Someone make a convincing case that I should be concerned about this.
But that's the problem. Each incremental step towards more surveillance, less privacy, and more potential for government abuse is perfectly justifiable and seems reasonable.
But then temporary turns to permanent. And the "significant events" restriction gets dropped. And 450 cameras from local businesses turn into thousands from others, or Rings, or Teslas, or whatever.
And then manual monitoring by humans turns into AI-powered monitoring. And the looking at cameras gets combined with location data.
The point is, each step is reasonable. But who knows where it goes? We have no idea, nor do we have any idea who will be on the other side watching or what their agenda will be in 5 years, 20 years, or 100 years.
So it's important to stay vigilant of any incremental privacy incursion or expansion of government power. It doesn't mean saying No necessarily, but being aware and cautious.
The "convincing case" is China's "social credit" system and the numerous abuses of subpoenas for dragnet surveillance in the US. In Germany, back from the IP address collection debate over a decade ago, we have the saying "Wo ein Trog ist kommen die Schweine" [3] - where there's a feeding trough, pigs will come on their own.
[1] https://taz.de/Ueberwachung-auf-Demonstrationen/!5167172/
[2] https://www.juraforum.de/news/ovg-muenster-fordert-waehrend-...
[3] https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2009-12/vds-bverfg-k...
No one ever seems to have information about non-hypotheticals and I'm tired of slippery slope hysteria.
For one, you're falling towards the "preparedness paradoxon".
But much worse: Yes, we absolutely have examples in the real world just how fucked up surveillance can get. The GDR's Stasi for example tracked people, just using people instead of technology, to an insane degree. Erich Mielke would openly drool in his grave if he knew just how powerful technology has become. In recent times, look at China and their "social credit" score.
Don't believe for a single second the US is unable to sink that low. Even decades-old stuff believed to be safe can be struck down with the stroke of a pen of the Supreme Court. Get your expectations codified in a constitutional amendment, or be prepared to literally have to fight for your expectations. Abortion was just the beginning.
Isn't one of the reasons why you Americans don't mandate the possession of a valid passport or ID card to avoid the creation of such a database? Or why the ATF is forced to operate on paper card records to prevent the government from having a readily usable database to identify gun owners?
Besides, look up the No Fly list. Have the same name as a terrorist? You're not getting on that flight and it's barely possible to get removed from the list.
> ...why you Americans don't mandate the possession...
Sounds like you haven't tried to buy a beer in America. Let alone vote. Last time I volunteered for a local food bank (doing bottom-end manual labor), I was told to bring picture ID. I've only been volunteering for them about 25 years now.
The No Fly list is a far better argument against security theater and endless bungling at scale than it is an argument against creepy government. If the U.S. was preparing and serving chicken salad sandwiches as widely and incompetently as they're doing the No Fly list, then Food Poisoning would be the #1 cause of death in the U.S.
I'm German. Unlike you in the US, we have museums dedicated to the horrors of the NS regime as well as the Stasi and general GDR dictatorship around the country. I can recommend you a visit if you get the chance to visit Germany - there is no argument as convincing as actually seeing eyewitness accounts and evidence of how depraved humans can get.
We've had this tech for a while now, so where are the examples of it being systematically abused by the government?
The rest doesn't seem to have much to do with technology, more to do with Florida politics.
Something that happened in Germany in the 80s is not exactly a time long ago in a galaxy far away...
This is why Jefferson wanted sunset dates on everything, so every group would have to fully come to grips with why things are the way they are instead of going with Madison's view of a state of affairs where "deference to the dead" was the norm and an eventual State where all the laws in existence were handed down or made on the basis of the lives of people who are long dead.
Governments should serve the living. Not the dead. Governing is hard. Anyone who jumps into it thinking otherwise is a fool.
Here’s why it counts for me. It’s not scary new tech, but it is a case that shows that police departments will be as aggressive as possible about collecting data.
This isn’t “cops are bad.” Most of us would do the same thing, as evidenced by the endless thirst for data that most tech companies have. When there’s a way to learn more about something, humans tend to lean into it rather than worrying about inchoate potential misuse.
Everyone seems to be offering, "Think of how bad it could be," but most of their examples center on right wing politics rather than technology.
My feeling is that once you start compiling this data in a formal way, you’ve taken a significant step towards the dystopian events you’re describing. I agree that the ability to do a thing is not the same as the thing happening. However, exactly as I try and remove the ability to make manual mistakes from my deployment pipelines, I also think it’s good to restrict the ability to impose dystopian rules.
But that is a really big topic and I am not expecting you to say “oh yeah you’re right” just because I made a dubious analogy. I appreciate that you took the time to clarify.
> Not really, if you get into the story it's much less about abusing technology, and much more about abusing FISA courts.
It's about law enforcement having easy access to information that they're not supposed to use unless they have good reason to, and them using the information even when they don't have good reason to.
> I also think that said courts releasing a public reprimand for that behavior is precisely the sort of accountability and transparency you don't get it in authoritarian regimes.
True, though I would have preferred denying those requests in the first place.
> The system isn't working perfectly by any means, but it isn't some techno-fascist hellscape.
Yet.
You seem to be attacking the thesis "these tools can only lead us to techno-fascism". But how about the converse thesis: "When fascism shows up, it will inevitably use these tools. And therefore we should be cautious about building these tools, and allowing the authorities to use them."
> You could remove the technology from the story entirely and it would be the same.
Without the technology, the data would not be (ab)used on anything like the same scale.
Look, I'm not entirely opposed to law enforcement having information available when they need it. But we keep expecting them to only use it when they have legally-recognized good reason, and they keep going well beyond that. We should know by now that there will be too many people in law enforcement who will attempt to abuse the process and subvert the limitations, and we should start thinking seriously about how to prevent that.
Whether "we can't prevent that (well enough)" is grounds for not building the tools at all is a different question, one we are not forced to answer quite yet. We should at least start at "how can we make these (much) harder to abuse".
Police abuses against dissidents and disinherited is widespread and well documented if you're not actively trying not to discover it. It's not other people's responsibility to do this work for you especially once you've gone out of your way to frame the very idea as "emotive nonsense."
Why even have any constraints on law enforcement if they’re so trustworthy? Just let them do anything to catch criminals and trust they don’t take it too far. There are rules for a reason here, it’s to preserve ideals that society holds as a group.
This sort of rhetoric is absolutely poisonous and supremely counterproductive to any social movement. No cause is too righteous to require participation in the political process. If there is an issue in society that you want corrected, it's on you to persuade others to support your cause. The status quo is innocent until proven guilty, the burden of proof rests on the prsopective reformer. That's how democracy has always worked!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36041059
I'm pretty sure since you made your way to Hacker New you can also Google the relevant information you are asking other who came to a random article to somehow have already compiled for you.