Campaign “Reclaim Your Face” Calls for a Ban on Biometric Mass Surveillance
edri.org
edri.org
Looking at the title, I hope one day we can run a campaign for a ban on ALL(*gasp) mass surveillance, not just biometric :/
We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists.. (or stop creating them in the first place)
Other ways? All this mass surveillance has hardly helped so far. All you get is nice footage after someone blew something up.
By the way these surveillance cameras and systems are stupidly expensive. For most installations they're so expensive you could pay for a police officer permanently stationed for years at each of those public spaces and subway stations you were going to surveil. That would actually help making them safer.
On top of that there's many other ways to use that money to save lives where it matters.
For instance you could use the money you were going to use on surveilling public places to make them physically safer instead: less accident-prone, install public access defibrillators, etc. Statistically you're going to save so many magnitudes more lives that way, it's not even funny.
People seem to assume that heart attacks is something that happens to other people, while terrorism of all things is a personal threat to them.
Not bombing their countries would probably go a long way toward this. The US spends far too much money dropping explosives on brown people.
This was never intended to stop terrorists:
However if you used a material that is only transparent at certain angles, you could make use of the fact that cameras are generally placed somewhere near the ceiling.
A baseball cap kind of solves the same problem though.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90274113/heres-a-look-at-delta-a...
Simple solution: just wear sunglasses on top.
Then simply refuse to remove either. It's about creating a shelling point: face scanner work on the pre-covid premise that most people were NOT covering their faces, so it required no action on their behalf.
Fortunately, the situation changed: the shelling point prefers the existing status-quo, so it will be seen as an unreasonable expectation to ask you to remove your mask, unless it's a TSA agent checking your id... and it's not.
Say out loud "But I don't want to catch Covid and die!"
Pretending you care more about public health works very well!
If they insist, say their disregard for the FDA guidelines just to play with they new tech toy is not acceptable, and say you will denounce this blatant endangering of everyone health.
The fear of monetary liabilities from Covid is a great way to make most business dance the way you want.
If you remove reliable identification as a feature you will push the equilibrium to some other state. Are you sure you want to live in that state?
They aren't addressing the root problem, which is "internet cameras everywhere", and the answer is to figure out how to work with that reality, not to turn the clock back to 1975.
The solution will involve doing a forward-looking envisioning of a mass-camera society where rights are respected. Not something I'll be able to invent on the fly in a HN comment, sorry. :)
Not because it wouldn't solve the problem, but because at some point cameras will be so ubiquitous that there's no point in banning the State from putting up cameras, because every tom, dick, and harry has a camera on their phone and on their glasses, every store has a camera system, some jackets and hats have cameras, etc, etc, etc.
Sure. The State doesn't have cameras. It will develop a automated warrant-generator to pull all cloud footage from cameras that were in a specific area at a specific time. They will have agreements with the major cloud camera vendors. All legal, above board, reasonable, protective of rights and process, and exactly identical to if the State had camera towers.
Same for biometric ID. Fine. You don't want the State having in-house biometrics? Great. It can set up agreements with Facebook and Google: "Identify this person" - a few flatfeet go run down those leads.
Net effect is to have the same result, but now with less accountability (private firm), more expense (private contracts getting profit), and less safety (private firms with the data).
That's why we need to assume the existence of these technologies and the followons, then design the world we want to see given the followons.
And it's not like a law against cameras would be impossible to enforce. At the very least in the widespread constant surveillance scenario the government is entirely aware of the existence and location of the cameras.
Maybe it's changed, but I think that if you get a new device, it basically has to reindex all the faces iirc. Or maybe it's only stored in your own personal iCloud.
(I want to be clear: I don't like it and I'm not advocating for it, I just don't see a way out/around it.)
In return for our privacy, most forms of crime could be made difficult or impossible, so it behooves us to make our laws carefully.
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You can't make ubiquitous surveillance illegal because you have to use it to make sure no one is violating the ban on using it. It's one of those logical "This sentence is a lie." loops, eh?
This is a choice. It doesn’t have to be this way. Laws regulating collection and use of data are possible and don’t have to be complicated. They do run up against the interests of those that use that data for their business, but again, that is explicitly a choice on our part as to whether we put their interests ahead of our own. You really can’t run get around these laws without being obvious and easily stopped.
How can we be sure no one is using the tech without using the tech?
(And, once someone somewhere is using the tech, why not solve all crime? Why have the illusion of privacy, and permit e.g. kidnapping, rape, murder?)
You’re asking governments to put restrictions on their power. You can see how the incentives are not exactly aligned.
At this point we discover just how subjective most crime really is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
> The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the spacetime continuum.
This same data can also put you near a crime and lead to false accusations.
"The pentagon has a laser that identifies people by their heartbeat"
https://www.engadget.com/2019-06-27-the-pentagon-has-a-laser...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-molecular-weight_po...
What I mean is that biometrics are going to be used one way or another, what we should make sure that the data can't be leaked original data can never be access again etc.
A different example would be healthcare data. In Germany spend so long lobbying that data should not be used until the new health minister just sneaked in a law or two to just give that data to insurances.
What we should be doing is design systems in a way that that data is actually accessible by default but also not abusable. I.e. only a subset research necessary PII filtered data should be available. But that way we could potentially have audited systems where we can make sure that the data is shared in a safe fashion and the other side can't do malicious things with it.
Because if we don't, once the data becomes available some government contractor will write the law (and the crappy software) with the Health Ministry acting as a defacto lobbyist for the insurance industry.
Years ago my country was arguing over getting the state biometric databases to update the federal database within hours compared to typical weeks, the usual terror nonsense rolled out. No one was debating the morals at all, it was solely about interop and "who is paying for this?".
Biometrics has dug in deep and isn't ever going away, at least in the free world.
Hargrove claims that the overall decline in homicide clearance is a failure of local leadership:
> It is the position of the Murder Accountability Project that declining homicide clearance rates are a failure of leadership by local police and by the politicians over them. When mayors and other elected officials make murder clearance a priority, as did the mayor of Philadelphia a few years ago, the clearance rate will improve significantly. If readers look at the “clearance rate” charts at our website, they will find hundreds of police departments that are doing a stellar job solving murders.
> [...] we strongly believe that failure to solve murders are a failure of will by local leaders to make homicide clearance a priority in their communities.
> That homicide clearance rates have plummeted despite the forensic revolution is one of the real mysteries in American law enforcement. The backlog of DNA testing has certainly slowed down the process in many cases. Lab testing may have forced a “pause” in murder investigations, which causes delays that can dramatically reduce the odds of a homicide being solved.