At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room.
Across much of the globe, modern police forces have been empowered and emboldened to such a degree that many departments, and their members, feel institutionally above the law.
In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police.
Its frankly insulting to see, again and again, that people we (civilians) fund the salaries of, see us as beneath them - as evidenced by how we are held to the letter of ordinances and laws by them, while they break ordinances and laws with seemingly wanton abandon.
This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.
American police don’t feel institutionally above the law, for all intents and purposes they are. Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct. And the lengths the courts will go to protect cops are ridiculous, to the point where the courts have upheld the idea that a cop didn’t know that attacking a surrendering suspect in a “grassy ditch” was illegal, even though doing the same thing in a wooded area had precedent. And of course, since the cop was let off the hook, no new precedent was made.
And even when cops do finally cross the line, they just move towns or states and get a new job. Police unions have fought long and hard to avoid even the slightest forms of accountability; in most states being fired for cause isn’t enough to get your license pulled. This protection for bad cops comes at the cost of us all, both in terms of settlements paid by our money, and by unnecessary deaths inflicted on the poor and vulnerable by the state.
QI is horrifically racist. A group of black community members and pastors, I believe, were getting some coffee before boarding a Greyhound, and an officer "moved them on", so as to prevent (in his perception or claim) a dangerous situation from a group of people who were "upset" by this.
They refused, and despite no crime being committed (as was later shown in court, with a directed verdict of no violation), all fifteen of them were arrested.
They sued, claiming civil rights violations. Courts found 1) that there was indeed a lack of constitutionality in what happened, and 2) police were not required to "predict"(?) what laws were constitutional or not.
This rubs me the wrong way in a much less egregious way. I'm an avid photographer, and while my area isn't really focused in a problematic way, I've read many a story of photographers being prevented from photographing police, or in public, or similar.
We are expected to know what our constitutional rights are - remember, "ignorance is no excuse" when it comes to the law for us.
But, as above, multiple police chiefs have said, when addressing issues of such photographers being later released without charge, "We cannot expect our police to be constitutional lawyers".
^ This. Cops aren’t your friends. They can and will use anything you say against you, never for you, in a court of law.
I’m not saying we don’t need them. I’m saying they aren’t your friend. Never underestimate the ability of a cop to twist the truth. In court, a cop has the fullest faith of the courts even if they don’t show up. Defending yourself against what a cop says happened is almost impossible. It can be done though.
Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct.
Qualified immunity has nothing to do with criminal liability, it is a civil affirmative defense and a sound one. Essentially, it provides personal protection for ordinary negligence. When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from their paycheck. If we did, no one would work there.
> In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police.
That isn't really true. Have you read half the corporate policies published by large companies? Neither have most of their employees. Nobody cares and they're not enforced until Something Bad happens, at which point it's time to open the book for the first time to see which rule the designated scapegoat can be found to have broken.
The problem with the police is that the institutional Something Bad doesn't align with the actually bad things that happen when they break the rules. The institutional Something Bad is bad press.
The actual bad thing is sending an innocent person to prison while a guilty one stays free to continue committing robberies and murders. Or the same sort of "bring me the man, I'll find you the crime" except used by the police against dissidents and anti-authoritarians instead of the people presiding over some corporate incompetence.
But when that doesn't result in bad press, nobody gets punished and then it keeps happening.
This is why it's important to have a media willing to hold any administration's feet to the fire. Ironically, getting the election results many of the people who care about this wanted is having the opposite effect, as now the pressure is off to actually do anything about the problem.
Complaining about it when the other guy is in is rhetorically advantageous; actually doing something about it when you're in costs political capital. So now we get to see what they do. But based on the existing media rhetoric, the implication seems to be more police state rather than less.
Of course, the media is not just The Media, it's also this. So write your Congress critters.
1) The police can get away with stuff even when the public has clear video proof of wrong-doing. Usually that's enough to at least trigger the "sacrifice a scapegoat" process, but not here.
2) The police can get away with violating not only policy, but actual laws.
> This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.
Forget that! Police should be held to a “higher” standard. These are people we’ve trusted to walk around with guns and big sticks. Shit’s so backwards.
Governments will have to address the elephant in the room? Why on earth would they ever do that?! This system is working perfectly. They write the laws! The police (and army) are their force! That is what governments do!
