Milwaukee police considering trading mugshots for facial recognition tech

There was a whole cottage industry that sprang up where people were selling these like..tabloid periodicals that just had people's mugshots in them. No guilty verdict or anything.

So people would be at the gas station or convenient store and there's a stack of free mugshot tabloids. It was wild. Once or twice a year I'd get texts from friends, "hey did you see that so and so got their mugshot taken!?"

Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider.

Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.

Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"

If you want to talk about total surveillance, I'd worry more about something like Flock where they're actually deploying cameras on a massive scale.