The Feds are building an America-wide face surveillance system and ACLU is suing
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
Everyday it's another article about your private information being sucked up and sold for advertising or hacked and sold to be used for stealing your identity or other nefarious shit.
Then there's the public side of gov't agencies monitoring everything in your life. At any point they can send an email to any tech company and get a full dump of your information. They're tracking everything you do online, they have cameras on every intersection recording your face.
Every cop car and repo truck is driving around collecting your license plate information tracking all your 'off-line' movements.
You can't walk around your neighborhood without your face being recorded by every paranoid household with a doorbell camera and feeding the government databases of your whereabouts.
You book a vacation and the next day every device you use connected to the internet is sending you ads about your vacation destination even though all you did was book a flight and get an email confirmation.
This sounds like some conspiracy tinfoil hat old man rant (I swear I'm non of those), but I hear regular "non-tech" people airing the same complaints more and more. It's just disappointing that there isn't an option to not participate I guess. Sorry for the long (mostly off topic) rant
I can't stop the data collection, but I can stop ads. If I ever see an ad, I stop what I'm doing and figure out how to remove that ad from my life forever.
So yeah, I'm fully tracked, and I have no privacy, but at least I'm not being influenced by the ads that come from processing all my data.
I also try to block as much data collection as possible, but I realize that's not fully in my control.
I'm not talking some worthless accounts either - I'm talking major airlines, national postal services, government business accounts, etc.
Rant on my friend. Rant on. You're not the only one getting depressed about all this lunacy. How about that yahoo article about white male depression or something. I'm sure shit like this is just another heavy rock on the pile of life we're carrying on our backs, white, male or not. It's a problem for everyone. Nineteen Eighty-Four is coming to life before our eyes. It's a damn prophecy.
I have friends who fully understand whats going on and chose to have alexas and rings in their home because they're lazy in the sense that they want to maximize their recreational and leisure time. They don't want to fiddle with the complexity of setting up their own cctv cameras, running wires and then figuring out how to remotely access it without leaving your home open to a hack. They don't want bulky PC's. They have careers, kids and a babysitter so easy peasy iot cameras with mobile phone apps are a godsend for them. They don't believe they are special enough to warrant surveillance. They say they'll just bore some eavesdropping spook. Ain't got nothing to hide.
I recently spoke with a musician who randomly complained about: operating systems that they couldn't control, phones tracking everything, ads tracking them, microphones and cameras everywhere which could be hack or backdoored, email spying by the provider, etc. They had a pretty good grasp of the situation as well. They even became proactive and opened a paid protonmail account. Then they asked about purism laptops and if they could live with using Linux.
As for a router, have a look at the PC Engines apu2 then run pfsense on it.
It may not be all bad. Technological surveillance could at least be subject to oversight and regulation, where old school family- and community-based social norms monitoring could not.
Nah, people here are savvy enough to recognize it.
The term conspiracy theory was created as a way to disenfranchise reports when the government actually does something harmful. But you, like most people here, can tell the difference between something manufactured like flat earthers and NSA's machine learning projects.
I worked at a CDN and did analytics over a lot of the worlds http traffic. So yah.. sadly, it's a real problem.
"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
Just wondering when we're actually going to reconsider that premise and its legal cognates.
Presidents have a major influence on what lawmakers do.
First, they're the ostensible leader of their party, and to the extent they actually can and do lead, they can influence the rest of the party, including the legislature.
Second, they can also greatly influence the relationship with the opposition party, as has been made eminently clear from the polarizing effect that Obama, Bush Jr, and Trump had on their opposition.
Third, they have one of the world's biggest megaphones that they can use to push for their agenda. Witness the galvanizing effect of Kennedy's call for a space race or the Peace Corps.
Fourth, they have veto power over legislation. While legislation can still pass over a Presidential veto, it has to have a lot more support in Congress, which means that controversial reforms will have a much harder time passing.
Fifth, they can sign executive orders, which (in lieu of legislation) can also have a great effect.
"Although the Bill of Rights does not explicitly mention "privacy", Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority that the right was to be found in the "penumbras" and "emanations" of other constitutional protections, such as the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment. Douglas wrote, "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship." Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote a concurring opinion in which he used the Ninth Amendment in support of the Supreme Court's ruling. Justice Byron White and Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote concurring opinions in which they argued that privacy is protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."
We're not. It's very simple: you're talking about something like the EU's GPDR. We can't do that, because the EU did it, and since we're America and we're Exceptional, we can't ever copy anything that someone else does. So it'll never happen here.
Recording devices in people's homes (alexa, siri, google).
AI inference that can be trained to predict violent crimes based on data from these always on devices.
Nation wide person tracking system, just using faces instead of eyeballs.
