A Billion Surveillance Cameras Forecast to Be Watching Within Two Years
wsj.com
wsj.com
I just don't know how to scare society enough. Maybe use this techs explicitly against specific demographics. Abuse it against democrats and republicans. Track and publish analysis of every trump supporter, bernie sanders supporter,minorities, I don't know just hit everyones sensitive sweet spots to show them "we can do this legally!!" Because the people that will profit from this will certainly not make their practice public enough to be visible by lawmakers and society at large.
The tech is moving magnitudes faster than the law.
Essentially use it against them in a very hostile way to force them to take this seriously.
In the end we have psychopaths owning democracy and until this is resolved (which it might never be) expect more of the same.
I like your idea about surveillance of the surveillance, I’m sure there are already millions of places this happens. Imagine what Google knows about Trump?
How about known criminals. More cameras owned and controlled (for real) by individuals is enough. I have heard about massive improvements in public safety in places where people have Ring, or similar things. I'm not too keen on Amazon being an operator, as unfortunate as it would be if they were judged for things they don't do, it'd be worse if it turned out to be a genuine dragnet.
Nonetheless, I'm not anti surveillance, provided it's up to individual and business location operators to disseminate or not (except by subpoena). I plan on installing more surveillance cameras.
That is a good motivation to practice Zen mindfulness meditation.
Not only the politicians themselves could be monitored, but also their families, children, life partners…
Though, it could create two worlds. The area around the policitian's houses, that would be clean of cameras, and the others, infested by cams.
* identifying vehicles & reading license plates * identifying people and tracking them across cameras * identifying products on the back of trucks * counting people in queues or getting in/out of vehicles / stores * detecting suspicious activity / shoplifting
Generally you don't even need to completely eliminate humans watching footage, you can just present the human with cases detected by the object and let the human decide whether it's a true positive / what to do.
It's scary but useful technology because there's no way humans can watch all the footage being produced by a billion cameras...
[1] https://speakerdeck.com/alxcnwy/gdg-devfest-2019-deep-neural...
I'm not suggesting you can use models in all situations or an all current setups, just that it's possible (and surprisingly easy) to use models to automate a lot of analysis on video.
A lot of current commodity $100 cameras are good enough resolution for many use cases but of course you do need sufficiently high res video and good enough lighting conditions.
You also don't necessarily need to do facial recognition to track people. I'm nervous of the privacy implications of all this surveillance tech but it's possible to do useful tracking (e.g. I've worked on a project counting people to prevent over-filling busses which is a big issue in Africa) without needing to use facial recognition. In the counting case, you don't need to recognize people to count them and can do edge computing on quite low resolution video so that the raw footage never leaves the device (only computed count statistics).
This one seems hard to do right. How do you avoid false positives / negatives?
Imagine an appliance brick and mortar shop that gives users free WiFi. In the middle of the night, masked intruders burgle the place and steal $50,000 worth of goods. In addition to logging the (fairly useless) footage of masked people stealing stuff in the dark, the system also recorded some Bluetooth / WiFi beacons. If sufficient "fingerprinting" information can be collected from this data, it could become possible to look backwards for clues to who these users were in earlier collected data (say for example, when the assailants had previously scouted the store during the daytime making a plan).
I mention these because this type of equipment is very easy to acquire and that, even if there are no companies out there currently offering what you're suggesting, doing this type of radio surveillance (DIY or otherwise) would be fairly easy. Heck, you can even do really high res Van Eck phreaking with the USRP B200 quite easily [5]. You could look at the criminal's twitter feed if he was scrolling through it. :P
[1] https://greatscottgadgets.com/ubertoothone/
[3] https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/
[4] https://www.ettus.com/all-products/UB200-KIT/
[5] https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR
Edit: grammar & wording
The balance of surveillance power between government, corporations, and the public must be maintained.
That said, if you want to know how to help out, you can start by submitting public records requests for information on your local law enforcement agency. There's so much to do!
That's the ultimate against counter police misconduct 1) happening and 2) being hidden/obscured/obstructed by police agencies as you describe.
