Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans | Hacker News Reader

Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

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304 pointsatg_abhishek155 comments

At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room.

Across much of the globe, modern police forces have been empowered and emboldened to such a degree that many departments, and their members, feel institutionally above the law.

In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police.

Its frankly insulting to see, again and again, that people we (civilians) fund the salaries of, see us as beneath them - as evidenced by how we are held to the letter of ordinances and laws by them, while they break ordinances and laws with seemingly wanton abandon.

This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.

> we (civilians)

I just want to remind everyone that police are civilians too. I also sometimes forget

civilian noun

2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force

Why would firefighters not be civilians?

I don't know exactly, but it sounds like the word is context-dependent. During war, it means people who aren't in the military, but during peacetime it means people who aren't expected to risk their lives in more ordinary ways.

[If the jobs of firefighters seems irreproachable or lacking authority compared to military or police, then maybe it would help to remember that firefighters turned their hoses on civil rights protesters in the 60s. No doubt there are many similar examples of firefighter's behavior being clearly outside of the what is thought to be typical of civilians.]

Some dictionaries seem to disagree with you:

– a person who is not a member of the police or the armed forces

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/civil...

– one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civilian

– a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/civilian

I’m a little curious, why should they be considered civilians?

> why should they be considered civilians?

Because they are. Robert Peel was insistent on exactly that point when he set up the police force in the UK. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

Edit: corrected URL

No, they are not. They are literally instruments of the government’s monopoly on violence.

I have no idea why you reference a dead politician’s antiquated analysis of the role of the police.. shit has happened since 1850, and I personally believe catholics should not be barred from parliament. Also, not everyone lives in the UK.

Edit: as an example: what’s “sir” Robert Peel’s view on facial recognition...?

Not everyone lives in America which is what most of this thread seems to be about.

No idea why you're mentioning Catholics in the UK Parliament. Unless its an attempt at discrediting the previous commenters statement.

We certainly refer to them as the civi-police in the military. Though we don't have the gun issues the US has, but that seems based on an antiquated amendment even older the Peels analysis.

> No idea why you're mentioning Catholics in the UK Parliament.

Look up Robert Peel

> Also, not everyone lives in the UK.

Also quite a substantial number of people don't live in the US. So as I said in another comment, perhaps we should all annotate our comments with information regarding the jurisdiction in which the information applies.

As armed representatives of the state, I would argue that they are not. They’re not military, but they’re definitely not civilians.

Ah, so if they shoot me at all, it's assault with a deadly weapon, just like any other civilian

Are you confusing it with the word "citizen"?

American police don’t feel institutionally above the law, for all intents and purposes they are. Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct. And the lengths the courts will go to protect cops are ridiculous, to the point where the courts have upheld the idea that a cop didn’t know that attacking a surrendering suspect in a “grassy ditch” was illegal, even though doing the same thing in a wooded area had precedent. And of course, since the cop was let off the hook, no new precedent was made.

And even when cops do finally cross the line, they just move towns or states and get a new job. Police unions have fought long and hard to avoid even the slightest forms of accountability; in most states being fired for cause isn’t enough to get your license pulled. This protection for bad cops comes at the cost of us all, both in terms of settlements paid by our money, and by unnecessary deaths inflicted on the poor and vulnerable by the state.

^ This. Cops aren’t your friends. They can and will use anything you say against you, never for you, in a court of law.

I’m not saying we don’t need them. I’m saying they aren’t your friend. Never underestimate the ability of a cop to twist the truth. In court, a cop has the fullest faith of the courts even if they don’t show up. Defending yourself against what a cop says happened is almost impossible. It can be done though.

> I’m not saying we don’t need them

We need them, but we also need them to be held accountable for their actions.

Absolutely

I have never seen a convincing argument that we don’t need cops, courts, and prisons (not that you’re making that argument). Every society seems to have them, and I have a very hard time imagining a society that wouldn’t lock up someone like, say, Anders Breivik.

That being said, it’s pretty obvious that the American justice system is unnecessarily brutal and inefficient. We lock up a huge percentage of our population and have a pretty high recidivism rate compared to our peer nations. Well short of “defunding the police”, we desperately need to rethink the scope and responsibilities of our criminal justice system, and rethink the relationship between police and the citizens of this country.

We absolutely need cops, courts, prisons, jails and all that. The issue I have is with how they are deployed as tools to correct societies behavior. The way the USA uses them, it doesn't work and only serves to suppress a group of minorities from becoming participants nor leaders in society.

Jail is supposed to be for those who did wrong and need a "timeout" so to speak. A wake up call or reality check on their behavior. Prison is more longer term rehabilitation. Problem is, our society's tolerance of crime and sentences for said crimes lands people in jail more often than not. Difference being jail sentences are up to a year, prison year+.

Not to mention the absurd bias towards minorities in how we police, how we judge, etc. to fill said jails and prisons which are increasingly becoming For-Profit by leasing prison workforce labor out at 1890s labor costs of $0.27/day. It's legalized slavery.

Legalized slavery? Enslaving prisoners was never illegal in the US.

Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct.

Qualified immunity has nothing to do with criminal liability, it is a civil affirmative defense and a sound one. Essentially, it provides personal protection for ordinary negligence. When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from their paycheck. If we did, no one would work there.

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day.

There are far more examples of egregious abuse excused by the courts by QI than you can stomach looking at; just start searching.

Feel free to quibble about all the 'good calls we don't hear about', and then dive in to 'second guessing split-second life or death situations'. We've all been through this discussion before.

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day.

On what planet? I'll admit, I don't do a ton of criminal work, but, I've spent more than my fair share of time sitting through criminal dockets observing cops and criminals and I just don't see it. My good friend won the last significant police brutality case in my metro of 2M people and that was 5 years ago.

Here's another tell. Watch daytime TV for an hour and you'll see attorneys advertising re: Insurance companies, J&J Talc, Monsanto, Me Too, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, Monsanto, Mesh manufacturers, Asbestos claims, Elmiron claims, ad infinitum. But, you won't see any police brutality commercials, and it's not because us ambulance chasers are afraid of the police. It's because the cases are so few and far between that it doesn't make sense to waste resources seeking them out.

It's not because you're afraid of the police, it's because the courts have made it clear that accountability is impossible and cases are pointless. The standard is that you can't convict an officer for constitutional violations unless there was clearly established precedent before the violation occurred. It's an obvious catch 22: to establish precedent you must convict an officer, but you can't convict them unless there was already precedent.