Yes yes, the always on devices are only on when you activate them with a keyword. So what. Once MicroGoogleZon proves that they can "prevent crimes" every non-tech person will want this in their home. We even see techies eschew privacy and champion fall detection systems that can report someone falling over in their home to the authorities.
Is it worth it?
This was while google services was denied access to the microphone. Via android permissions.
I partly miss my phone that had a removable battery. I felt more comfortable that it was fully off. But I know even that isn't fully accurate.
If only there was some concept where we could specifically enumerate powers to the government, and that's all the government was allowed to do.
Or flaunted with the understanding that the population of people that can actually call out your legislation is astoundingly small given that most have to survive as law abiding citizens while also being potentially harmed by malicious regulation that gets crammed through without review by any interpretive representative in order to ensure the authors fully understand second, third and fourth order consequences?
Sure would be...
Better to say "the best corruption is no corruption". That is at least marginally less refutable.
>The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
So... if you posit that your life is an act of performance art can you sue the intelligence agencies for violation of copyright by making and storing recordings of your original artwork (especially if you have the habit of working on your Silly Walk and speaking in impressionistic voices throughout your day)?
> After considering the four factors in the aggregate, the court finds that the fair use doctrine does apply to the City of Radford Police Department's use of Shell's photographs and other works. As long as the use remains solely for the dual purposes of permitting City of Radford law enforcement officers to properly investigate allegedly criminal acts and to use that evidence in any subsequent criminal proceedings, it will be a fair use and not a violation of the Copyright Act.
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2407651/shell-v-city-o...
If I recall correctly, a pop bad, played in different streets, and then asked for, and made a video with those recordings of them...
Found it -- though it appears it was not entirely accurate:
https://observers.france24.com/en/20080516-hoax-cctv-video-g...
Good idea though!
"I was protesting at Bohemian Grove several years ago when an FBI agent came up to me, took a pic of my face and said have you heard of facial recognition technology? I was shocked but not surprised. As an intimidation tactic, it was pretty effective."
Would you not want a law enforcement body to be able to query against photos legally obtained?
Now, if they’re running additional programs with broader means (the FBI do not answer the ACLU on this which is why they’re suing) that is a different matter, but the ACLU does not assert this, only that it may be possible (and for that reason it should be stopped).
Prior to this technology, a detective could certainly go with a suspect's name to the secretary of state and compare a driver's license photo with a security camera image. I have no issue with that, and I suspect the ACLU doesn't either. Subsequently, they're able to passively monitor all security camera images and compare them to millions of driver's license photos to track the locations of people not under investigation: that's a vastly different action.
This does far more than make it more difficult for the guilty to get away with crimes. That's not a cause anyone would advocate for. What it does that people are rallying against is that it makes it far easier for the innocent to be wrongly charged. And the old maxim that it's better for 10 guilty to go free than one innocent be punished would suggest it's wrong to pursue the former at the expense of the latter. Institutions like law enforcement will always seek to increase their power, that power needs to be limited by society's concerns for the rights and freedoms of its members.
The issue here is that the ACLU (and citizens) do not know whether the FBI has any of this governance in place or is using additional photo sources for this matching (like public security feeds, or other aggregated security feeds / image capture)
I completely agree that law enforcement agencies will always seek to [reduce barriers to getting what they believe they need] and that we should limit this as a society.
While it's easy to abuse and leads to dark conclusions, all I'm trying to suggest is that the FBI may have actually considered appropriate usage of facial recognition and deliberately NOT gone down the rabbit hole you're discussing. Because we don't know, we have to assume the answer might be yes, but those facts have not been established, which is why the ACLU is suing.
Actually, I'll advocate for it. What you're saying assumes a perfect law, but actually there are plenty of crimes that should not be crimes. People should be able to get away with those, despite being legally guilty according to a standard set by whatever group is in power.
Imagine if everyone who ever carried an ounce of weed got caught and locked up for it. A perfectly effective law enforcement system leaves no room for societal adjustment and changing norms through noncompliance. There has to be cost and human effort involved in enforcing the law.
While I technically “knew” my fingerprints were being taken, I guess, I certainly was not of any age where I could informedly consent to the action. Who knows what’s happened to them? (Probably nothing, but that’s definitely not a certainty in my mind.)
Judging by comments, GDPR is something people in US may like. It may satiate a lot of concerns consumers balk at.
Did you know GDPR doesn't apply to law enforcement/security agencies collecting data?
Even if US changed (whatever that would mean, I don't know) regulations/laws in this respect, there's still going to be mechanisms where data has to be bulk collected for a security purpose.
The reason why is nobody has devised a way to know for sure what's interesting, at the time, while it goes through the wire, reliably, because it'd require being able to predict the future.