Perhaps, they could write a law and apply it retrospectively do square things off tidily, but why bother?
But really, once you have total control over what is considered right or wrong, why would they change anything?
>At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room.
Crime?
If a community is suffering from a very high crime rate (and some American cities are amongst the most violent cities in the world) - why are we prioritizing one set of rights (right to privacy) over another (right to personal security, right to raise children in a safe environment)? In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.
And there is a class component to this. If you live in a nice safe (and affluent) neighborhood, I'm sure privacy is much more important to you because you don't have to worry about your children being hurt by or recruited into gangs on the way to school. You don't have to worry about getting mugged or assaulted walking to the store. If you live in a community with a high crime rate, are you sure you want to focus on privacy and rights of criminals?
>In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.
You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that empirical fact. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that infringing on our right to privacy makes use safer in any meaningful way - though I have seen evidence to indicate it, in fact, makes us less safe.
There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons. It's not a 2 way balance. America has chosen that access to weapons to commit crimes with is more important than personal safety or privacy, and no amount of giving up privacy will make up for prioritizing weapons
When it comes to distributed/local technologies, does a ban really accomplish anything? I'm dubious that facial recognition technology will disappear because some random governments passed laws against it. Especially because it's nearly impossible to punish when police can just use parallel construction. "We received an anonymous tip and followed it up."
Enforcement on these issues is trivial, given that the local authority actually desires to enforce the ban. Facial Recognition software is not free.
The basic steps to stop these issues are
1. (The local authority) mandates that all contracts with vendors indicate that they do not perform facial recognition services for the police
2. (The local authority's) lawyers sign off on vendor contracts ( already happens )
3. The auditors verify that no one is paying/expensing a facial recognition vendor.
Generally, working around your employers legal/audit mechanisms is grounds for termination. If the problem is data sharing with partner agencies... then the local authority needs a privacy law on criminal evidence that could be used for facial recognition.
You could require the software to have a warrant number entered in order to do FR. This means you need probable cause first and you need to be able to convince a judge it is warranted.
There are more types of consequences than just penal ones. For example, I imagine if they are indeed banned, and a case against a defendant is built around the usage of the technology, then that case would get dropped. That is a consequence in of itself as it wasted valuable prosecutorial resources, department resources, etc.
Do individuals care about wasted taxpayer’s resources? They’re getting paid to do their job, regardless of dropped case or not. The defendant spends their time and money and has to live a stressful life.
Money drives everything AFAIK. So if laws existed that allowed a state to withhold budget to a county that had cops not following rules, then the county would take interest. If the counties could withhold funding from cities that had bad cops, the mayors would take interest. Or perhaps the laws could permit budget reallocation. I doubt any such laws would ever get passed, but in theory this could help keep people focused.
Another challenge is sunk cost. San Diego for example has LED street lights that are also cameras and microphones, being used for machine learning. Would they ever rip those out if they were deemed illegal? Or would they just pause the collection and wait for people to forget? [1]
Police are largely protected from criminal prosecution because they know exactly how cruel and inhumane the criminal justice system is.
If they are indicted they often have special rules for how and when they will be arrested / interrogated through union contracts. A way to solve this is legislation at the local level that a) makes some of these specific unequal rules illegal, but also b) fixes the inhumane parts of the justice system for everyone.
Police in the US don't enforce the laws against other police or other powerful figures in governments, for the most part. This results in two different sets of laws, one that applies to police and government officials, and a much broader set that applies to you and I.
The idea that the law is applied equally is a total fiction.
I think the more practical consequence is to fine and place injunctions on the software providers. They have the most to lose for violating compliance.
We saw the same in London after the 2012 riots. Instead of stopping the rioting and looting the police let it go on and then took all the cctv and arrested the perpetrators after the event.
It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.
From Susan Landau's 2016 testimony[1] before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone:
>> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques."
>> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations."
>> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based."
Whenever law enforcement complains that they need tools that give them access to more data they never mention that they have access to far more data than any point in history. Yes, some types of data they have used in the past may be going dark, but they have gained an incredible breadth of new tools.
Unfortunately, learning new investigation techniques requires money, training, and effort. Shoveling as much data as possible onto the problem makes the actual investigation more difficult, but they do it anyway when it also acts de facto as another source of power. ~sigh~ This crap needs to be reigned in. Fast.
