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Comment by toomuchcoffee | Hacker News Reader

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."

1984, Book 1, Chapter V

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I wonder if one could get away with vandalizing cameras as protected speech. I would certainly start wearing makeup: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20003431-1.html

I'm already intending to do this with traffic cameras. Freedom-sniping, I'll call it.

http://wtop.com/64/3025740/Speed-cam-shooter-Dont-do-what-I-...

A bit more concrete information on how to defeat facial recognition:

http://cvdazzle.com/

I know this is a shot in the dark, as you linked the site, so I don't know how in depth you may have dived into the issue:

> Partially obscure the nose-bridge are: The region where the nose, eyes, and forehead intersect is a key facial feature.

Wouldn't a big pair of aviators, or any sunglasses, pretty much take care of this?

This is explicitly discussed on the linked page.

When I read this article a few months ago, I wondered if protesters should just start wearing hats: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/04/152011840/who-k...

Let me put on my tin foil hat.

Vandalising cameras is not (IMO) a valid response.

These cameras are put up with the intention of protecting life / liberty / property. Perfectly valid and laudable aims in a democracy.

The problem is that the uses of the systems can become subverted and spiral downwards, through lack of controls and oversight.

As an example imagine cameras and software to identify sudden violent actions in a street, flag the incident for review, follow all the involved people as they walk down different streets switching cameras intelligently.

That seems a good thing.

Bad thing: not knowing you were being monitored last night and upon review nothing violent actually happened.

Badder thing: not knowing you are being monitored as part of a skin-color recognition innovation.

Badderer things: oh lots, but all about technologies being used outside of strict, "just cause" reasons.

I don't see how your first sentence is supported by the rest.

The existence of the cameras is not the problem. It's how we use the output of them. Vandalising cameras without putting in place (legislative) checks around the use of surveillance devices is short sighted Luddism - so not a valid response

That's like saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." even though death by speeding bullet is more prevalent where guns are legal. Guns and cameras should be used only where a credible strategical benefit exists. Right now, they're often part of a scare tactic and thus oppresses the people confronted by them. One has to ask whether their output is relevant at all before questioning the usage of said output.

So I think you are suggesting imposing a ban on cameras like here in UK bans guns. That is one approach and maybe effective however I feel that there are public good to be derived from surveillance tech, that if the govt has cameras to enable those benefits we still need to manage that and the difficulties of enforcing such a ban for civilian usesuggest to me that mitigating the existence of cameras through open access is simplest approach

I wasn't even suggesting guns should be banned everywhere (although they should), let alone cameras. Open access doesn't mitigate the problem, it'd merely replaces one problem with another. Similarly, publicising requests for footage could be detrimental to law enforcement agencies who are trying to help protect fellow citizens.

Since crime will always exist and criminals will always one-up law enforcement, it's in our best interests to always use the least possible countermeasures. Time will tell when we've reached 1984, society seems to drift closer and closer — albeit, ever so slowly.

I read that book in high school too.

It's relevant.

Yup, because this time it is facial recognition technology. What if it is mind-reading technology in 20 years time? If you don't draw the line in cement instead of sand at some point such as now with facial recognition technology, it will be redrawn over and over and over again.

Given that several the hacker community here familiar with dystopian future literature accepts this as inevitable in many comments, suggests that a slippery slope argument is not in the least bit far fetched.

If here there are people are accepting, then in other areas of society there are people actively arguing in favor of using facial recognition technology everywhere. Those same people will probably be arguing for equivalent of telescreens once something akin to them are invented.

There exist algorithms for estimating emotion from facial video. The accuracy is kind of hit or miss, but it's enough for "he's experiencing anxiety during the security search, he must be a terrorist."

Or as they say in Eurasia, "behaving abnormally":

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464298

Once you can download an isotope separator or a plague kit, privacy concerns become moot. The societies not running under total AI supervision will simply go extinct. So the question is what kind of supervised society do you want?

  Isotope seperator - plague kit

I assume this is downloading nuclear bombs or viruses? And that means that we need AI to monitor us constantly in case some idiot kills everyone?

Yes. If your household fabricator can make arbitrary machinery, you can say "Make me a uranium-235 enricher."

Any sci-fi book recommendations where I can read about this sort of thing?

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