How normal people deployed facial recognition on Capitol Hill protesters
vice.com
vice.com
I don't have a solution to this problem; I philosophically don't agree with legislation to prevent publicly available facial recognition, because I think it's maybe even worse to have a government monopoly on it, but I realize we can't rely on people's good judgment and self-restraint. Maybe we have an awkward time until we develop a mature perspective on this technology.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/automatische-gesichtserkennu...
From time to time there's a discussion on HN about the "Nothing to Hide Argument" (e.g [1],[2],[3]). On this topic, I feel there's close to a unanimous position on HN that the "nothing to hide argument" is wrong. People mention counterexamples like "are you ok with cameras in your bathroom", "can you share your bank account password with me". They are all strawmen.
The way I see it is: if law enforcement identifies all the perpetrators of the Capitol attack and brings them to justice, that's a good thing. I was not there. I don't live in fear that one day the law enforcement will use some facebook photo of mine to send me to prison, because I don't engage in criminal behavior. But if someone with my likeness was there, and a mob of redditors mistake that person to me, yes, that's something that I can be afraid of.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416123
>From time to time there's a discussion on HN about the "Nothing to Hide Argument" (e.g [1],[2],[3]). On this topic, I feel there's close to a unanimous position on HN that the "nothing to hide argument" is wrong. People mention counterexamples like "are you ok with cameras in your bathroom", "can you share your bank account password with me". They are all strawmen.
Let's assume you are right and they are strawmen. What if we take a more innocuous question? Let's say I ask you at what time you shower in the morning. Would you feel comfortable answering? If not, what exactly worries you about the question? Giving the information would not harm you, but there is still that feeling that it ought to be on a strict need-to-know basis, and failing to combat surveillance means as they develop guarantees that this basis will be increasingly ignored. The easier a tool is to use, the more it will be used, and the unintended consequences of that use will multiply.
Why would anyone say that? It wasn't a coup by definition and, even if it had been, neither the people you'd need to bribe/murder nor the records you'd need to burn and replace were present.
Well, if that's the way you're looking at it, there's not much point passing a law banning the use of facial recognition technology, since that law could be changed after the fact too.
who says this can't happen with law enforcement surveillance?
You thinking highlights your own inexperience. The system idd as heavily flawed and often makes mistakes. Many convictions are eventually thrown out. And that’s the very imperfect justice system. Don’t get me started on very imperfect software or data management.
If I'm not too nosy, did you? Or you are basing your conclusions on things you read about?
In my case, not only I didn't experience the "heavy hand" of the law enforcement, but I don't know anyone who did. I interact with hundreds of people, and I don't know anyone who's been subject to law enforcement troubles. Now, I assume that some people with such trouble would not talk with everyone about their issues, just like people with health problems don't necessarily advertise their condition. But if I can continue the parallel with the health issues, if someone has cancer, you learn about that sooner or later. If someone spends a few days in the "crowbar hotel", there's a good chance people would start whispering. I never heard this type of whispers about the people in my circle.
So, based on my personal experience, I did not see evidence that the "due process" is a farce. But more importantly, I did not see evidence that innocent people fall pray to any intentional or unintentional abuse from the law enforcement linked to face recognition, or other types of surveillance.
Yes, I did read horror stories on the internet. But I take what I read with a bit of grain of salt (especially since there's a tendency in all these stories to hear only a sigle part of the story), and I prefer to rely more on my personal experience.
You have almost certainly committed some minor crime at some point. Mass surveillance and facial recog tech means they can just bank that for later use if for any not-criminal reason the powers that be decide you need to go away.
I remember the first time seeing tineye.com and thinking how cool it was and that’s when I stopped posting photos of myself publicly. It was only a matter of time until CS freshmen courses have people building reverse image searches.
I think that the damage can be reduced by passing laws disallowing law enforcement and prosecutors from acquiring evidence through facial recognition search dragnets.
That and enforcing anti-dox TOS violations even when people are using it against jerks like the capitol rioters.
Most normal people still have ethical concerns about tracking others, even in exceptional circumstances like this one.
