Hacker News Reader

Comment by renholder | Hacker News Reader

>He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved."

...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah?

This blasé attitude about sweeping-up data of innocent people is precisely how you arrive at it eventually being abused.

The eroding of rights isn't a flagrantly giant leap but tiny concessions that occur until it's too late to reverse what has essentially become the modus operandi.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186759

View on HN

All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate.

Police collects data from security cameras, road cameras, credit card purchases, witnesses, and now from mobile service providers.

I agree that privacy erosion is real, but you argument was not convincing.

> All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate.

Agreed. Also, all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are not legal. So let's take your examples one at a time:

> Police collects data from security cameras,

If a proprietor wishes to give the police footage. If not, they need a warrant in the U.S. to search them. If the police asked for a general warrant to go collect footage from everyone's security cameras in the same area it would probably have been denied, no?

> road cameras,

Agreed.

> credit card purchases,

Citation needed for local law enforcement getting a general warrant to run a credit card purchase history search "so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans."

> witnesses,

Again, citation needed where police can force tens of thousands of witnesses to answer questions and/or submit relevant data to the police.

> and now from mobile service providers.

Agreed.

> I agree that privacy erosion is real, but you argument was not convincing.

I agree it's not very persuasive, but neither is your counterargument. I'd like to have a deeper discussion about what triggers a violation of constitutional rights, and how to design technology that doesn't threaten to erode those protections.

If your train of logic basically reaches the conclusion "police cannot legally investigate crimes," I'm afraid I have some bad news about the facts underpinning your train of logic, because society will not conclude crimes can no longer be investigated.

That sentence was poorly worded.

But then if this least generous interpretation you chose represented my train of thought, one would have expected me to clearly argue that both "road cameras" and "mobile service providers" are illegal. Instead I replied with, "Agreed." Did you read down to those parts? If so I'm curious what you thought that could mean in a worldview where police cannot legally investigate crimes.

No, the error was mine. I zoned out on details because I misinterpreted your earlier sentence and assumed the remainder of the post was poor justification of my misunderstanding of your thesis.

This is surprisingly civil for an internet discussion forum. Kudos on having good manners.

Ah, I see.

That makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. If the initial thesis sounds fatuous, inconsistencies that come later wouldn't necessarily stand out.

Good news! The train of logic doesn't do that!

Traditional methods are just fine. Some technological methods are fine, others are not.

Ah, my mistake---you wrote "all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are not legal" and I think you meant it as "not all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are legal". English needs parenthetical binding. ;)

That's what I meant.

> English needs parenthetical binding.

No I think it is. (Enough to take) care when communicating and rely on our falcuties to rveceor qikucly form flaiures wehn tehy hppean().

Also it wasn't me.

> If the police asked for a general warrant to go collect footage from everyone's security cameras in the same area it would probably have been denied, no?

No, probably not.

The last aerial photo, with a gas station, the police would certainly be able to get warrants for security cameras for the whole area. Warrants require only reasonable belief that they would lead to evidence of a crime. All cameras pointed at the location that a crime was committed would be reasonably likely to contain footage of the robber.

The earlier photos, with 2-5 blocks of coverage, it's less clear, but still likely that the police would be able to get a warrant. The perps driving the get-away car is evidence and cops only need to show that there is a reason to believe that the camera footage shows a glimpse of the get-away car to get the footage.

Some criminal investigations start with the evidence that a crime has occurred, and links additional evidence to the web that grows out from there, until at least one suspect is linked to a public identity.

If you start by making random accusations against innocent persons in an attempt to generate additional leads, you're not investigating, you're just playing "Clue".

Police resort to unlawful tactics when they have no leads to investigate and political/administrative pressure to close cases. Or when they are rewarded for making large seizures and well-publicized arrests, and are never punished for the sloppy work that led up to them.

The US system is supposed to encourage following the evidence to the suspect, rather than picking a likely suspect and then trying to connect that person to the evidence. "Parallel construction" is a direct attack on the presumption of innocence and personal privacy. It is part of a policing culture that encourages individual police to be lazy and slipshod in their investigations--and that's how you get 2 corpses and injured police at 7815 Harding Street, with some heroin dealers doing an orderly cleanup and evacuation at 7815 Hardy Street, even as the PR flack from the police union and the police chief are busy blaming the victims and doubling down on the botched raid. That's how flashbangs land in a baby's crib. That's how the family dog gets shot, no matter what.

