After WW2 the University of Tokyo banned weapons research from happening in its research labs. I think we can be drawing more lines on research like this and take a stand against a lot of this.
Because for me, that argument has a whiff of 'think of the children'. I don't think the NSA has done anything to make me safer, and I haven't seen any convincing proof to show they have done anything to help my safety.
At this point, what is actually accomplished by the US military getting even fancier ways of killing people? From how things are shaping up, even if things come to blows b/w US & China it won't be a shooting war. It's looking like it will be similar to the cold war: neither adversary can dare attack the other, so we end up with a series of proxy wars and nitpicking at the adversary.
Being able to track and find individuals, anywhere in the US where there is a camera, will significantly reduce crime. Cameras would cover a larger swath of territory, and we would be able to find potential terrorists, criminal suspects, missing people, human traffic victims, etc. far more effectively. We would likely be able to identify people acting like they were about to commit a violent crime too, but that’s just an assumption based off my experience.
Does large scale surveillance help with making individuals safer? I think the answer is obviously yes. I disagree with it because it has significant side effects, and doesn’t address the underlying problems CAUSING cultural violence and international crime.
When I bought a bike in China and asked about locks, the shop owner showed me, but mentioned that he didn't really see a need, he hadn't heard of a bike being stolen in a while, which he specifically attributed to pervasive surveillance. I bought a lock anyways, but was taken aback by how strong his perception was that he actually was weakly trying to dissuade me from buying a lock. And indeed I saw my fair share of unlocked bikes, although I also saw many that were also locked up, enough that I continued to always lock my bike.
And it gets to some really in-your-face levels. Some major cities in China have occasional electronic, public billboards posting somewhat redacted photos and partial ID info (first several digits of their ID card and their surname) of jaywalkers flagged by surveillance cameras, essentially naming and shaming in a very public way.
And anecdotally I also feel safer in many large cities in China compared to years prior. Drivers are a lot less crazy. In some, but definitely not all, large cities, traffic lights and crosswalks are essentially sacrosanct now with cameras automatically ticketing everywhere. As a pedestrian, cars will often preemptively stop for me at a crosswalk to let me pass. Pickpocketing seems far less of a concern. Most Chinese residents I see actually wear their backpacks on their backs now at tourist locations and on public transportation (as opposed to previously on their chest to prevent people stealing things from the back). It feels like night and day going to a smaller Chinese city where the old craziness of one or two decades ago still reigns (which is somewhat sad for other sentimental reasons).
Now this is both anecdotal and only based on perception. Even if there were statistics provided about this, they would probably come from the Chinese government which makes them suspect.
Is this scary how much power this concentrates in the government? Very much so. Is the Chinese government using this power to corral dissidents? Definitely. Does it make large sections of the Chinese population feel safer? I think so.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
I don't think it makes people feel safer with their freedom or their rights (property or otherwise), rather it makes people less anxious that people act outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour (e.g. act disorderly).
However, the problem here is that it is done by constant fear. Instead of educating people about why they should behave in a positive manner, they are coerced into behaving by fear. It's Clockwork Orange territory.
The general attitude of Chinese people that I speak to is that they are good but lots of other Chinese people are bad/don't follow rules. I constantly have Chinese people trying to protect me from other Chinese people that they are worried will try to take advantage of me.
It seems to be like breaking road rules. Everyone justifies themselves when they do it but other people are bad drivers when they break rules.
The general idea is that surveillance isn't for them but for other Chinese people which they are fine with.
There are exceptions, mainly among academics and politically-minded people who consciously feel a need to self-censor as well as some businesspeople who fear anticorruption purges by the central government fueled by power struggles within the party.
But for the most part, the people I've asked about the fact that the government can see everything, practices widespread censorship, and has a sordid history of disappearing dissidents just shrug and point to how much richer and safer China has become. This includes people who have spent a considerable time abroad in Western countries. Which perhaps from a Western perspective is even scarier than a population living in fear.
But this might just be the pessimist in me speaking.
> Does large scale surveillance help with making individuals safer? I think the answer is obviously yes.
Until regime change makes some previously legal activity or status verboten. Your government collecting harmless data on your religion starts to matter a lot more when the wehrmacht rolls into town... (I don't think this is a serious possibility for the US, but for countries with less robust judicial systems or militarily superior neighbors it's worth considering)
Oh wait - it doesn't. The reason these laws were mostly passed in the mid-1900s was because of the KKK.
But today, unlike 1000 years ago, we're also a couple of button-pushes away from almost total species annihilation (the effects of a a possible nuclear winter are yet to be determined exactly), to say nothing of the countless genocides perpetrated during the 20th century and into the 21st or about the the two world wars.
(Not based in the US)
It's a strange arguments given that you can use it in this exact form to support a lot of unpopular measures. Like banning strong encryption.
On the other hand it's weird to jump straight to face recognition without making sure that you put some real effort into other less invasive methods, already proven to work by other western countries. Plenty of counties like France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom have a substantial presence of people coming from vastly different cultures and crime rates are still up to 5x lower than the US.