Maybe some court cases will help explain. Here's Mattos v. Agarano, where officers tased a defenseless, completely non-threatening pregnant woman for fun: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/10/17/0...

A clear framing of the catch 22:

> In determining whether an officer is entitled to qualified immunity, we employ a two-step test: first, we decide whether the officer violated a plaintiff’s constitutional right; if the answer to that inquiry is “yes,” we proceed to determine whether the constitutional right was “clearly established in light of the specific context of the case” at the time of the events in question.

Even a general precedent isn't enough, you must find a previous incident relevant to the specific context of the case, which again is impossible because any officers in the past ~50 years would also have been protected by qualified immunity.

> In sum, Brooks’s alleged offenses were minor. She did not pose an immediate threat to safety of the officers or others. She actively resisted arrest insofar as she refused to get out of her car when instructed to do so and stiffened her body and clutched her steering wheel to frustrate the officers’ efforts to remove her from her car. Brooks did not evade arrest by flight, and no other exigent circumstances existed at the time. She was seven months pregnant, which the officers knew, and they tased her three times within less than one minute, inflicting extreme pain on Brooks.[10] A reasonable fact-finder could conclude, taking the evidence in the light most favorable to Brooks, that the officers’ use of force was unreasonable and therefore constitutionally excessive.

Of course, qualified immunity applied, there was no reason to further investigate the constitutional violation, case dismissed.

You can look at Kaufman County v. Winzer, where officers shot (17 times) and killed a mentally impaired man 6 seconds after seeing him, because a completely different man had shot at them and they were scared. https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kaufman-county-t...

If you like, you can also read about how qualified immunity doesn't even achieve its alleged purpose, to shield officers from wasting time with discovery and other trial-related obligations. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/Schwartz_1ki1sac4.pdf

You can read a much better researched article on this topic from an actual legal scholar, rather than a random internet commenter: http://ndlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2-Schwartz...

You can read Jessop v. City of Fresno, where officers who literally stole $200,000+ could not be sued, because no officer before the advent of qualified immunity had been convicted of that particular crime, and the legislature hadn't thought to pass a law saying "police officers can't steal": https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/04/1...

> At the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers are entitled to qualified immunity.

Let me know how many more cases it will take to convince you, and I'll be happy to list them.

thanks for this

I read Matos. There is nothing indicating it was for fun. She was resisting arrest and they stunned (not Tased) her first in the leg and then arm and then neck in order to complete the arrest. They made sure not to zap her belly. She was fine, baby was fine.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to not waste time worrying about assholes who engineer their own misfortune.

My point is that this seems like a case where the cops should have been (and maybe were) disciplined within the employment context, i.e. more training, suspension, etc. But I see little benefit to society to be gained by letting these guys be personally sued.

Well, the Mattos case was dismissed without ever deciding if the officers were justified. Unless you think it's physically impossible for an officer to tase someone inappropriately (keeping in mind that tasers can kill people), you can see why this is a problem. The courts will not even entertain the possibility that an officer has done something wrong.

> My point is that this seems like a case where the cops should have been (and maybe were) disciplined within the employment context, i.e. more training, suspension, etc.

They weren't. What incentive would the department have to discipline them?

I'm interested in your thoughts on Jessop v. City of Fresno.

> But, you won't see any police brutality commercials, and it's not because us ambulance chasers are afraid of the police. It's because the cases are so few and far between that it doesn't make sense to waste resources seeking them out.

Which is because no matter how much police violate our rights, it's basically impossible to win a case against them.

General murders are also few and far between, yet it is in society's interest that murderers be prosecuted. The rarity of a type of crime has nothing to do with whether it should be prosecuted - achieving justice for low-frequency events is literally the entire point of the criminal justice system.

> When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from their paycheck. If we did, no one would work there.

Actually, in professions where we are talking about serious damages to people or property, the institution doesn’t cover it and makes the practitioners buy insurance. Can you imagine if Surgeons and Lawyers operated on this pottery barn standard?

Indeed, traditional professions such as doctors and lawyers are typically prohibited by law from being shielded by liability by a corporate veil. This is why, depending on the states, doctors and lawyers are typically organized as professional corporations or other similar terms rather than limited liability companies: they are specifically required to remain personally liable for their actions. Traditionally, this is what "professional" meant: that you were individually accountable for your actions.

Perhaps we should consider applying the same to law enforcement, a field which by its own rhetoric seemingly holds "professionalism" in high regard.

Surprisingly, police do fine in other countries without qualified immunity. And judges can strip QI, but this happens far, far too rarely. So maybe it shouldn't be the default.

Yeah the criminal defense is through union action to ensure that police get extra time to manufacture stories and the like before evidence can be collected

> When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from their paycheck. If we did, no one would work there.

Call me crazy, but I’d like to hold the armed representatives of the state to a higher standard than the minimum wage employees at Pottery Barn. When Pottery Barn employees start legally shooting patrons for dropped plates, we can revisit this.

> And even when cops do finally cross the line, they just move towns or states and get a new job

And even though our collective awareness about this issue is increasing, this just happened yesterday:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961692068/officer-who-quit-wi...

There is actually a national register of police who were fired, suspended, or resigned to avoid termination.

During BLM, to the credit of one particular police chief, when terminating two racist officers, he had them de-registered as police in his state, and placed on this register.

The problem? In a large number, even a majority of police departments, the Union CBA forbids the City or Department from looking at this register for hiring decisions.

QI is horrifically racist. A group of black community members and pastors, I believe, were getting some coffee before boarding a Greyhound, and an officer "moved them on", so as to prevent (in his perception or claim) a dangerous situation from a group of people who were "upset" by this.

They refused, and despite no crime being committed (as was later shown in court, with a directed verdict of no violation), all fifteen of them were arrested.

They sued, claiming civil rights violations. Courts found 1) that there was indeed a lack of constitutionality in what happened, and 2) police were not required to "predict"(?) what laws were constitutional or not.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray

This rubs me the wrong way in a much less egregious way. I'm an avid photographer, and while my area isn't really focused in a problematic way, I've read many a story of photographers being prevented from photographing police, or in public, or similar.

We are expected to know what our constitutional rights are - remember, "ignorance is no excuse" when it comes to the law for us.

But, as above, multiple police chiefs have said, when addressing issues of such photographers being later released without charge, "We cannot expect our police to be constitutional lawyers".

This is an issue to the extent that things like this are created: http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

That's a pretty weak line of reasoning for declaring QI racist. The reason police were given QI protection was because the court felt that the police were shielded by the same laws that already shielded judges so long as their actions were undertaken during the performance of the duties.