When we do not make police work difficult enough that some investigations fail, one does not need to be diligent, attentive, and dedicated to pursue a career with the police. A person who is violent and sloppy can still get their promotions and pensions. Computer says arrest this guy, so cop goes out to pick him up. The person who is not smarter than the computer cannot recognize the limitations of the system. It becomes a magic box that spits out the right answers--most of the time--without having to do any of the homework.

We don't always actually know that a crime happened to the minute nor do we know the position of a cell phone to the meter indoors or near buildings.

Your potential criminal pool is potentially anyone who passed within a few hundred meters within a period of hours. Potentially hundreds of people in some cases.

Absent real evidence of note the black man with a record who walked 200 feet away 4 hours before the crime looks like winner.

This makes me want to purchase a librem with a switch to turn off the baseband.

In big investigations hundreds of people are suspects. There is nothing wrong with that.

There is nothing wrong with a police being able to collect information of people who were in the scene.

The real issue is what happens to data and how you get it.

1. Police should need to use subpoena to get the data.

2. Police should not be allowed to use the data for any other thing than solving that particular crime.

These kinds of issues should be separated from mass surveillance. The ability to just go there and explore data of citizens or persons who they are interested in but don't suspect from crimes. That's what intelligence agencies do.

The "scene" could in fact be an arbitrarily large space and time due to uncertainties and complexities of the particular issue at hand.

> All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate.

Just the opposite. The investigation starts with the crime, not the suspect. Interview the victim and potential witnesses (none of which are required to talk to you), inspect the scene of the crime, collect physical evidence, etc.

You don't have any suspects until the evidence points to someone, and you only get to the point of credit card purchases and location data once you have a specific suspect. Then you should only get that person's credit card purchases or location data, not everybody else's.

Your response illuminates the exact boiling frog / slippery slope problem AP was referring to.

None of what you mentioned should have been granted to the police but because of similar apathetic non argument whataboutism tactics like yours it was.

The only one I see there that even holds water as an acceptable invasion of privacy is witnesses but that's only because people still have a right to tell the police to get lost provided they're not a damn fool [1].

The rest are just as bad if not worse invasions of privacy. None of which have valid arguments for existing themselves. Their current use doesn't really give much more of an argument for allowing this new encroachment. If anything they give a reason to push back even more.

1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

I upvoted the gp post just so it and your reply can be kept visible.

This dismissive attitude towards the slow but steady incremental erosion of privacy and authoritarian creep terrifies me. It's like people have completely forgotten about not-so-distant history, and are not just tolerating, but welcoming the mechanisms of oppression rolling out once again. In the name of catching a dozen or so criminals - just like every other time in the recorded history of oppressive regimes.

This has all happened before. For centuries. The same dismissive arguments have been used to defend the Gestapo and KGB. If there's a crime, why wouldn't you interrogate the family of everyone who was reported to be near the scene? Why wouldn't you force a confession and tick off the case if none of the leads are working out?

It takes only a few minutes of empirical thought to realize that not every crime must be solved, especially when that doctrine creates an incentive to 'solve' crimes with easy targets rather than the real perpetrator. You hit diminishing returns really hard really fast by investing extra resources into solving crimes with statistically negligible incidence rates. The only entity that stands to benefit is the proto authoritarian regime and its ability to target arbitrary population segments and continue expanding.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin knew better.

> None of what you mentioned should have been granted to the police

Not even questioning the witnesses, or stopping people in the area?

Please describe the alternative method for police investigation? Someone is killed in the street, now what?

I mentioned witness testimony as somewhat legitimate simply because it is opt in in nature.

The rest is assuredly not opt in.

This is the very basic argument: if I don't opt in, you do not have a right to my private affairs, details, papers, movements or discussions with others.

If you want to argue we live in an imperfect world full of grey areas and need to sometimes give up some general privacy for the greater good and safety of the people then do so, and I will likely agree with you on a lot of the justifications to concede that privacy.

Just don't for a second think that those individual concessions instantly justify all others. That like your original position is just far too many logical fallacies to even begin to unpack.

>He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved."

"Hmm, this black person was near..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter

(others, too numerous to mention)

There are others, too numerous to mention, yet you used someone that was very likely guilty as your second example? Just wanted to bring this up in case anyone reads your comment and thoughtlessly nods in agreement.

Ironic choice of examples, because lacking these tools, you've just identified the tool the police tend to fall back on.

We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same?

> We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same?