Scared (for their safety) politicians is a societal failure mode. It should be more urgent and pressing than almost anything else.
When the government fears the people, it's an institutional failure mode, just like allowing people burn and loot small business with near-impunity, which, broadly, it was.
Governments and politicians should always fear the people. Not in terms of violence (although I do understand why BLM felt the need to resort to violence, given that police has undeniably committed grave acts of violence specifically against people of color for generations), but at the very least they should always fear not being re-elected so that they have an incentive to work for the people.
If the people don't hold their politicians accountable and keep voting only because of the party letter (and not voting in primaries...), the end result is Qanon believers like Greene in Congress.
Why are people so myopic in their blame for police, when its politicians who are ultimately responsible for creating the drug war, mass incarceration, and police militarization?
The current POTUS has a long history of being a major champion of the drug war, the military police state, and voting for wars resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent "people of color", and yet he is seen as a hero by many people who hate the police and claim to care about "people of color". How is that not deeply ironic?
I fully agree that the issue goes deeper than police, but still: it was a conscious choice that led to George Floyd's death. It was and is a conscious choice of a police officer to conduct racial profiling.
Politicians must be held responsible, and yes that includes the current Presidency, but that does not absolve individual actors at the bottom of the ladder.
It seems like some people are consciously or unconsciously using the police as a scapegoat, though, as a means of avoiding genuinely addressing the root causes of police militarization and mass incarceration which are politically taboo to discuss: the war on drugs, and to a lesser extent, the war on terror.
Do we now elevate the political class above regular citizens?
If politicians can be coerced with violence, the only politicians left will be corrupt ones, and democracy and the rule of law will be lost. Then regular citizens will no longer have any say over the situation anyway.
If a regular citizen can be coerced with violence, they still have recourse to the polling booth.
Again, I don't believe the protesters were correct, but they believed that widespread election fraud was being ignored by their representatives and state and federal courts. In their minds, resorting to force --- fairly mild force, in all honesty --- was not an unreasonable step.
OK you're going to say only a minority of the Capitol invaders had such thoughts, but that's the same with BLM "rioters" as well (what you're obviously refering to).
When the protestors were outside hearing the president speak it was a protest. When they tried to storm the capitol it was an insurrection.
There are clear, easy lines to be drawn. People don't draw these lines though because they want to further their political agenda.
I don’t think what happened at the Capitol was a monolith either. There were 10,000s of people in DC that day and only 100s (?) entered the Capitol illegally.
So, it’s entirely similar to what happened over the summer with BLM where there were 10,000s of peaceful protestors and 100s of violent rioters.
While there have been a few assassinations of police since the BLM riots started years ago, I'm not aware of any overt attacks on the persons in politics by the right. Obviously this is fairly fresh, so we'll see, but my point is there's talk and then there's action.
This is just a point of curiosity, not affirmations of the actions at the capitol. The plot against the Michigan governor by the right-wing anarchists strikes me as a much more credible threat than what occurred at the capitol, even though the latter is spoken about with some sort of future-telling confidence.
Then again, most of the Q-Anon Capitol invasion force is probably like that too.
My thought is, they were a huge mob goading each other. I do remember noticing some people trying to stop others who were breaking stuff, so surely some of them thought they were going there to just be heard, but others went in seemingly ready to kidnap people. But the mob mentality could've lead to someone getting beaten to death.
I think both are bad, but the difference between a “competent coup” that kills the scared politicians and the stupid incompetence that was the capitol riot can only be known afterwards.
I think this fits into the concept that political violence is worse than regular violence.
Or a closed case of a mob wanting to see blood rather than letting the justice and authorities do their work. Which reminds me to the reason why the inquisition was originally invented: to prevent neighbours mobbing or directly killing their other neighbours after falsely accusations of whatever blasphemy, and it was indeed a regulated process which released (originally) most of its accused free and ended up being a protection for minorities and socially disadvantaged people in the middle age societies (still being the jugging topic inmoral for nowadays standards, but still a large improvement for the middle age people and their lack of social security).
'cause that's what the good guys do.