Don't watch the YouTube channel "audit the audit"... It will just make you angry.

A lot of the interactions are about people videoing or photographing in public places.

> This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.

Forget that! Police should be held to a “higher” standard. These are people we’ve trusted to walk around with guns and big sticks. Shit’s so backwards.

> In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police.

That isn't really true. Have you read half the corporate policies published by large companies? Neither have most of their employees. Nobody cares and they're not enforced until Something Bad happens, at which point it's time to open the book for the first time to see which rule the designated scapegoat can be found to have broken.

The problem with the police is that the institutional Something Bad doesn't align with the actually bad things that happen when they break the rules. The institutional Something Bad is bad press.

The actual bad thing is sending an innocent person to prison while a guilty one stays free to continue committing robberies and murders. Or the same sort of "bring me the man, I'll find you the crime" except used by the police against dissidents and anti-authoritarians instead of the people presiding over some corporate incompetence.

But when that doesn't result in bad press, nobody gets punished and then it keeps happening.

This is why it's important to have a media willing to hold any administration's feet to the fire. Ironically, getting the election results many of the people who care about this wanted is having the opposite effect, as now the pressure is off to actually do anything about the problem.

Complaining about it when the other guy is in is rhetorically advantageous; actually doing something about it when you're in costs political capital. So now we get to see what they do. But based on the existing media rhetoric, the implication seems to be more police state rather than less.

Of course, the media is not just The Media, it's also this. So write your Congress critters.

> Nobody cares and they're not enforced until Something Bad happens,

That's not my experience. I'm not claiming that it is never true just that as far as I can tell, in the UK and Norway, it is mostly not.

I would certainly believe that this is different outside of the US.

The US is very litigious and as a result the rule book is often long and complicated enough that nobody really understands it because it's written by lawyers to avoid liability rather than as a set of practical measures designed to improve real outcomes.

Also, whenever Something Bad happens they generally add new rules to address it, even if the existing rules would have prevented it had people been following them. So the complexity grows over time and makes it less likely that anybody even reads the rules, much less implements them.

This also differs by industry or even by which rule book it is. If you have reasonable policies for handling hazardous materials, people follow them because if they don't then they get hurt. But even in the same company, the company policy on other things only gets followed if it gets enforced, and only gets enforced if not doing so caused trouble in practice.

I think there's two key differences here:

1) The police can get away with stuff even when the public has clear video proof of wrong-doing. Usually that's enough to at least trigger the "sacrifice a scapegoat" process, but not here.

2) The police can get away with violating not only policy, but actual laws.

Right. I'm less sympathetic to this argument than I was years ago when I first started paying more attention to police corruption, because since then I've watched widespread protests happen over police brutality, and I've watched prosecutors literally just refuse to charge the officers involved.

The protests didn't matter, prosecutors would not consciously attack the people on "their side."

It's an argument that sounds good, and in a system that wasn't so fundamentally broken, it might even be true. But it doesn't hold up to the reality we're seeing with police departments. We're past the point where we can describe the problem as just being about education or awareness. The current system is brazen.

>At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room.

Crime?

If a community is suffering from a very high crime rate (and some American cities are amongst the most violent cities in the world) - why are we prioritizing one set of rights (right to privacy) over another (right to personal security, right to raise children in a safe environment)? In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.

And there is a class component to this. If you live in a nice safe (and affluent) neighborhood, I'm sure privacy is much more important to you because you don't have to worry about your children being hurt by or recruited into gangs on the way to school. You don't have to worry about getting mugged or assaulted walking to the store. If you live in a community with a high crime rate, are you sure you want to focus on privacy and rights of criminals?

There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons. It's not a 2 way balance. America has chosen that access to weapons to commit crimes with is more important than personal safety or privacy, and no amount of giving up privacy will make up for prioritizing weapons

>There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons.

There are no simple solutions and to pretend that all you need to do is X and then therefore everything will work is naïve to the extreme. This kind of argumentation, where reality on the ground is ignored in favor of some pie-in-the-sky hypothetical policy, is not actually conducive to actually helping people suffering from crime (not just gun violence but crime).

>In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.

You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that empirical fact. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that infringing on our right to privacy makes use safer in any meaningful way - though I have seen evidence to indicate it, in fact, makes us less safe.

>You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that empirical fact.

It's self-evident that there is tension between privacy and security. I'm not making an argument against privacy. In fact, we now have entire political, activist and cultural movements advocating for the rights of the criminals. Who is making the case for the rights of the innocents to not be victimized by crime?

Lol - really??!?

Governments will have to address the elephant in the room? Why on earth would they ever do that?! This system is working perfectly. They write the laws! The police (and army) are their force! That is what governments do!

Perhaps, they could write a law and apply it retrospectively do square things off tidily, but why bother?

But really, once you have total control over what is considered right or wrong, why would they change anything?

You should take a listen to the Quash - a legal insider to gain a better understanding of how things work: https://the-quash.captivate.fm/episode/politicians-lie-its-t...

I still think about "no country for old men".

And the busses of people in mexico.

Law enforcement should not just be held to an equal standard as citizens, they should be held to a much higher one.

This will never happen with people being able to report authority similar too the people they 'police?'

When it comes to distributed/local technologies, does a ban really accomplish anything? I'm dubious that facial recognition technology will disappear because some random governments passed laws against it. Especially because it's nearly impossible to punish when police can just use parallel construction. "We received an anonymous tip and followed it up."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

The solution instead might be the same with deepfakes: fill everything with junk data.

Parallel construction sounds an awful lot like lying

They’re allowed to do that too

They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens. A defense attorney can't get evidence stricken when it came from dubious sources when they lie in court about the source.

> They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens.

That's only true in theory. In practice, police lies are one of the pillars of the US "justice" system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-polic...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilyin...

That is exactly the problem

> The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

https://web.archive.org/web/20130809014315/https://www.reute...

A lot of the comments in this discussion should be tagged with the country to which they apply.

Enforcement on these issues is trivial, given that the local authority actually desires to enforce the ban. Facial Recognition software is not free.

The basic steps to stop these issues are

1. (The local authority) mandates that all contracts with vendors indicate that they do not perform facial recognition services for the police 2. (The local authority's) lawyers sign off on vendor contracts ( already happens ) 3. The auditors verify that no one is paying/expensing a facial recognition vendor.

Generally, working around your employers legal/audit mechanisms is grounds for termination. If the problem is data sharing with partner agencies... then the local authority needs a privacy law on criminal evidence that could be used for facial recognition.

