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Comment by nscalf | Hacker News Reader

Going to note that I am largely against facial recognition tracking to us citizens before I say this post.

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.

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I think that as soon as facial recognition starts getting used to actually put people in prison, things like the Niqāb [0] are going to become extremely popular among criminal or criminal-adjacent populations. The side effects for the nominally law-abiding population will remain, and the program won't be rolled back, but the crime reduction capabilities will go away quickly.

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)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niq%C4%81b

Hiding your face in public can be made illegal. This is literally not an issue.

That's why my example was religious wear, which is a bit harder to ban in the states.

Yes! We should just make all crimes illegal, then there will literally be no issues at all!

Yeah because a bunch of people running around concealing their faces leads to good things.

Oh wait - it doesn't. The reason these laws were mostly passed in the mid-1900s was because of the KKK.

Laws affect behavior only loosely. Particularly behaviors that lack a direct victim. See also: war on drugs, speed limits, gun control.

Anecdotally this is a big factor when I talk with Chinese residents and how they feel about safety in everyday life.

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.

>Does it make large sections of the Chinese population feel safer? I think so.

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.

Except they aren't in fear.

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.

A sibling comment already mentioned this, but I'll elaborate. Indeed, the people I know for the most part do not fear the government. Sure they don't want to be ticketed, but that's not really the same thing.

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.

To corral, as in "collect or gather", is an euphemism though.

> 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"

> Being able to track and find individuals, anywhere in the US where there is a camera, will significantly reduce crime

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 this wisdom will ever be applied, so for now I do support vandalism of CCTV. It is self defence because I am pretty sure my constitutions says that surveillance doesn't happen.

(Not based in the US)

Crime never disappears completely, it just "sublimates" itself and becomes active in new "territories". You could say that the modern industrial society is way more secure and crime-free compared to the Dark Middle Ages, just to give an example, after all you can now pretty safely go from one town to the next 20 kilometers away without fear or getting robbed or worse (in most of the world's places, anyway).

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.

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