How confident are you that we can build algorithms to do that? You can't just flatten the probability distribution based on race when many of the legitimate factors are correlated with it, any more than you could do so for gender or age or nationality. Unless you want an absurd false positive rate against octogenarian women from Japan.

But given that some racial (or gender or age) disparity is expected, how do you know if the amount of disparity in the algorithm's results is legitimate? It could be too high, or too low, and knowing which one would imply possession of an algorithm that gives the "true" amount, which was the original problem to begin with.

The answer is to require high standards of proof and conclusive evidence, so that it's impossible to choose a random innocent black man off the street and convict him of anything just because you're a racist or some algorithm decided he fit an aggregate profile.

But that's the opposite of the dragnet approach. You need evidence on a specific person, not statistical data from thousands that doesn't give you a better than 5% probability that it was any given one of them. And suppose the actual perpetrator wasn't carrying a phone at the time of the crime, so now you've got a list of "possible suspects" 100% of which are innocent.

I believe the article clarifies that this system (much like its sibling, DNA database mining) is used to narrow the search space so that traditional (and comparatively more expensive) sleuthing can find the evidence needed for a conviction. The dragnet is, in a sense, more ruling people out than ruling people in.

> I believe the article clarifies that this system (much like its sibling, DNA database mining) is used to narrow the search space so that traditional (and comparatively more expensive) sleuthing can find the evidence needed for a conviction.

Which is exactly the problem. The system spits out a list of 25 names, 20 of them have an alibi and only one of the remaining five had the capacity to commit the crime. So you've got your man, all you have to do is dig up some evidence. Unless the true perpetrator wasn't on the original list to begin with, or fabricated an alibi, in which case you're attempting to convict an innocent person. Which huge databases are ideal for doing because it's very easy to use selection bias to raise the apparent probability of random events.

It's like the reverse pyramid scheme. You choose a stock and send brochures to a million people telling half it will go up and half it will go down. Then it goes up or down and next week you send brochures to the half million people you sent the accurate prediction to last week, telling half of them that a different stock will go up and the other half that it will go down. By the end of ten weeks you have about a thousand people who think you can predict the market when all you've really done is to start with a large pool.

"99.9% accurate" in a city of two million means that 99.95% of the matches are false positives.

You can't start with a list of names and then look for evidence it was them. You have to start with the evidence and see who it points to.

We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias

Can we? Those algorithms are built/trained by humans with biases - how can you be sure we can build/train AI to avoid those same biases?

It's an excellent open question. I'd argue that relative to training it out of humans, we have a glimmer of hope of building algorithms that avoid racial bias because you can always bust an algorithm open and "examine its entrails," and the same can't be done with human thinking.

... but it's not categorically, definitely better, just more likely to be so.

oh come on. we're not talking about mass survaliance here. this is a clear cut case of a warrant, deacribing the place or thing to be searched and or the persons to be siezed, issued by a judge presented with probable cause.im weary of state overreach too but this isnt it.

The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this.

In fact the FBI has often hid the scope of Stingray operations from judges for precisely this reason.

>The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this.

Only one person was affected by it. The initial request was for anonymized data and the subsequent request for actual data was made for only one specific person.

Remember that protest @ the beginning of Trumps presidency? Or any protest that has elements that go bad? When they were seeking images of people they could recognize in order to detain/question/harass because they were in the vicinity of some mischief?

It is already known that agent provocateurs are used to incite peaceful mobs. It would be no great difficulty to use a agent provocateur to give a probable cause to pull the lever that dumps the complete list of people in that mob with little effort.

Technology affords law enforcement great powers. But simply handing these powers over without judicial oversight and control can turn very dangerous.

I'll go back even further. Remember when police used honey pot wifi access points at the DAPL protests? Remember the hippie's getting beat at occupy?

You don't need to lecture me. I'm with you. In fact, I participated in the Restore the 4th protests just after the Snowden leaks.

What I'm saying is let's not cry wolf here. Yes surveillance technology can be used to set up a system of oppression. So can many other state apparatuses. If the state had such desire it could skip the middle man of surveillance and skip straight to martial law. That is why we have a system of courts and warrants and checks and balances etc.

A warrant for data highly limited in terms of scope in time and place isn't a threat to civil liberties. A blank check for a Nation State Actor to get any data it wants, anytime, without giving any cause is a threat to civil liberties. We make ourselves look bad when we confuse the two.

> That is why we have a system of courts and warrants and checks and balances etc.

The problem is that those are worth nothing if judges and courts do not understand (or don't want to) the full consequences of carelessly signing those warrants.