> Facial Recognition software is not free.

Open source versions will be here before long.

How does that change any of what the comment you are responding to says?

You could require the software to have a warrant number entered in order to do FR. This means you need probable cause first and you need to be able to convince a judge it is warranted.

A ban is ineffectual without consequences. Criminal prosecution of police chiefs is what's needed, IMO.

There are more types of consequences than just penal ones. For example, I imagine if they are indeed banned, and a case against a defendant is built around the usage of the technology, then that case would get dropped. That is a consequence in of itself as it wasted valuable prosecutorial resources, department resources, etc.

Unfortunately, you have situations where cases are started using inadmissible investigation tactics, but presented to a jury without them.

In those situations, the prosecution may succeed, which actually adds incentive to conduct the illegal investigations.

Do individuals care about wasted taxpayer’s resources? They’re getting paid to do their job, regardless of dropped case or not. The defendant spends their time and money and has to live a stressful life.

It is obvious that waste of public resources is not an effective deterrent of police lawlessness.

Police leaders should go to prison if they willfully violate the law.

Police in the US don't enforce the laws against other police or other powerful figures in governments, for the most part. This results in two different sets of laws, one that applies to police and government officials, and a much broader set that applies to you and I.

The idea that the law is applied equally is a total fiction.

I think the more practical consequence is to fine and place injunctions on the software providers. They have the most to lose for violating compliance.

Police are largely protected from criminal prosecution because they know exactly how cruel and inhumane the criminal justice system is.

If they are indicted they often have special rules for how and when they will be arrested / interrogated through union contracts. A way to solve this is legislation at the local level that a) makes some of these specific unequal rules illegal, but also b) fixes the inhumane parts of the justice system for everyone.

Money drives everything AFAIK. So if laws existed that allowed a state to withhold budget to a county that had cops not following rules, then the county would take interest. If the counties could withhold funding from cities that had bad cops, the mayors would take interest. Or perhaps the laws could permit budget reallocation. I doubt any such laws would ever get passed, but in theory this could help keep people focused.

Another challenge is sunk cost. San Diego for example has LED street lights that are also cameras and microphones, being used for machine learning. Would they ever rip those out if they were deemed illegal? Or would they just pause the collection and wait for people to forget? [1]

[1] - https://www.govtech.com/smart-cities/Smart-Streetlight-Data-...

Cities don't have much ability to handle bad cops though. The police unions are too powerful

Very true, good point.

The perfect event (the capitol) to normalise the practice even further.

And those who should be opposing it most passionately will be applauding it’s use, because they started with ‘the bad guys’.

We saw the same in London after the 2012 riots. Instead of stopping the rioting and looting the police let it go on and then took all the cctv and arrested the perpetrators after the event.

It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.

> lazy policing

From Susan Landau's 2016 testimony[1] before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone:

>> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques."

>> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations."

>> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based."

Whenever law enforcement complains that they need tools that give them access to more data they never mention that they have access to far more data than any point in history. Yes, some types of data they have used in the past may be going dark, but they have gained an incredible breadth of new tools.

Unfortunately, learning new investigation techniques requires money, training, and effort. Shoveling as much data as possible onto the problem makes the actual investigation more difficult, but they do it anyway when it also acts de facto as another source of power. ~sigh~ This crap needs to be reigned in. Fast.

[1] (pdf) https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG...

So instead we should increase the risk of death and injury instead of safely picking people up once things deescalate? I don't think that's lazy by any measure.

is it literally not the job of the police to stop events like this? of course their safety needs to be considered to a degree, but any perceived threat isn't a reason for them to just act as a glorified clean up crew

Police are here to deal with a few deviants here and there who act up. They aren't really meant to be a tool to break up mass political action.

Sure, in an ideal world.

But every big city police department is at decently trained and equipped for dealing with riots at our expense.

So if we're gonna pay for that stupidity we may as well get the benefit of it.

"...the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to citizens..." (1)

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columb...

Doesn't apply in the circumstances of this event since it happened in London, England.

If i report someome trying to kill me, i'd very much prefer the police to act immediately

Don't worry sir, we'll dispatch a camera drone immediately. Please keep within a well-lit area. With video evidence the perp will almost certainly be convicted.

IANAL, but I was under the impression that the police have no obligation help people. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columb...

Oh my God, your country truly is fucked up, isn't it? I've lived in police states where the laws aren't steaming garbage like that.

If we let these events continue until they die down, wouldn't that create more of a risk that a death happens than the police intervening to try to stop it?

It's a tough decision to make, police getting involved to break up crowds often escalates the violence from that crowd, look at all the protests here in the US that were mostly peaceful and get escalated by police response. Now there's a new thing to be mad about and it's unlikely to go away because the police are hard to disengage once they decide they should.

This. Lazy policing is everything that is wrong. Fire everyone and have a drone fly overhead that takes a picture a minute if you don't care about human privacy.

Riots are dangerous situations, I think they need to do both. Put in place a physical security presence to contain and limit the damage, and address he worst cases involving violence, but also consider that escalation may not be appropriate. In a riot it unlikely you're going to be able to quash it and clear it up completely, so you also need to make sure perpetrators don't get away without consequences.

In the 2012 riots did the police really have no street presence at all? That's not what I remember.

Funny enough, the capitol insurgents brought their own surveillance. Courtesy of FB and Twitter. Pretty sure all the video material streamed and posted by themselves would be more than enough in that case.

Yes but there's a difference between reviewing evidence and using mass facial recognition software to scour literally everything.

Oh, it definitely is. Going through public material or videos provided as evidence, even using facial recognition, after a crime is IMHO ok. Preemptively recording everything, and using facial recognition right from the bat, is very different. The latter shouldn't be acceptable in a free and democratic society.

Absolutely agree with your second point, but still not sure I'm comfortable using it 'post crime' so to speak.

Me neither. We now have surveillance capabilities like never before, stuff the Gestapo, Stasi or the NKVD couldn't even dream about.

Funny enough we are mostly using it to sell adds. Until you look at China and their surveillance activities. I do not want any of that. Especially if all that can be replaced by proper police work. Like unbiased investigation, arresting people (just imagine if authorities had arrested all the insurectionists right on the spot). I am afraid so, that we will have more surveillance and not less.

For the sake of our kids.. I have no idea how we will avoid a complete surveillance state in the future. Tracking devices in every pocket. And algorithms that can turn every camera into a tracking device.

What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state? I.e. what would be different from now.

Not OP, but presumably advances in machine learning which will make it simpler to identify patterns and gleam useful, actionable information from the vast troves of data being collected.