Riots are dangerous situations, I think they need to do both. Put in place a physical security presence to contain and limit the damage, and address he worst cases involving violence, but also consider that escalation may not be appropriate. In a riot it unlikely you're going to be able to quash it and clear it up completely, so you also need to make sure perpetrators don't get away without consequences.
In the 2012 riots did the police really have no street presence at all? That's not what I remember.
So instead we should increase the risk of death and injury instead of safely picking people up once things deescalate? I don't think that's lazy by any measure.
This. Lazy policing is everything that is wrong. Fire everyone and have a drone fly overhead that takes a picture a minute if you don't care about human privacy.
Funny enough, the capitol insurgents brought their own surveillance. Courtesy of FB and Twitter. Pretty sure all the video material streamed and posted by themselves would be more than enough in that case.
For the sake of our kids.. I have no idea how we will avoid a complete surveillance state in the future. Tracking devices in every pocket. And algorithms that can turn every camera into a tracking device.
We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption.
All we can do is try to make a society where that doesn’t matter.
IMO such a society is as anarchic as possible, though “as possible” is still well short of the level in, say, The Culture; the exact level is dynamic and tech-dependent.
> We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption.
I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible).
It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."
Not OP but I believe most of the surveillance derives from third parties. The government doesn't directly control or monitor most of the surveillance tools (google, telecoms, geoloc, &c.), or at least not in most advanced countries. But it's getting easier and easier for them to access these data and there will probably be less and less safeguards.
For example in France we're in a permanent "state of emergency" since the attacks in 2015 (and now with covid), which grants more rights to the government/police and let them bypass some legal safeguards for "the greater good" but of course it's already being abused, not against terrorists, but against protesters, people squatting land to protest against projects that would have a negative impact on the environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend), &c.
Not OP, but presumably advances in machine learning which will make it simpler to identify patterns and gleam useful, actionable information from the vast troves of data being collected.
Today, it is my impression that much data is only used to reconstruct events after the fact, rather than gaining a priori knowledge to prevent an incident in the first place.
(And, to make it clear - I am not suggesting 'progress' as outlined above is desirable...)
"What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state?"
Ratcheting up automation is what would make it different to me. While there are exceptions, for the most part, police look at all this data after they know about a crime.
They have most of what they need to use the info to discover crime and automatically cite people. As a simple example, ANPR in two places could issue a speeding ticket if the time elasped between two scans is low enough. I'm sure it's happening somewhere, maybe a toll road. The difference would be when it's widespread.
Compare surveillance in US and China. Both have a lot of it, but one has orders of magnitude more of it. Also China is more open about it. In US there's attempts to be sneaky about it, not so in China, though that's probably just the dictatorial aspect.
Yes, (Duh, wouldn't you?) I've said this before so I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Whether we like it or not ubiquitous surveillance is the new order of the day.
You cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. You can't enforce rules against using it without using it. We're stuck with what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy"[1].
The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)
Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?
I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain. If it would prevent a kid from getting kidnapped, or someone getting raped, or murdered, or even just getting hit by a hit-and-run driver, that I would agree to have my life JenniCam'd[2]. The fact is, it's already happening. E.g. your smart phone uploads your location data which is then sold off. Your smart TV sends pictures of the screen to the cloud. Your smart router listens to your conversations. Your smart electricity meter sends telemetry. Smart streetlights know where the cars are, smart cars know where the people are (a fleet of networked self-driving cars (auto-autos) is a ubiquitous surveillance system.) Etc.
Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry.
[1] "Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy ("Grundiocracy"? Ew.)
> Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry.
As a country, the United States has decided that the Bill of Rights was important enough to write down, even if some bad people get to go free.
As a country, the United States also decided that wiretapping is illegal except when permitted in a specific instance, with approval from a judge.
You may think it's okay, but our Founding Fathers and our predecessors decided that these things weren't okay, likely do to immediate dangers they had just been experiencing.
Arguably, the software and practices that Snowden exposedallow after-the-fact wiretapping, where everything was recorded, but not looked at prior to the fact. I argue that is against the spirit of the wiretapping laws, myself.
> The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)
It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.
> Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
No we can't, and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.
> Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?
To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.
It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.
> I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.
I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.
I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.
> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane
tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an
oxymoron, doesn't it?)
> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad
really fast when they have absolute power.
If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.