There are plenty of measures to go through before jumping to face recognition. But I'd wager the actual goal of any country starting to rely heavily on such privacy invasive tech is not crime control, it's just control.
I don't think tracking people via facial recognition will significantly help, but some similar technologies might. Recognizing camouflaged tanks (or disturbed ground concealing mines, or flares vs engine exhaust, or...) would, though. And I don't think those techs are separable, if that makes any sense.
> At this point, what is actually accomplished by the US military getting even fancier ways of killing people? From how things are shaping up, even if things come to blows b/w US & China it won't be a shooting war. It's looking like it will be similar to the cold war: neither adversary can dare attack the other, so we end up with a series of proxy wars and nitpicking at the adversary.
And if you think that neither country will be able to afford to attack the other and thus stop preparing to be attacked... Well, that feels like it'll invite an attack. Not to mention that some of those proxy wars might end up being "Korea mk2" or "Taiwan", both of which would make conventional military expertise extremely valuable.
Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat? So the protector of the US can be the US itself - if it chooses to be.
And if the US was willing to cut itself off from the rest of the world, this might be relevant.
But I don't think that's the case.
> Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat?
Um. I can think of a ton of reasons? From "they're not a threat now but give them 5 years to retool and they'll be really fucking irritating to deal with" to "they keep providing military and tech support to countries on our borders we want to omnomnom" or even "this will help with domestic political issues".
"Don't bother hurting me, I'm defenceless" works when there's a cop standing over your shoulder. Not so much when you used to be the cop.
This is an interesting perspective. Facial recognition is routine among people, and generally not considered nefarious. Rather, it's important to know who people are for a large number of good reasons.
The "facial recognition is inherently evil" point of view probably realizes that it's almost always a bad thing for the government to know who you are. But oddly, ID numbers and birth certificates, which are the normal government equivalent of facial recognition, don't seem to draw similar criticism.
The only way to avoid face recognition would be to wear something like a burka or maybe a hoodie. Two things that have been attacked over the last couple of decades.
And it’s not just governemts doing face recognition, at least with thoses there’s some semblance of democratic oversight - private companies with this data are far more insidious.
You could say you are comparing a kitchen knife to an AK47.
It's similar to giving out your IP address to websites you visit vs. being tracked by an omniscient ad network embedded all over the web.
These are governments that we are setting up to benefit ourselves, this seems far more in the interest of gov interests than citizens.
If they were strictly limited to criminal investigations and required a warrant to scan the images that might be a different story.
So of course “facial recognition” per say is not the problem. But in this particular example, we see how facial recognition combined with a couple hundred million surveillance cameras funneled into a massive government data processing pipeline can be extremely effectively used for persistent tracking and nearly instant geolocation of “suspects”.
I’m pretty sure we’ve seen how this movie ends. There’s a reason we don’t implant GPS trackers into babies at birth just because they might get lost one day.
Maybe China will use this technology to build a veritable Eden free from crime and lost puppies. Or maybe they are closing the grip on a dystopian nightmare. I think you have to be pretty naive to think it’s not looking startlingly like the latter.
What reason are you thinking? I wouldn't support it myself, but I don't usually represent public opinion.
GPS didn't really burst into the public imagination before 2007 and the iPhone; in a sense the technology is only about a decade old or so in the public sphere. Prior to 2000 the US government's official position was something like "this is a military technology".
As the cost of sensors and radio chips goes down, we might reach the point where we do put a GPS sensor on everybody. Law enforcement would love it and on the small scale it would probably save lives and reduce crime.
GPS chips are already cheap enough (single digit dollars), that it's an issue of policy\public perception, not cost
You make a critical point. Technology itself is always amoral. We are enamored by technology for technology sake, while we drifted away from our moral roots.
I was burgled recently and looking for cameras and alarm systems. I was asking the police who came to check the burglary and they explained that here (Spain) it is illegal to point cameras to anywhere ‘public’, so the situation you describe would be removed and fined here. My feeling at the time was that now I cannot protect my property adequately because I cannot detect people at my gate as that would also cover the street so I would only get to them when they are already in after they disabled the power. But after thinking about it, I do think it is a good thing.
Ofcourse law enforcement here can do more, however they seem quite limited as well compared to UK/US/CN.
The facial recognition, in this case, is the right place to intervene.
The argument can be made it's a good thing for more people to be arrested for BSfaster to get laws off the books, however, I fear authority will exploit select enforcement to it's fullest extent to ensure they can put a sufficient number of problematic individuals away without stirring up unrest.
It's important that enforcing the law be difficult, expensive, and imperfect.
Its true that thanks to profit motive, someone will build it.
Its just not going to be me.
Of course stopping all facial recognition doesn't suddenly make a totalitarian regime disappear. But having it makes some things way easier than it used to be.
For what? automatic tagging of faces in your photo library?