In Germany we have some local courts which are "famous" for being very near to the police and will often rule against your personal freedom or accept half-cooked "evidence" from copyright holders (rather their shady lawyers) for purposes of spamigation and alike.

You can't trust in the court system to rule in favor of freedom here.

Whose civil liberties are hurt by a few blocks of cell phone information after a crime has occurred?

The crime itself is a violation of civil liberties.

See, your mindset is part of the problem.

I'm not in any way suspicious, just because I have been around the area where a crime has happened. As we know those blocks can be quite large so you will have lots of "suspects" whose only connection to the crime is being around a crime scene.

Then you question all of them and hope that something sticks with one of them. That is unprofessional and will lead to lots of problems once your neighbours get to know that you are suspicious of $crime because you were near $location.

You question them, ask if they saw anything unusual, ask if they saw anybody matching a suspect's description, spot a known perp, spot somebody staking out the place hours before the crime...

I don't want to talk to police just because I was near. Now what. More suspicious? Less suspicious?

This is sarcasm, isn't it?

These are search warrants. They can comb through the details of your life to any extent.

> ...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah?

Yes, wrongful arrest and conviction happen all the times. And I definitely don't want it to happen to me because my phone was near a crime scene.

However, I don't believe that the risk of wrongful accusation is a good argument against surveillance.

That's because while surveillance can make you a suspect, it can just as easily clear you. Imagine that there are two suspects for a crime, you and someone else. Turns out they detected the other guy cell phone close to the crime scene, arrested him, and found him guilty. Surveillance saved you from a wrongful accusation, even if you aren't aware of it.

There is a bias here, a bit like with vaccines. A vaccine is much more likely to save you from a deadly infection than to kill you because of some nasty side effect. But you only see the side effects, you can't see the sickness that didn't happen.

Note that I am not saying mass surveillance is a good thing (vaccines certainly are). Just that the "wrongful accusation" argument is more in favor of mass surveillance than going against it.

The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Given that alternatives the police have include "picking up anyone who just looks like they might be a perpetrator" (which all too often translates to racist policing), is there value to communities (especially communities with past racial policing concerns) of tools that tell the cops it's probably not any of the people the system doesn't identify (or identifies as affirmatively not in the area of interest)?

> The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative?

Do you mean a miss?

Misses are unavoidable. If the perpetrator didn't have their phone on them, this is not going to help a bit. However invasive your investigative powers are, there will always remain a chance of misses. The question is how much privacy and freedom of innocents you want to sacrifice for a small further decrease of miss chance.

I don't mean a miss, I mean "This phone breezes through the dragnet but is clearly moving the wrong way to be associated with the crime in question, so we can discard this suspect."

That'll be great news for the suspect in question if it's the black guy the cops picked up using "traditional" policing methods because he looks like he was in the wrong neighborhood.

It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about them can be used to target them for arbitrary or deliberate police or political purposes.

Oh and then there's the peer-pressure gaslighting of anyone pushing back on the "nothing to hide" mantra or pantopticon surveillance state. Ask them to live in glass houses or give over their banking details, suddenly they have less "nothing to hide."

Lock up anything you value because no one else will. Also a good book: Three Felonies a Day

I always find comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a [small] part of the problem.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, mass surveillance is allowed to exist because of the application of force (torture and murder). It's a dystopia founded in violence and oppression. We like to think things are like the book, because it paints us as victims.

However, the truth is that, at best, we're complicit. This reality is explored in the far more prescient Brave New World.

This surveillance is allowed not because people are afraid to protest, but because they don't care (or rather, they care more about other [meaningless] things).

Or, in many cases, people have done the mental calculus between free, powerful, entertaining services and their privacy rights and have chosen the former.

Correct. It's best modeled by neither 1984 or Brave New World---It's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

People get the basics that there are breakdowns in the system of safeguards and a non-zero chance that they'll be the victim of a crime or injustice facilitated by ubiquitous observation. But relative to the benefits, the odds they'll be the one locked in the dungeon suffering are so low that they'll readily shoulder that risk for the observed, immediate, and obvious benefits.

This looks like a fascinating read. Thank you for bringing it to our attention!

I know few people who can do mental calculus, fewer who can perform the cost benefit analysis you describe and none who have the right to make that decision for everyone else, but that's exactly what happens

...which is why you have some privacy minded people using gmail anyway, or getting biometric passports.

