One significant/important difference between the US and China is you likely won't be able to criticize the program in one country vs. the other.

You can only criticize it, if you're made aware that it's happening. There are cities in the US that have deployed facial recognition technologies without anybody except the mayor (and police) knowing. Not even the city counsel knew. Most of the US was not aware to the extend that they were/are being monitored until Snowden revealed it.

> Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

The local chapter of the ACLU is in an office building across the street from City Hall in New Orleans. I think it's fair to say nothing comperable is the case in any major Chinese city.

> "using the same tech and doing the same things"

This post on HN would then be a great place to post links supporting that thesis.

Facial recognition to identify passengers on public transit or anyone caught on a police officer’s body camera is mentioned in the article. Everyone else is not doing that. Everyone else does not have concentration camps and re-education facilities for Muslims and other rural cultures in mainland China. You are delusional to suggest that China is a victim of the free press. It’s the other way around.

UK has been doing the same thing for the last 10 years...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/face-recognition-police-uk-s...

Your ability to be blind to a challenge to your convictions is impressive in its own way.

What conviction? China is an authoritarian state, I’m not disputing that at all. My only conviction is that these articles are upvoted based on anti-Chinese sentiment, not on any real basis for learning something. Especially considering tech like drones and facial recognition aren’t being used by China any differently than how other countries like US, UK, etc. use them.

The US, UK and other countries are using facial recognition to round up and re-educate ethnic groups? You have invented a lie of convenience and sold it to yourself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-m...

Personal attacks, such as you posted here and in your comment upthread, are not allowed on HN and will get you banned here. Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome either.

Please edit these things out of your posts to HN and follow the site guidelines, even when someone else is breaking them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My attack was neither personal nor "nationalistic". It is against the HN guidelines to respond to comments that you find inappropriate:

> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

> Everyone else is not doing that.

The US is. Let's not pretend that it's not happening, or try to justify it because a "good" gov't is doing it vs a "bad" one. Freedom, and rights, are becoming more and more of an illusion. For some reason, we've become conditioned to think it's only bad when the other guy is doing it and we're justified, somehow. It's wrong, period, and the outcome will not justify the means. It never does.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/22/amazon-is-selling-facial-...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/11/predictive-policing-surv...

https://www.apnews.com/b11e4bca11e548d3af7a63f24e348c6f

There's really two ways that can be read.

One is "in China it's a dystopia, watch out and see how it happens because it could happen here". The other is "in China it's a dystopia, not here. Our bird-cameras are blueish-grey, not greyish-blue".

The second-order reaction is to watch out for people who exaggerate the small differences.

The difference, to me, is that China is doing this to spy on its own, civilian citizens.

That doesn't make what the US military does okay, but it does make it a lot better.

the spy on own citizens is just speculation added in by the clickbait journalist because hey it’s china so nobody will dispute they do this for opressing their own citizen

Do you think most branches of the US military aren't involved in domestic spying?

The US-China attempt to moral equivalence is getting tiring. Far from perfect, the US still has a vast superior Rule of Law, human/natural rights protection, open internet, and it's not imprisoning a million people in "reeducation camps".

No, it's imprisoning two million people in prisons.

Yeah for actual crimes not for talking shit about the Communist party or being Muslim or whatever the Chinese government is up to these days. In the U.S. you can talk all the shit you want about Trump, you're not gonna suffer legal consequences for it. Good luck protesting Xi Jinping in Shanghai.

Actual crimes like possession of marijuana?

And yet, use of Marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states because people the US have the right to protest and attempt to change laws they think are unnecessary or unjust. Try having that conversation in China.

You just made political or religious dissidence equivalent to murder, thieving, or tax evasion.

About a quarter of the people in US correctional institutions at any given time haven't been convicted of anything --- they're awaiting trial and can't pay bail. Another quarter or so are locked up for drug or public order offenses, not violent or property crimes.

I'm glad that America has strong protections for political and religious freedom. I wish China had such protections as well. But we still imprison two or three times as many people per capita for bad reasons as China does.

There's a term for this its called Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

As you probably know, the intelligence community (which is partly military) is not supposed to target U.S. citizens, but there is a fair argument that so-called “incidental collection” of communications between a foreign target and someone in the US still amounts to “domestic spying”. However, for things like a spy drone where there’s no ambiguity in which jurisdiction is being targeted, I do think that no branch of the US military subject to the Posse Comitatus Act (all but the Coast Guard and, when called in, the National Guard) does or will use them on US soil. That said, civilian law enforcement agencies including the FBI, Border Patrol, DEA, and state police may do so. They all already use normal drones for various purposes.

The answer is to increase scrutiny against both, not back off.

So why are only China news upvoted here?

Well let's look at the past year's top stories with the keyword "surveillance" - it seems that there is far more about corporate surveillance powers and also American/Western surveillance, apart from one popular story about Xinjiang.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=surveillance&sort=byPopularity...

I will agree, however, if you simply search 'China', the results.. don't look that pretty. I find it hard to tell how much of that is due to current American anti-Chinese sentiment and how much of that is due to accurate reporting.

All the more reason for giving greater scrutiny to articles/journos as well as nations.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...

I see. Information about how a dictatorship suppresses its citizens bothers you.

Its good for people to get freaked out when foreign governments do sketchy things.

I know it seems like everyone is picking on China, but if the world got really freaked out by what was happening there then people might have a better chance of preventing, or undoing, it here. If they accept it, its easier to normalize it at home too. Its way too normalized already.

For example, it seems like there has been a lot more news about western surveillance lately now that China is bringing the topic to people's attention. Facebook helped too. Sure, the media is picking on Facebook and China lately, but its bringing some important topics to the public attention as a warning.

Click-bait? That's from South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper that still tries to be independent from Beijing. Also, did you know that Chinese in mainland can't access this very article? since SCMP has been blocked in the mainland for several years?

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