Portland, Maine passes referendum banning facial surveillance
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Facial Recognition and Right to Repair improvements both ended up on state ballots and came away with citizen/consumer wins (as opposed to gov/corporate).
HN comments are usually quick to point out that "normal people" don't have a clue about these issues. I tend to agree. I for one am happy to have such objective data points that the public is sensing some urgency here.
I hope Cory Doctorow sells a billion copies of Attack Surface (the new 3rd vol in his "Little Brother" series), as it's an entertaining and accessible way to introduce these concepts to said "normal people".
The technology is a tool and like all tools it may be used positively or negatively. By all means there should be a comprehensive legal framework to control its use but a ban means that benefits cannot be reaped, either.
One answer to the question is that this is a benefit of federalism. Small states (as opposed to a large country) can experiment and other states can learn from it, whether it's a disaster or not. Just like Oregon decriminalizing hard drugs.
The other side of this is the problem of how outright prohibitions often stick around for far longer than they should, even with plenty of evidence of it being more harmful than good (drug war being the obvious one but there's plenty of harmful regulations written in prior eras where it doesn't make sense).
Again this is where federalism and smaller states may help because it's easier to change the law than end the drug war and all the entrenched interests.
If it was a federal level ban I would be angry about the implications for sure. Now I'm skeptical but also don't really care because I don't know of any positive uses but I do know my local police here in Toronto are already using facial recognition and it scares the shit out of me.
But maaaybe something like in prisons it could be helpful. IDK, much about the subject.
Hypothetically, the Portland PD sends all the details of the crime, including images, to a Third Party. Third Party, through use of proprietary black-box algorithms, returns a list of likely suspects. Portland PD investigates the suspects, and constructs the parallel case, without the need for the Third Party's report to ever enter the court room. Not that I think Portland, Maine is an epicenter of authoritarianism.
Is it a good thing to have idealistic laws? Or is it damaging to have a false sense of security?
Relative to the kinds of places many of it's residents come from it is a paradise of individual liberty.
Relative to the rest of Maine it is the most authoritarian by a mile.
People from Portland (cue joke about them all being from MA) wouldn't blink twice about a local ordinance that would have the people of Bangor or Lewiston up in arms. I'm sure they don't mean to be authoritarian and it's just a reflection of the cultural norms from the places many of them come from and everyone else keeping their mouth shut (because nobody wants to rock that boat in a tourism economy) but having a reason doesn't excuse it. Yes I know I'm generalizing, please don't paint a straw-man and act like I called your hardliner libertarian uncle from Portland an authoritarian. Clearly I mean it at the statistical level and mean it relative to the other parts of Maine.
However, I wouldn't describe anywhere in Maine as being remotely authoritarian in the first place. The disclaimer being I haven't really spent any time up north, but I suspect no one is alleging authoritarianism north of Bangor.
Yeah, turns out a functioning city might feel more authoritarian than like the three people who do all the work in your local town office
Portland's problem in my observation is the wealth and cultural norms (not the same thing as the politics) of the tourists who become permanent residents and an economic impetus to keep things quaint looking for the tourists. Nobody wants tell the golden goose to stop crapping on the lawn.
Also, tourists who become permanent residents are just residents. Trying to paint a group of fellow citizens as outsiders is a negative pattern, IMHO.
Zoning is inherently authoritarian and an affront to individual liberty.
Parking tickets depends on whether they write citations for things that aren't harming anyone, like people parking unregistered stuff on the street where there's ample parking available. If you're enforcing minor laws just because they're there and forcing people to step in line when them doing whatever doesn't appear to be bothering anyone then that passes my duck test for authoritarianism.
Frankly from the rest of your comments in here you're coming across like a masshole who thinks Portland is perfect because they don't have busybodies calling the cops on people over nothing and cops just chilling waiting to see someone do something so they can go fishing (or waiting to get one of those calls). And for the record, the poor parts of MA aren't authoritarian like that but people from the poor parts don't retire to Portland.
>Trying to paint a group of fellow citizens as outsiders is a negative pattern,
They're from elsewhere and are of a different culture. Sounds like a reasonable definition of "outsider" to me.
