Snowden even blew the lid off of it, and nothing changed. That's how you know it's permanent.
And that might turn this technology into something that only big company can afford, artificially created a pro-monopoly environment.
The problem is complex.
If the bureaucratic obstacles for using a technology are so high that only very well funded companies can overcome them, then those companies effectively form a cartel with the state in the use and abuse of those technologies.
If citizens had stronger protections against the application of the third-party doctrine in the US, we might have less to fear. Currently though, the greatest oppressor of personal freedoms through technology is the United States Government. They can and will use "guidelines and potential liabilities" to weaponize new technology while making it next to impossible to counter the threat.
This is not a market problem at all, I don't see why you'd use market-brain constructs like monopoly to engage with it.
One provider or thousands, the problem is the social dynamics and the power structures, not a product-consumer relationship.
That's not the argument I took away from that. Poster includes a summation, "it's complex" and is noting that simply adding regulation that only increases costs of compliance may just enable the formation of a tent seeking monopoly and does not necessarily result in a better outcome for citizens. The poster could advocate for a ban (or not advocate for anything) rather than deregulation as implied.
The laws can be as strict as you like, but its like introducing a law saying you cant watch nude cartoons at home. Even if you somehow eliminated all the existing ones, its just a pen and paper away.
There are plenty of things that are easy to do but have strict legal frameworks around them. Quick examples include copyright laws, use of force/violence and driving rules.
That's how you end up with the NSA and CIA being inside every single camera in the country :)
If the camera itself is not bugged, it likely is harvested at another step at some point and nothing's more clear that if NSA wants to see what a camera sees, they are able to tap it if needed. Sure, untapped cameras exist, but it doesn't really make a practical difference. The NSA will still have your information if it wants, and likely already has most of it.
It's likely that for your security camera footage to be accessed you would have to be targeted. It's likely that such targeting would only affect footage in the future or very recent past. But I'd grant that pervasive attackers can probably capture exponentially-decaying single video frames from millions of cameras if they were appropriately motivated, and those single frames could go back quite far.
The real problem here is the existence of such a system creates a kind of panopticon [0], with chilling effects not only on activity and discussion contrarian to the current administration, but also any future administration that may have access to electronic surveillance records. Without knowing how long records are kept, it is quite plausible that a future authoritarian state will misuse past records to target civilians.
Actually, as another commenter mentioned, they probably already are doing it. It would be stupid to think otherwise.
> The people of America seem to be fine with it.
The people don't care that they're being watched. That's the main lesson I took from the snowden leaks. I think most people might even like it because they think it means there will be less crime.
The NSA's warrantless surveillance program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...) and the CIA's Operation CHAOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS) are two examples of this behavior.
They won't get it. Trust me.
What you propose would require massive changes to essentially any camera that has any part of its view covering an outdoor area, and probably many indoor areas (malls, etc.).
Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much. You'd need to implement something like an HDMI-style encryption to control what devices/processors/whatever can connect to a live video stream from a camera to try and control exactly how the streams are processed.
Spitballing. Enforcement: make distribution of CCTV video undisclosed via court order criminal offense.
> Also, that is totally counter to the current (US) laws that basically state you can record video (not audio) of any publicly viewable areas freely.
This is irrelevant, because scale changes nature of things. Single photo of your person is just that. 24 photos per second for every second of your life is a total surveillance. Law was clearly about recording usage that does not amount to surveillance.
> Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much.
Encrypt the stream on the camera itself. Storage is cheap.
The same way gun ownership laws have curbed the illegal gun ownership/use problem? Or, do we just keep stacking laws endlessly hoping one of them actually works?
>24 photos per second for every second of your life is a total surveillance.
Sure but we're nowhere near that point, or likely to be at that point. Also, almost nothing records at 24fps, 15fps is more common.
>Encrypt the stream on the camera itself. Storage is cheap.
In most cases and camera and recording/viewing software come from different companies, so you'd still need some kind of key management system.
There are legit arguments to be had about personal freedom here, but it’s plainly untrue regulation intrinsically can’t work. It works for many, many things - and works for gun ownership in basically every other developed nation in the world.
Anywho, sounds like we're jumping through hoops without really understanding the requirements. Like, what is really bad about recording people in public? What is really bad about performing facial recognition?
But I'd go a step further, what is it that we're trying to prevent from happening by making facial recognition illegal? This is the juicy part and the one where the "problem" becomes wishy-washy. We get reasons like: "Prevent stalking by government officials", or "stop widespread surveillance from...[something]". All present their own challenges and implied slippery-slopes, but all have different ways of being solved without necessarily making public recording and facial recognition blanketly illegal.
But here is the interesting bit: I can’t set up a fixed camera to record a public space without permission. And I won’t get that permission. Meaning basically that recording in public spaces is only done by humans, limiting the scope of how widespread it can be. I like this.
It also means, that it’s not allowed to put up a camera on my porch that covers the street in front of my house. I suspect a lot of ring/nest users are in violation.
That’s almost impossible to get permission for. A private citizen can not get permission to film a Street corner. The difficulty in getting permission obviously isn’t written in the legal text, but individuals don’t get permission and businesses only very rarely do.
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-f...
Seriously, this means every home outdoor security camera is potentially illegal. This can’t be true.
Does everyone do that? Probably not. But that doesn’t change how the law is written.
Really, facial recognition just isn't getting weighed properly judicially.
Instead, we should take the opposite approach: Invest heavily in this tech, and lightly-regulate glaringly bad aspects of it. E.g. For facial recognition, we can put down laws that punish unfair punishment of suspects. Or if we find employers that misappropriate facial recognition developed to record hours worked on the factory floor to punish them for chatting or going to the bathroom too many times, and we don't like that, then we regulate that.
We really went down the wrong path here somewhere, applying a black and white approach to things instead of just riding the in-between strategically and fairly. That's how we move forward as a society instead of legislating ourselves into irrelevance.
If facial recognition is perceived as low accuracy, but can yield some leads for investigators that can be independently corroborated, that seems like a fine use of the technology. If we're worried about the public assuming it's more accurate than it is if used as evidence in trials, we can either pass some laws about its use as trial evidence (which is not the same as using it as a lead), or train defense attorneys and the public (often done through TV...) that it's use in the role of proving guilt is extremely limited because of it's false positive rate.