I was tracking the progress of some activists who decided to action in this respect, Peaceful Streets Project (http://peacefulstreets.com/), in Austin a few years back. The police started getting super pissed at all these people filming them while doing arrests in public to ensure proper procedure.
At some point the police came up with some ordinance saying you had to be 50 feet or some other ridiculous distance away from an officer engaged in duty, I think.
Anyway perhaps some of you can stop talking theory and take action like the PSP has done. Be forewarned that getting on the police's radar is not going to be fun, depending how high they are on the thuggish crony scale. You might even be arrested for interfering with an officer's duties and find yourself in a byzantine justice system that will make you hate it forever.
I think the efforts of the PSP did eventually result in the Austin PD wearing bodycams so that all their activity on the clock is recorded. There's a little cottage industry in making such wearable devices such that they hold up to the scrutiny of chain-of-custody and other legal concepts behind securing evidence and all that jazz.
If enough people do it, it can work. The hard part is getting to that tipping point to convince enough people to do it without real fear of reprisal or complicating their lives.
That sounds like fascism to me.
The division within the public is by design, and highly effective. I'm not sure how it can be combatted. The closest "solution" that comes to mind is to be able to out-meme and soundbite the oppressors so that the public has easily digested messages of unity.
If a crime is committed and the video is needed as evidence or for identifying the person(s), then the archived video can be “unmasked” via court order or other process. There is some precedent for this, relating to when US citizens incidentally appear in foreign phone calls collected by intelligence agencies (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmasking_by_U.S._intelligen...).
This way, there is a reasonable level of privacy preservation (=anxiety reduction) for people innocently going about their lives. It also limits opportunities for abuse, like stalking and discrimination. The effectiveness of surveillance systems as a crime deterrent and source of evidence is still maintained under this policy. That is, it’s basically a Pareto improvement—no one is made worse off, while many are better off.
E.g. with an existing technology known as firearms, it's not socially 'OK' or legal to just go up and randomly shoot someone with such technology, but technically you could do it, if you really wanted. There's consequences to it though.
So we need consequences for violating people's privacy or using their information in a way that is abusive or unfair to their human rights.
Radical transparency of disclosure such as what insurance companies know about you that they feed into their business will have to be legally mandated. (How about an open-source algorithm too?) We will need new frameworks by which data collected on you and used against you MUST be disclosed, because otherwise it could be total abuse and fake. We know China is already in that territory.
The world of deepfakes is going to make 'deniability' a major opposing force of surveillance as well.
We have an interesting future ahead of us.
There was a scifi novel many years ago, forget the name, where everyone's glasses were constantly live feeds. The author posited that crime went down, but also transparency amongst the powerful/elite climbed as well.
"This is a video camera, and this is the precise model that's getting this incredible image quality. Image quality that holds up to this kind of magnification. So that's the first great thing. We can now get high-def-quality resolution in a camera the size of a thumb." ...
"But for now, let's go back to the places in the world where we most need transparency and so rarely have it. Here's a medley of locations around the world where we've placed cameras. Now imagine the impact these cameras would have had in the past, and will have in the future, if similar events transpire. Here's fifty cameras in Tiananmen Square." ...
"There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness." ...
ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN
-From "The Circle" by David Eggers
I've publicly declared the rest of my life to be "performance art" and look forward to a continuing stream of license income from people who have illegally recorded my performance without permission .....
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Building...
Surely some intrepid politician will see how unsustainable and just plain wasteful such a situation is and, in cooperation with some tech company, push for the development of some sort of mobile monitoring solution tied to every human being.
Like a, um, handheld, networked device required for modern lifestyle and work, backed by major corporations like Google and Apple?
So blessed to be living in an era of unimpeded technology deployed for our benefit.
See:China.
It will all be tied into an increasingly centralized system and we will be taken into cybernetic hell or utopia depending on the controller(s) intention(s) or maybe regardless of them.
True story.
A friend of mine opened a business, and he was required to have a security camera to make things convenient for the police. The law specified VHS as no one had bothered to update it, but he just burned them a DVD the one time they asked for a recording.