Today, it is my impression that much data is only used to reconstruct events after the fact, rather than gaining a priori knowledge to prevent an incident in the first place.

(And, to make it clear - I am not suggesting 'progress' as outlined above is desirable...)

Not OP but I believe most of the surveillance derives from third parties. The government doesn't directly control or monitor most of the surveillance tools (google, telecoms, geoloc, &c.), or at least not in most advanced countries. But it's getting easier and easier for them to access these data and there will probably be less and less safeguards.

For example in France we're in a permanent "state of emergency" since the attacks in 2015 (and now with covid), which grants more rights to the government/police and let them bypass some legal safeguards for "the greater good" but of course it's already being abused, not against terrorists, but against protesters, people squatting land to protest against projects that would have a negative impact on the environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend), &c.

It cannot be for “the greater good”, or the law would not have been written that way before the “emergency”.

Any government action that relies on emergency powers is an admission from that government that they have failed to govern using their prescribed legislative mandate. Any government that uses such power should be held to account for their failure to govern, because it’s almost never necessary, and is always abused.

The tools necessary to achieve this good light not be the same in all corconstancies and you only want to extend the law when strictly necessary, not always. See food ratio in war times.

We don’t have mandatory in-home surveillance, for the moment.

I get that.

But I'm wondering if that really is what needs to occur before we consider a a state to be a complete surveillance state, if, for example, almost every home has some kind of device that can be exploited for surveillance, e.g landline, mobile phone, television, smart devices, laptops/desktops/tablets, internet routers/modems, smart meters, smart heating, rubbish collectoin etc?

I.e. have we opted in to in-home surveillance to a sufficient level to make mandatory surveillance almost of no use.

Compare surveillance in US and China. Both have a lot of it, but one has orders of magnitude more of it. Also China is more open about it. In US there's attempts to be sneaky about it, not so in China, though that's probably just the dictatorial aspect.

"What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state?"

Ratcheting up automation is what would make it different to me. While there are exceptions, for the most part, police look at all this data after they know about a crime.

They have most of what they need to use the info to discover crime and automatically cite people. As a simple example, ANPR in two places could issue a speeding ticket if the time elasped between two scans is low enough. I'm sure it's happening somewhere, maybe a toll road. The difference would be when it's widespread.

We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption.

All we can do is try to make a society where that doesn’t matter.

IMO such a society is as anarchic as possible, though “as possible” is still well short of the level in, say, The Culture; the exact level is dynamic and tech-dependent.

> We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption.

I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible).

It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."

The reason I say it is unavoidable is not laws of nature, it is the ease with which it can be done with current technology, and the advantages that our current technology brings to societies which do not reject it.

Indeed we could, as you say, construct societies without that capacity — Amish, etc. already do so — but such a society is outcompeted by every society which embraces tech, and any society with tech at the level of the Stasi (i.e. both old and the wrong side of the Iron Curtain) can surveil whoever it wants whenever it wants.

Now? Now it doesn’t matter if you decentralised all the infrastructure, the tech is too cheap to avoid total surveillance.

Now, laser mics are school projects, and the hardware cost for pointing one at each and every window in London 24/7 is significantly lower than the annual cost of the Metropolitan Police Service in the same city.

Now, your WiFi can be converted into a wall-penetrating radar, do pose detection, heart rate and breathing detection.

Now, my wristwatch knows when I walk past the charging station to turn on its screen and remind me of its existence. I don’t even know how it knows when I’m walking past.

Now, I have an IR camera that can see through some opaque-to-visible-light materials for no good reason and at pocket-money prices.

“Centralised” has its problems, but getting rid of centralisation isn’t enough.

Yes, (Duh, wouldn't you?) I've said this before so I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Whether we like it or not ubiquitous surveillance is the new order of the day. You cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. You can't enforce rules against using it without using it. We're stuck with what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy"[1].

The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)

Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.

Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?

I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain. If it would prevent a kid from getting kidnapped, or someone getting raped, or murdered, or even just getting hit by a hit-and-run driver, that I would agree to have my life JenniCam'd[2]. The fact is, it's already happening. E.g. your smart phone uploads your location data which is then sold off. Your smart TV sends pictures of the screen to the cloud. Your smart router listens to your conversations. Your smart electricity meter sends telemetry. Smart streetlights know where the cars are, smart cars know where the people are (a fleet of networked self-driving cars (auto-autos) is a ubiquitous surveillance system.) Etc.

Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry.

[1] "Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy ("Grundiocracy"? Ew.)

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream)

> Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry.

As a country, the United States has decided that the Bill of Rights was important enough to write down, even if some bad people get to go free.

As a country, the United States also decided that wiretapping is illegal except when permitted in a specific instance, with approval from a judge.

You may think it's okay, but our Founding Fathers and our predecessors decided that these things weren't okay, likely do to immediate dangers they had just been experiencing.

Arguably, the software and practices that Snowden exposedallow after-the-fact wiretapping, where everything was recorded, but not looked at prior to the fact. I argue that is against the spirit of the wiretapping laws, myself.

I don't think these things are okay. I don't see a realistic way to prevent them.

> The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)

It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.

> Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.

No we can't, and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.

> Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?

To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.

It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.

> I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.

I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.

I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.

> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)

> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.

If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.

I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if it tried it would be undermined by other governments.

In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but it doesn't seem to have played out that way.

> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.

> No we can't,

What would prevent it?

> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.

I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?

Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it? If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then that should be written into the law.

For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?

> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.

Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that day did not stem from insufficient information.

> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.

That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology (which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall into some sort of dystopian system.

> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.

> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.

I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping? That's the question.

I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a few hours.

We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.

> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.

To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!

That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap and unevenly enforced.

> If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.

Possibly. But if that's the case, it's very important that we acknowledge that fact now and work to prevent it. We can't just say that governments will suddenly become incorruptible because the alternative is unpleasant. We have to face that unpleasant reality and respond to it.

> What would prevent it?

The fact that it's not working. Even in totalitarian regimes like China, they're not stopping all crime, they're just crushing political dissidents. And they don't even have perfect enforcement on that.

To get to the point in enforcement you're talking about, we would need an even larger jump in surveillance than what we're talking about now. And even in that world -- it's not lack of surveillance that allows police officers to violate people's rights with impunity, it's lack of prosecution. Enforcement of the law isn't just a problem of finding criminals, it's also wrapped up in the system's own brazenness and willingness to apply different standards to different people.

