RCMP denied using facial recognition technology, then said it had been using it | Hacker News Reader

RCMP denied using facial recognition technology, then said it had been using it

cbc.ca

123 pointspseudolus44 comments

The Calgary Police uses Peter Thiel's data-mining company Palantir. At political events such as protests, town halls, meet and greets, you can see members of the Calgary police walking through parking lots near by and taking pictures of license plates. With the license plate numbers, they can identify someone's name and use it to find out current address, family relationships, bank accounts, and more if it is in their database.

Is anyone surprised by this? Anyone who believes a government can have a tool and limit itself from using it is naive beyond understanding. Paper documents, lawsuits, and international agreements are all incapable of restraining government. It is completely amoral, and its survival depends on power and control; the only thing that can restrain government from an action is the fear of a backlash that will cause it to lose more power than that action would provide. I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the USA, the people are not inclined to outrage, no matter what the government does.

Canadian here, it's pretty much the same. All of our political parties are quite bland and effectively different flavours of centrism. Trudeau was re-elected last year despite failing to meet some major campaign promises - most people didn't know or didn't care, and none of the other parties presented a viable candidate.

In the time I've been aware of and followed politics (~5 years) I can't recall a time when our country got angry enough about anything to take real action, besides the recent Wet'suwet'en anti-pipeline protests. Most political action in this country is carrying signs with snarky slogans down police cordoned and approved protest routes.

I agree fear of losing power is the only thing that restrains government. But disagree with:

> I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the USA, the people are not inclined to outrage, no matter what the government does.

That's not entirely true though -- currently in the USA republicans are so scared of standing up to some of Trumps wilder ideas because they will get voted out.

Similarly, when Virginia's government discussed imposing new gun legislation, 22,000 people marched (with guns) through Richmond:

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/20/797895183/richmond-gun-rally-...

They might not always care enough to protest in such a manner, but they do, fairly regularly.

The gun marchers seemed to attract a large number of gun owners from across the region. It'd be interesting to know the state numbers.

That's a point; there is a tendency to some protest. But that wasn't really what I meant. I mean that, to control a government, they must fear that the people will remove them in the time-honored fashion.

Apparently lying about something and then admitted it (with no consequences) is a popular theme these days.

Gaslighting appears to be a nasty and old habit of governments back to "liberating" the local Christians in the crusade and then both raiding their countryside for crops and then not sparing them from the massacres and looting.

In my Canadian province we were all issued new enhanced driver's licenses. It was only recently discovered that each person's image was entered into a police database. No permission was given no indication it was being done.

Wasn't the assumption that, by getting a driver's license, you were entering your image into at the very least a government database? I kind of assumed that those pictures, and all the licence data attached, would be open to the police for use in traffic stops.

I believe they were used for other purposes like someone robbed a bank so your photo is checked to see if you were the robber.

It's only supposed to be used for driving not for anything else.

All Canadian passports are biometric anyhow (someone correct me if this is mistaken) and upon entry into the country in many places, you scan your face for a camera anyhow before even seeing the customs people. Seeing as how both Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the RCMP are federal agencies, they already have theoretical access to everyone's face data. That's the real sad state of affairs: they don't even need to this stuff secretly when they make it obligatory in some other way with not one single protest.

The future is grim.

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