All kinds of crime will become impossible. Today the police doesn't have resources to spend on stolen packages, bikes or small time muggings.
But with permanent tracking and AI it will be trivial to backtrack any interaction.
And it will be impossible to disable the tracking. Even if you don't have any tracking on you, unless you are literally invisible you'll be tracked through millions of other peoples cameras each day.
Something like Google Street View, but in real time will also exist.
This will never be the case.
The constraints are currently on the resources available for police to find the suspect. While prolific surveillance will make finding the X "persons of interest" easier + faster + more reliable, the constraint would then be on identifying other evidence and the court/prosecutor system to process plea bargaining and/or jury trials.
Additionally, jails and the resources concerned with jailing are very expensive (VERY large outlays and high upkeep) in the current high-cash-bail environment.
I know it's not the point you were trying to make but people dump trash because it's easier/cheaper than getting rid of it the "right way". Where I grew up there was one scrap place that only took non-ferrous metals and the towns all charged $20-$50 to dispose of it at the dump (scrap metal is usually something you get paid for, not pay to get rid of). Likewise washing machines and refrigerators and whatnot adorned highway rest stops and the ends of dead end roads. Then a real scrap place that took ferrous metals opened up and not only did the existing dumped stuff vanish but you never saw one again.
Point is that there's a class of petty crimes that are like video piracy, people wouldn't do it if the "right" thing was cheap and convenient enough.
My state raised its littering penalties 16 years ago:
https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2003/07-31/215440_fin...
Up to $1025 for throwing a cigarette out a car window. Up to $5000 if you dump more than a cubic yard of trash!
But I still regularly find roadside cigarettes and even spot drivers tossing them, because it's still rarely enforced. It's a huge roulette wheel with an unreasonably low chance of ever landing on 0 and an unreasonably high penalty if someone ever does. I think that we would get much better compliance overall, without the risk of occasionally ruining a low-income person's life, if the cigarette-littering penalty were only $20 but most incidents could actually be penalized.
But you don't even need to get to this stage. If you have 99% conviction rate, people will just stop doing crime, starting with the ones for which crime was just a marginal thing anyway (maybe even for the adrenaline rush), and as a result you'll have even fewer crimes to prosecute. It's a positive feed-back loop.
And you don't need to put people in prison. Something like China's social credit is coming everywhere. Steal a bike, you pay double for everything.
Do you have any information to support this claim?
> And I'm not kidding about the absence of enforcement and low risk of stealing bikes. Here's a NYT journalist filming himself stealing his own bike in New York City to see how people who see him will react. You gotta see this to believe it. He even uses powertools and does it near cops.
https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/underworld-economics-what-h...
You should take a look at DAs conviction rates sometime. Federal conviction rates are 99.8% in the US.
I am a freedom-fighter, yes, and I hate conformity, yes, but the current evolutionary survivalness of humans is also very ugly. (E.g. the selfish drive to steal a bike.) I don't have a solution, just thinking openly.
The best way for governments to get society to their surveillance nirvana is one shortly-lived, outrageous privacy violation at a time. The same way you eat an elephant.
Regarding jails being expensive, isn't this a result of the profit motivation for incarceration that remains in many states (in the US particular, but also abroad)?
"The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports."[1]
[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-uni...
The thief in this article has been caught multiple times and still continues to this day. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...
I would bet essentially any amount of money that this will not be the case.
The risks of fascism will be greatly amplified, but the risks of crime will remain the same, with only a few minor changes to which crimes are committed, to whom, and how.
All kinds of minor things will become a crime.
The automated systems will be too rigid, as they are stuffed to the brim with rules and regulations to enforce without fair human judgment.
You accidentally drop your handkerchief, or the wind blows your cigarette butt from your hand? Bam.. littering, $50 fine and your credit score goes down a notch.
Freedoms will be diminished. You are in a hurry, there is no traffic at all and your destination is 50 yards away. Do you cross the street? You can't. That's jaywalking, $100 bucks fine. You'll have to walk a mile and use the nearest traffic light. Oh, and your credit score is lowered for being late at an appointment.