Getting rid of privacy won't fix that, and preemptively getting rid of privacy when we have unequal standards of enforcement will make things worse because the corrupt parts of the system will have even more power.

> I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed.

This is a good ideal that we should strive for, but not a practical reality. Marijuana would not have become legal if people couldn't have broken the law. Gay rights would not have become a reality if people couldn't have been secretly gay. Perfect enforcement of the law can stagnate social progress, because the law is fallible. Fallible systems need safeguards that make it possible to oppose them -- and extra-legal normalization of certain behaviors is one of those safeguards.

There are other ways we could add checks and balances to the law, but I have not seen many proposals from anyone that seem realistic or achievable to me. The reality is that breaking the law is often how we achieve social progress. Again, see Hong Kong and China, or the history of slavery in the US, or any number of social movements.

> We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.

I think it's a completely defensible moral position. I think that our privacy is one of the reasons that the US government is not the CCP, and I think that the harm China is doing to its own citizens is pretty objectively greater than the harm that a couple of kidnappers will do. I'm not a fan of kidnappers, but the CCP is building concentration camps. Muslims in China need privacy more than they need protection from kidnappers, it's not a hard trade for me to make.

> We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!

I think the solution you're proposing is more difficult and less likely to happen then even the most long-shot of my proposals. The odds of all of the nations of the world uniting under a common set of laws, and those being laws being good are astronomically low. It would be easier to invent an invisibility cloak.

> > If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.

> Possibly. But if that's the case, it's very important that we acknowledge that fact now and work to prevent it. We can't just say that governments will suddenly become incorruptible because the alternative is unpleasant. We have to face that unpleasant reality and respond to it.

To be clear I'm not saying that government will automatically become incorruptible (we should be so lucky, eh?)

How shall we formalize our response if not through government?

How can we be sure no one is using the surveillance unless we use the surveillance?

> > What would prevent it?

> The fact that it's not working. Even in totalitarian regimes like China, they're not stopping all crime, they're just crushing political dissidents. And they don't even have perfect enforcement on that.

Ugh, give them a minute. :(

To me it seems obvious that you get either: 1) a split-level society, where insiders get away with stuff while the masses live under the panopticon, or 2) you get a universal panopticon that includes the police and politicians and we are subject to the absolute rule of Mrs. Grundy.

I just do not see a realistic scenario with partial surveillance. The technology will become too cheap.

> To get to the point in enforcement you're talking about, we would need an even larger jump in surveillance than what we're talking about now.

Our smart phones are already a surveillance system.

Consider that a fleet of networked self-driving cars will be a surveillance system just as a side-effect.

The economics will drive it even if politics doesn't.

> And even in that world -- it's not lack of surveillance that allows police officers to violate people's rights with impunity, it's lack of prosecution. Enforcement of the law isn't just a problem of finding criminals, it's also wrapped up in the system's own brazenness and willingness to apply different standards to different people.

Now we're talking. Did you see the movie Elysium? I didn't finish watching it, because there's a scene near the start when Matt Damon's character is standing in a line and robot police (it's not clear whether they are autonomous AI robots or remote-controlled by humans) come by and hassle him and break his arm. I saw that and was like, Fuck That.

If that's what we end up doing to ourselves I'm not interested.

Why would you program a robot to do police brutality? It makes no logical sense. If the robot is strong enough to break a bone (already a dubious design choice) then it's strong enough to restrain a person without breaking his arm. FFS! At that point we're just watching someone's sick fetish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)

That's what I mean by "humane tyranny": yes, the police are robots now but they are programmed to be nice.

"Klaatu barada nikto", eh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_(The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_...

> He is but one member of a "race of robots" invented by an interplanetary confederation (described as "A sort of United Nations on a Planetary level" by Klaatu, who is a representative of that confederation) to protect their citizens against all aggression by destroying any aggressors. Klaatu describes "him" as one of an interstellar police force, holding irrevocable powers to "preserve the peace" by destroying any aggressor. The fear of provoking these robots acts as a deterrent against aggression.

> ... preemptively getting rid of privacy when we have unequal standards of enforcement will make things worse because the corrupt parts of the system will have even more power.

Right, but I'm not advocating that.

I'm saying that, since privacy is going away anyway, let's use that to make the system work well.

> > I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed.

> This is a good ideal that we should strive for, but not a practical reality. Marijuana would not have become legal if people couldn't have broken the law. Gay rights would not have become a reality if people couldn't have been secretly gay. Perfect enforcement of the law can stagnate social progress, because the law is fallible. Fallible systems need safeguards that make it possible to oppose them -- and extra-legal normalization of certain behaviors is one of those safeguards.

I get what you're saying but I think you're wrong about the desirability of selective enforcement of "soft" crime because it's hypocritical and because perfect enforcement of "hard" crimes is very desirable.

I'm saying we better stop rounding up potheads and gay people, because we are about to have the power to make our laws stick for better or worse. There are lots of places even today where it's illegal to be gay. If those places get tech before they get hip they're gonna have a bad time.

(I once worked for a startup that was developing a device that could read blood alcohol level and their market was a staunchly Muslim nation. They hadn't thought it through. This nation severely restricts alcohol consumption and you're trying to introduce a fitbit that measures blood alcohol, think it through guys.)

Computers are the "perfection of the executive". (That quote goes back to Babbage BTW. He didn't say it, a fellow said it to him of his machine, and he agreed.)

We are going to get perfect enforcement -or- hypocritical "justice" systems -or- better, more humane laws.

As I see it those are the options. The cameras are already deployed, billions of folks are carrying self-surveillance devices right now.

> There are other ways we could add checks and balances to the law, but I have not seen many proposals from anyone that seem realistic or achievable to me. The reality is that breaking the law is often how we achieve social progress. Again, see Hong Kong and China, or the history of slavery in the US, or any number of social movements.

You make me realize that I don't have any formal proposals in re: my theory (that since tech makes surveillance inevitable we should all just be cool.)

I don't know that there are any concrete things to do. Or that, if there are, I could come up with them.

> > We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.

> I think it's a completely defensible moral position.

It's really not. Either you're not taking the thought experiment seriously or you don't have children. I wouldn't wish the loss of a child on my worst enemy.

> I think that our privacy is one of the reasons that the US government is not the CCP,

The USA totally spies on us. That's what the "Bumblehive" is for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

> and I think that the harm China is doing to its own citizens is pretty objectively greater than the harm that a couple of kidnappers will do. I'm not a fan of kidnappers, but the CCP is building concentration camps. Muslims in China need privacy more than they need protection from kidnappers, it's not a hard trade for me to make.