> Parking tickets depends on whether they write citations for things that aren't harming anyone, like people parking unregistered stuff on the street where there's ample parking available. If you're enforcing minor laws just because they're there and forcing people to step in line when them doing whatever doesn't appear to be bothering anyone then that passes my duck test for authoritarianism.
You've effectively painted all cities as authoritarian. If that's your position, fine, feel free to include Portland. But I still don't see any specific examples beyond has zoning, has police who might enforce its laws, etc. I think that becomes a very broad brush with which to paint anywhere that isn't rural as authoritarian, and I don't agree with you.
> Frankly from the rest of your comments in here you're coming across like a masshole who thinks Portland is perfect
Wrong on both counts. Portland has its issues, but I don't think heavy-handed enforcement of its many laws is one of them. Diversifying its economy away from tourism, and expanding its base away from 3-4 large, very legacy employers, would be two big ones in my mind.
> They're from elsewhere and are of a different culture. Sounds like a reasonable definition of "outsider" to me.
Authoritarians love in-groups and out-groups. Just a hop, skip, and jump to nationalism and fascism. Not everyone that moves into a place is going to want to change it to their ideal, but they're going to have their own perspectives, and I see no reason not to respect them.
Just because Portland has zoning laws and historic districts doesn't make it authoritarian. I'd argue Portland is pretty minimally restricted compared to any other US city. Besides not being able to shoot guns in the middle of the old port, and having some red tape preventing you from knocking down the west end to build steel and glass buildings, I'm curious what is remotely authoritarian about the place.
Then again, I'm from a bit south of Portland (and originally from away, which Mainers seem to care about in perpetuity), and moved away to SF a couple years back. My perspective could just be off?
I should clarify, I'm not arguing in favor of real time facial recognition, I'm just skeptical of this move's efficacy in preventing the same outcome.
With a ban in place, the ability to build such a database drops significantly because you need a pretense for every image or piece of video you acquire. You can acquire and send for processing security camera footage when there was a crime, but when there was no crime? How do you justify acquiring the security footage, and how do you justify asking for it to be processed. Whether the footage available to facial recognize is ubiquitous or not makes a qualitative impact.
My only other thought is that a government/organization interested in using/misusing such a database would be willing to invent a pretense.
I'm not sure how heavily to weigh the precedent of government surveillance skirting these kinds of protections. I assume that Portland doesn't have a FISA court rubber-stamp equivalent, but I can't know for sure.
Either way, I think you're right that adding speedbumps to the process is a good thing, especially for data security. I just hope that people don't consider this too much of a victory, although it is definitely a victory.
I hope that the latter would require a warrant and have some scope limitations. The former expands constant surveillance to constant surveillance + identification.
> I should clarify, I'm not arguing in favor of real time facial recognition, I'm just skeptical of this move's efficacy in preventing the same outcome.
You don't appear to be, don't worry. And these days there's nothing wrong with being skeptical. After all, it did turn out that the government was spying on its citizens. This wouldn't stop that, but it does blunt it a bit. Dunno, maybe I'm an optimist.
In the city, there's a dozen cameras on every corner. This was a problem a decade ago, but once you left the densely populated areas for the suburbs and rural areas, cameras were few and far between.
Now in the suburbs, there's cameras at the intersections and in parks, and everyone is wiring up their homes with neighborhood surveillance cameras that let law enforcement know if the cameras capture any potential evidence that the government can subpeona or copy via a warrant without ever having to let the cameras' owners know.
Similarly, some person in their garage won't be stopped from violating this law as long as they're careful about it. This law stops facial recognition products from being mass deployed and being made ubiquitous, though.
The same logic applies to someone cooking meth in their garage. They'll probably get away with it if they're careful, but good luck turning that into a legitimate business.
So, it's outsourced. A private entity does the spying and tips 911.
It's because a well informed public tends to shift power back to itself.
It's been reported that protesters in Portland OR and other places have been using facial recognition to identify police who don't have visible badges -- so I am wondering if this is banned.
I bet that would easily be considered unconstitutional by the courts.