In the real world, maybe 5% do the math. The rest are dazzled or browbeaten by apps and continuous demands for some permission they don't fully understand the scope of.

... so ... soma?

> "This surveillance is allowed not because people are afraid to protest, but because they don't care (or rather, they care more about other [meaningless] things)."

The People aren't getting honest and consistent news about such things. The Snowden revelations were met with what relatively amounted to crickets.

Should people be more aware? Yes. Absolutely. However, the mainstream media driven system is designed to make that close to impossible for most people. Editorial: I don't think that's an accident.

It's allowed to persist because they've self-medicated and conditioned to not care. It was started because of fear ... so I agree that Brave New World is absolutely a more appropriate context in which we can frame ourselves.

This comment is unproductive and ridiculous.

1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel.

2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools".

3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen.

This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected officials, so they are eventually bound by the public. If you are to any degree right, you haven't explained how this data could be used to undermine, circumvent, or influence these factors and bring about a 'surveillance state'. At this point you're just fear mongering.

> This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers.

Sure. But getting tried is extremely expensive, in money and time. And it tends to fuck up your life in numerous ways.

Me, I just don't carry a cellphone that's always turned on.

At this point, you're gaslighting.

The procedure creates a means that can be exploited for fishing expeditions. The details of exploitability have been well enumerated in previously given literary examples.

Every infrastructural/institutional mechanism we implement or allow to be implemented is an undeniable weapon.

Just as some people may be nervous when others do something perfectly legal (walking around with a firearm), others get understandably nervous when others clamor in support of instituting new mechanisms to allow our civil institutions to circumvent due process.

"Someone was here at a time" is not a justification in and of itself for the casual dismissal of what normatively should be a right: the right to be free of being surveilled.

Does the jurisprudence provide for such a protection? No.

Would it have an Earth shattering impact on the business world if such a legislation was passed?

Absolutely.

Should we pass it?

in my opinion, yes, absolutely.

We've spent decades experimenting and finding out what happens when no one takes a firm stance against these seemingly innocuous forms of data gathering. People build systems with little pieces of innocuous information which in isolation are harmless, but in aggregate allow a terrifying capability to predict and otherwise manipulate or outright harm an individual.

Data aggregation protection must happen. We cannot allow the weaponization of data, even sanctioned, against our descendants, or we are as culpable in the erosion of liberty for them as those who came before us.

No more. Enough is enough.

Claiming I'm gaslighting is absurd and blatant rhetoric. It is reasonable for me to ask how the state can exploit the system in such a way which somehow defeats or undermines the checks on exploitation.

You're asking the previous poster to answer a question he has already sufficiently answered. Rhetoric or not, it's the truth.

While you may consider the literary sources he pulled from to be "BS", we've had more than enough precedent implemented in the last 30 years that these literary "cautionary" tales are instead of being used as a warning to not encroach on civil rights, are instead being viewed as instruction manuals for how to do so.

I.e. Semantic/linguistic engineering, appeals to nationalism, declaration of 'war' against nebulous but never seeming to disappear enemies, silencing or suppression of journalism/access to information, and engineering of artificial socioeconomic classes.

If you haven't read the books, and are just tired of seeing people talk about them, then I recommend you read them and take them to heart.

If you have read them, and yet still consider them irrelevant, then I can only question your motives/ position and whether it is fundamentally dependent on slowly eroding others right to be free of surveillance, because in no way whatsoever does the implementation details of the government in the United States proof its' citizens against these forces which are very actively employed by parties foreign and domestic.

I don't like to assume malice, but I find it absolutely mind boggling that anyone paying enough attention could not recognize this in good faith. It's just too painfully obvious.

So, if you truly aren't gaslighting, please enlighten me as to how you're trying to do anything but undermine actually valid concerns through rhetorically underhanded means? Because I'm honestly not seeing it.

>"nothing to hide" strawmen

Obviously I have no source for this except for personal experience but fwiw about %90 of the people I talk to here in the Bay Area believe the benefits of serveillance outweigh the harms and communicate such by saying they have "nothing to hide". I know my sample could be biased somehow but I've organized groups of activists before and done recruiting for such activities all around the bay (from ghetto to mansion). I have definitely noticed a trend. People here and on the internet seem more perceptive but that's definitely biased by my limited visited websites. I think it's impossible to have a constructive conversation about serveillance without talking about the "nothing to hide" people since, after all, in order to change policy you have to get people to agree on policy change.

> This information can only be attained by a warrant...

...and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com