But that's not the trade.

We can get rid of the kidnappers and the evil concentration camp-building bastards.

In the world I'm envisioning no one could build concentration camps.

Think about it: the CCP say those aren't concentration camps and the very reason they can't lie about it or about the other vile things they do and get away with it because there is too much information!

> > We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!

> I think the solution you're proposing is more difficult and less likely to happen then even the most long-shot of my proposals. The odds of all of the nations of the world uniting under a common set of laws, and those being laws being good are astronomically low. It would be easier to invent an invisibility cloak.

I find it depressing but I agree with you there. Realistically, I think the CCP will pretty much pown the world this next century. Depressing thought but if they can avoid starting a war (and we all don't get creamed by climate change) I think they've got it cinched. Bummer.

> We can get rid of the kidnappers and the evil concentration camp-building bastards.

> In the world I'm envisioning no one could build concentration camps.

Okay, but you don't have a way to get to that world.

If we're talking about what we want society to look like, then I might as well say that in the world I'm envisioning, we don't have concentration camps or kidnapping or mass surveillance. Let's imagine that we've figured out a way to get rid of all of it without any cameras anywhere.

But having an end goal isn't enough, you need a feasible path to get there. I don't believe there is any possible world where you have perfect mass surveillance that doesn't result in totalitarianism. I think it is a trade between kidnappers and totalitarianism, and saying you'd prefer it not to be a trade... well, great, but it is.

If you have an actionable plan to get to the society you're envisioning then go for it, but in the meantime let the rest of us try to invent invisibility cloaks, and build E2E encrypted chat apps, and promote Tor, and legislate/restrict State surveillance, because even if those solutions are imperfect we still want to try and protect the people who are suffering under the oppressive regimes that exist right now.

At the very least, even if privacy can't be preserved forever, every day that we delay the world of perfect mass surveillance is another day that people like you get to spend figuring out how to create the utopian society you're imagining. And frankly, it kinda sounds like you could use all the time you can get, because I don't see how you plan to get from point A to point B. So if it helps, think of the privacy advocates as buying you time to make sure that facial recognition won't be applied selectively against civilian populations while police officers don masks and cover up their badge numbers.

Once you've figured out the laws that need to be passed to make your utopia, and once they're far enough in the process that they have a pretty good chance of passing, then we can stop advocating for privacy.

> If we're talking about what we want society to look like,

Just to be clear, I want the world you're describing. I don't want the world I'm describing I just don't see how to avoid ubiquitous surveillance. It seems to me that either the good guys use it or the bad guys will.

> then I might as well say that in the world I'm envisioning, we don't have concentration camps or kidnapping or mass surveillance. Let's imagine that we've figured out a way to get rid of all of it without any cameras anywhere.

I would love for that to happen.

> But having an end goal isn't enough, you need a feasible path to get there.

Sure, but I'd say that we already have that in the form of Jesus or Sathya Sai Baba. If we would just follow the advice of the holy people we would do just fine. You don't need mass surveillance, or even government, to manage good people.

> I don't believe there is any possible world where you have perfect mass surveillance that doesn't result in totalitarianism.

I don't believe that either.

Mass surveillance -> totalitarianism. I'm with you on that.

> I think it is a trade between kidnappers and totalitarianism,

I don't. I think techno-totalitarianism can't be stopped short of either a terrible collapse in civilization. It's already happening. You're getting whether you like it or not.

> and saying you'd prefer it not to be a trade... well, great, but it is.

I prefer my life unsurveilled. However, in real life, my phone, my car, my TV, my electric meter, my browser, my ISP, etc., these things are all already reporting on me.

Never mind the word "trade".

If you're getting surveilled anyway, you should get the benefits too.

The Chinese are already catching kidnappers in near-realtime.

> If you have an actionable plan to get to the society you're envisioning then go for it,

I don't. I wouldn't "go for it" even if I did. I'm not the type.

> but in the meantime let the rest of us try to invent invisibility cloaks, and build E2E encrypted chat apps, and promote Tor, and legislate/restrict State surveillance, because even if those solutions are imperfect we still want to try and protect the people who are suffering under the oppressive regimes that exist right now.

I am not about to stop you or anyone from doing anything. I think it's a silly thing to do and a waste of time, but then 99% of everything humans do seems that way to me so don't let it get you down.

(Be aware it's potentially unhealthy. You've heard of COINTELPRO? Have fun with your new friends.)

> At the very least, even if privacy can't be preserved forever, every day that we delay the world of perfect mass surveillance is another day that people like you get to spend figuring out how to create the utopian society you're imagining.

Just to be clear, I don't think the end result I'm imagining is utopian, and I'm not trying to bring it about, because on the one hand I don't like it and on the other I think it's inevitable (or something so bad will happen that I won't want to participate anyway. I don't have any children so if the world goes to shit too badly I can go live under a rock somewhere until I die or something eats me.)

> And frankly, it kinda sounds like you could use all the time you can get, because I don't see how you plan to get from point A to point B.

I don't. I gave up trying to predict things when Twitter became a thing, let alone plan how to pilot world society.

> So if it helps, think of the privacy advocates as buying you time to make sure that facial recognition won't be applied selectively against civilian populations while police officers don masks and cover up their badge numbers.

Instead of letting people get away with crime, police officers shall be subject to the panopticon along with everyone else.

> Once you've figured out the laws that need to be passed to make your utopia, and once they're far enough in the process that they have a pretty good chance of passing, then we can stop advocating for privacy.

I'm not about to figure out any laws, aside from that, AFAIC you can advocate for privacy all you want, I won't try to stop you. I'm rooting for you more-or-less. I just think it's a waste of time.

I mean, let me ask you this: How are you going to know that any of that ("invisibility cloaks, ... E2E encrypted chat apps, ... Tor, and [laws]") is working? The NSA isn't going to drive by your house and give you a respectful nod?

The sooner we get used to the idea that the only privacy we have is a polite fiction the sooner we can round up all the kidnappers and kiddie-molesters and rapists and murderers and other monsters.

We can put them on Antarctica or something.

(BTW thanks for engaging in debate. I don't know if we got anywhere but I'm glad to be able to hash this out with other folks who care. Cheers!)

What a horrible thing. I guarantee this will constantly find incorrect matches.

Just like follicle investigators of the past, if it's completely inaccurate who cares because you can just scare some 19-year-old into a plea bargain. People with money won't be affected, they'll have high price lawyers who will get this ' evidence' thrown out.

