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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

There is a nonzero price to enforce norms and laws.

For instance, let's imagine a technology emerges that can render any wall in a building transparent and penetrable for a short time, without affecting the structural integrity of the building. How much easier would it make the job of the law enforcement! How many crimes would it help prevent or at least detect! Of course it will be a securely guarded technology, so that it won't fall to hands of random strangers, malicious hackers, or burglars; only the law enforcement agencies would use it, and only for legitimate purposes! Honest.

Would you endorse such a technology in your town? Mandate it for your neighborhood? Why? Are you comfortable with the idea that a number of crimes will go undetected or not prevented because this feature is not implemented? Not rhetorical questions all.

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There is a complicated legal and political process because there are a lot of things which are criminal that really shouldn't be. Historically, the law has been used to come down hard on people who:

* Say bad things about the king.

* Said good things about the king.

* Are homosexual and attempting to live their life.

* Are black and attempting to live their life.

* Are foreign, regardless of activity.

* Are female and attempting to own property.

* Are local but not the right type of local.

* The actual person is OK but they're trying to help the Jews.

* Own the wrong book.

* Worship the wrong god.

And in hindsight it is generally agreed that those laws were poorly thought out. Giving the police tools to enforce 100% compliance with the law is by no means a sane thing to do. And if that is the plan it would behove us to make sure the law is good first. Which it obviously isn't there are gaping holes in every legal system.

Or as someone on slashdot put it:

> Destroying the privacy of several billion people is not an adequate price to pay for capturing a dozen or even a hundred bad guys.

> Sure it did get them some. So would carpet-bombing New York City. Success alone is a worthless measure without taking cost into account.

-- http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4631081&cid=45871537

Wouldn’t a better analogy be:

I run a shipping company. You want to send a package. It is illegal for me to handle and ship certain things (e.g., nuclear bombs). Further, I don’t want to handle any of those things. Furthermore, if I find those things (e.g., when a package breaks open), I am legally required to alert the authorities.

What assurance can you provide to the me (the shipping company) that there is nothing illegal in your box? Suppose I ask you to attest but then I find out later that a bunch of people have been lying on their attestation forms which means I have been unknowingly, undesirably made party to illegal activities? Every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package and looking. Suppose my shipping company’s clever engineers invent a detector I can give to you that doesn’t require me to look inside the package but can tell me with some certainty that there are no illegal things in the package. What statistical properties would the detector need to have to satisfy you that this was better than forcing every package open?

This isn’t an analogy, it’s just reality, right up to the sentence “every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package”. Every shipping company doesn’t open every package today, and in the real world there are no magical package opening robots, though there are some specialized detectors. So we already know from experiment that imperfect detection is better than forcing every package open.

It is an analogy to what Apple is doing. Analogically you are sending something to Apple to handle for you (either store or ship) and they have legal obligations and business requirements. Every other company manages those by ‘opening your package’ is analogous to server-side image scanning like PhotoDNA.

PhotoDNA is analogous to the detectors. The analog of “opening every package” would be human review of every picture.

We already have real world evidence for “what statistical properties the detector would need to have” to be better than opening every package, because the real delivery companies are literally doing this today. There’s nothing hypothetical about the question.

Perhaps the analogy could have been clearer and the hypothetical more broad. I was trying to press on the difference between the shipper doing a very specific test vs some functionally similar but unknown test being done by the shipping company (the server-side test is unknown, it could be hashes, non-hash based image comparison, or manual review). I wasn’t asking about something like the sensitivity or specificity of those tests, rather, why we would be fine with one and not the other when the difference is not whether but when, where, and what test is applied.

Bomb sniffing dogs are your “magical package opening robots”

That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s what you do with the detectors answer that’s the problem. If you just say: “The detect says no, we won’t accept your package”. Then there’s no problem.

Apple could do the same, simply letting the user know that this/these images cannot be uploaded to iCloud, and then do nothing else.

The problem is that the results of these scans are pretty useless. They don’t prove anything. While Apple knows that law enforcement and politicians will believe it’s 100% correct, because they don’t even understand that DNA can be wrong, and demand customer names from Apple.

On the subject of rendering walls transparent for the last 10 years or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8914962

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-s...

I love cyberpunk because its predictions are all coming true, so I feel that I've got a fair warning.

This is stuff directly from Deus Ex (1999). Repercussions for posting wrong memes are also mentioned in Deus Ex, and are also coming true. (The epidemic situation is not that dire as depicted there, though. At least not yet.)

Transparent walls - well, walls are transparent to many types of electromagnetic waves, which can be visualized:

https://www.sciencealert.com/wi-fi-signals-can-identify-you-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mit-device-can-detect...

>Of course it will be a securely guarded technology, so that it won't fall to hands of random strangers, malicious hackers, or burglars; only the law enforcement agencies would use it, and only for legitimate purposes! Honest.

Here lies the problem. You can't guarantee that. Law enforcement itself has criminals. In some countries law enforcement is even one of the largest collection of criminals. And then something like Trump happens. Do you really want to give such powers to people like Trump and it's followers, not to mention more malicious ones?

There is no way that this technology is only used for good.

And what comes on top, it doesn't stop crime, just it's modus operandi.

If they can't use their computer to handle certain data, they use hacked ones and hide it there. You know the trick how drug smugglers use the suitcases of tourists to smuggle their drugs?

Of course I would campaign for it to be accessible. It would be a complete revolution in archeology, architecture, engineering, maintenance, rescue and firefighting and geology should it also work on rocks.

Not sure I see the relation to Apple laying Fully Automated AI ThinkPol groundwork though.

I love the different angle you've taken!

Let's assume that it only works with thin walls, so it has limited archaeology use. Firefighting is a very fair point.

Would you, reader, trust the firefighters to not abuse such a power by mistake? Would you trust the chance of it being abused for the chance of being rescued during a serious fire? Not an easy question.

You can put checks and balances in place. Firefighters have vehicles with ladders, but they don't drive up to houses and break-and-enter. If it can be made obvious when they're using it, and there's independent oversight, I think the trade-off is definitely worth it.

I don't mind your downvotes, as long as you honestly think about the transparent wall proposition.

Didn’t downvote, but didn’t understand context of your comment given who you replied to. Maybe that’s why downvotes?

I think the context is suitable: the arguments for increasing efforts of law enforcement, because "think of the children", accompanied with promises that only the good guys will have the new technical means, and the law enforcement won't even make honest mistakes using it, to say nothing of ever abusing it.

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