Police seem to do many things despite bans, or at least despite court rulings that tell them repeatedly not to. Photography of police is the one that comes to mind, and maybe even the Stingray.

I wonder if the Facial Recognition software or the police humans have a higher racial bias?

Of course they do, the Union is far too powerful and nobody holds them accountable.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Whaaaaaat police departments breaking the law? Never!

Here come the lawsuits

Everybody just keep wearing masks. It’s not like we have much of a choice, haha!

When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people.

"We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story).

But it keeps being used as "there is a <19 times in 20> 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go <violently> arrest that guy"

Is this actually true though? It sounds great, but where’s the data?

* we need more than just the occasional anecdote to determine if this is a real issue

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...

There are literally dozens of news stories about the wrong person being arrested for a crime they could not have committed. It's literally why cities have been banning the practice in the original news story.

Facial recognition software fails legal tests if used with large datasets. It does so b/c software does not discriminate in the same way the human mind does.

For example, some facial recognition software identifies this picture of a man wearing glasses as actress Milla Jovovitch:

https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/0...

[The New Scientist article from which the above picture is taken is "Glasses make face recognition tech think you're Milla Jovovich":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-fa... ]

The (PDF) original paper:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf

Steven Talley was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in two bank robberies using a facial recognition algorithm. He had an iron-clad alibi, but the police and FBI weren't convinced. In court one of the bank tellers said Talley definitely wasn't the robber. Nonetheless Talley lost his job, his wife and his family and was held in prison for months. For more details read:

"LOSING FACE: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life"

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition...

I found out about the facial recognition failures from he outstanding book "Hello World" by Hannah Fry. Fry tells the story of Steven Talley as part of a chapter on crime, AI and facial recognition.

https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp...

Fry's book shows how/why facial recognition software simply does not work well enough to use in police work. She provides the studies and footnotes them. As Fry says:

"If you're searching for a particular criminal in digital line-up of millions...the best-case scenario is that you won't find the right person one in six times...". That is not nearly good enough for law enforcement and the courts.

-from "Hello World" by Hannah Fry

The police chief in Detroit said their facial recognition system had a 4% success rate. Presumably this means that 96% of the time they were targeting someone with absolutely no relation to the actual crime. What a complete waste of time and disregard for our civil liberties.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-c...

Facial recognition needs to be paired with a screening for Racial Blindness with any operator of FR software. FR software provides a filtering, given many faces, here are the best matches. This is where the FR software operator is critical because it is then their task to pick the best match. The final step in FR is always a human making the selection, primarily due to a lack of image quality the "best match" cannot be assured to be the correct match, and even then the correct person may not even be in the FR database. This is the type of understanding and analysis that needs to be present in an FR software operator, but as far as I can tell this area is completely ignored by both the producers of FR and the customers of FR. Disclosure: I am the lead developer of a global leading FR solution.

That's a problem with police procedures and training of those who use facial recognition, not facial recognition per se.

Yes? Cities banned facial recognition use because police have proven unable to create effective procedures and training to prevent the problems.

Indeed. Let's not forget, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable as well.

>When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them?

Because trespass by itself is not a big enough crime to handle in that manner. Trespass is a crime that exists solely as a means to prosecute people for other not criminal enough to violate the letter of the law type behavior. There need to be other factors to make it worth tracking people down (theft, vandalism, stalking, etc). A pure trespass charge is not worth it. By all means prosecute the people who smashed stuff but in this day and age you don't need to go after everyone in order to do that.

>We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets.

Do you know what the MA state police use their ALPRs for since we don't really have a car theft problem big enough to warrant running plates all the time? They park on a main road by an intersection and automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets. Government programs are under immense pressure to justify their budget. This is why you have swat teams responding to BS, gotta use it or lose it. Dragnet crap inevitably gets used on petty crimes in order to justify it. All the incentives point that way so that's what you get.

>If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Looters, not trespassers.

> We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets.

But that is exactly where it winds up leading. But because it's not politically popular to prosecute jaywalking and rich people jaywalk they do things like prosecute all the weed dealers and backyard mechanics for not obtaining all the proper licensing and paying proper taxes.

Also as an aside I find your username very fitting.

I've lived in half a dozen states and only the DMV areas gives the Boston area a run for its money when it comes to approval of doing anything to enforce the law paired with blindness to downsides of enforcing the law to the letter. (Yes I am aware this is a sweeping generalization but I think it's an accurate enough one that I don't feel bad about making it.) Though I will admit that I have not lived in the wealthy suburbs of NYC and I have my suspicions about them.

> automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets

I think that's an excellent use of the technology. These are minor offences that would be too expensive and burdensome to pursue individually by hand. If it were enforced reliably, almost nobody would do be doing it.

People get charged a late penalty for not paying their power bill. It's enforced with 100% reliability. But expired inspection tickets is less obnoxious because you can just stop driving your car when it becomes illegal to do so. You can't just return electricity you already used but haven't paid for yet.

If you believe people should drive cars without safety certifications, that's a different issue. In that case, the solution isn't haphazard enforcement but no enforcement at all.

Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

Its same with deepfakes.

I am not happy or supporting either but with rise in computational power some things are unavoidable.

Police always used photo id databases in manhunts. And deepfakes existed in Victorian era.

We need to make sure that auditing agencies monitoring the government and offices and non profits protecting civil rights also gets technological and financial boost.

Everything else is just attacking the windmills.

It’s not the same though, because when done manually it is possible to be overloaded with the sheer volume of imagery to comb through.

Like saying someone is able to manually throw a grenade so we might as well just carpet bomb everything.

Guns existed before machine guns, you do have to consider the consequences of a bifurcation (loose speak)

"Sometimes a difference in scale makes a difference in kind" (heard in a CGPGrey video, but I'm sure the quote predates it)

Something like it goes back a couple of thousand years or more, see the note about Stalin and "Quantity has a quality all its own." at https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&old...

Yeah, and the difference between drinking a glass of water and drowning is also just one of scale and rate. Same for a pat on the back, and being violently attacked -- it's just physical impact, the only difference is the speed.

> I am not happy or supporting either

Then don't.

>Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

"Nuclear weapons are not a big deal, we used rocks and arrows for the same purpose in the past anyway..."

The similarities between past and present are irrelevant to draw conclusions from without also having the difference in mind.

And the difference here is one of scale. Dosage makes the cure or the poison.

>because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

That's exactly the difference. Because it was laborious and therefore expensive the techniques used to be reserved for when they were actually warranted. Now because it's cheap and easy those techniques get used for petty crimes.

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