I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm
using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if
it tried it would be undermined by other governments.
In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in
their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that
technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but
it doesn't seem to have played out that way.
> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
> No we can't,
What would prevent it?
> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in
any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect
enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent
crimes.
I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or
repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?
Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it?
If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then
that should be written into the law.
For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or
illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?
> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even
with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous
surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams
on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.
Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and
I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from
it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that
day did not stem from insufficient information.
> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is
improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that
the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving
additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good
use of the capabilities that they already have.
That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology
(which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall
into some sort of dystopian system.
> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.
> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like
asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a
kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the
bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a
widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of
constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not
a good trade.
I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming
anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping?
That's the question.
I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago
about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the
authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a
few hours.
We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value
our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan
of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.
> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech
is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce
regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial
research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition
will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the
problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a
problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask
wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it
easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give
people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.
To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already
bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets
deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal
highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing
cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than
a problem!
That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap
and unevenly enforced.
What a horrible thing. I guarantee this will constantly find incorrect matches.
Just like follicle investigators of the past, if it's completely inaccurate who cares because you can just scare some 19-year-old into a plea bargain. People with money won't be affected, they'll have high price lawyers who will get this ' evidence' thrown out.
Police seem to do many things despite bans, or at least despite court rulings that tell them repeatedly not to. Photography of police is the one that comes to mind, and maybe even the Stingray.
Readit News
Across much of the globe, modern police forces have been empowered and emboldened to such a degree that many departments, and their members, feel institutionally above the law.
In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police.
Its frankly insulting to see, again and again, that people we (civilians) fund the salaries of, see us as beneath them - as evidenced by how we are held to the letter of ordinances and laws by them, while they break ordinances and laws with seemingly wanton abandon.
This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.
And even when cops do finally cross the line, they just move towns or states and get a new job. Police unions have fought long and hard to avoid even the slightest forms of accountability; in most states being fired for cause isn’t enough to get your license pulled. This protection for bad cops comes at the cost of us all, both in terms of settlements paid by our money, and by unnecessary deaths inflicted on the poor and vulnerable by the state.
They refused, and despite no crime being committed (as was later shown in court, with a directed verdict of no violation), all fifteen of them were arrested.
They sued, claiming civil rights violations. Courts found 1) that there was indeed a lack of constitutionality in what happened, and 2) police were not required to "predict"(?) what laws were constitutional or not.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray
This rubs me the wrong way in a much less egregious way. I'm an avid photographer, and while my area isn't really focused in a problematic way, I've read many a story of photographers being prevented from photographing police, or in public, or similar.
We are expected to know what our constitutional rights are - remember, "ignorance is no excuse" when it comes to the law for us.
But, as above, multiple police chiefs have said, when addressing issues of such photographers being later released without charge, "We cannot expect our police to be constitutional lawyers".
This is an issue to the extent that things like this are created: http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
I’m not saying we don’t need them. I’m saying they aren’t your friend. Never underestimate the ability of a cop to twist the truth. In court, a cop has the fullest faith of the courts even if they don’t show up. Defending yourself against what a cop says happened is almost impossible. It can be done though.
And even though our collective awareness about this issue is increasing, this just happened yesterday:
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961692068/officer-who-quit-wi...
Qualified immunity has nothing to do with criminal liability, it is a civil affirmative defense and a sound one. Essentially, it provides personal protection for ordinary negligence. When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from their paycheck. If we did, no one would work there.
That isn't really true. Have you read half the corporate policies published by large companies? Neither have most of their employees. Nobody cares and they're not enforced until Something Bad happens, at which point it's time to open the book for the first time to see which rule the designated scapegoat can be found to have broken.
The problem with the police is that the institutional Something Bad doesn't align with the actually bad things that happen when they break the rules. The institutional Something Bad is bad press.
The actual bad thing is sending an innocent person to prison while a guilty one stays free to continue committing robberies and murders. Or the same sort of "bring me the man, I'll find you the crime" except used by the police against dissidents and anti-authoritarians instead of the people presiding over some corporate incompetence.
But when that doesn't result in bad press, nobody gets punished and then it keeps happening.
This is why it's important to have a media willing to hold any administration's feet to the fire. Ironically, getting the election results many of the people who care about this wanted is having the opposite effect, as now the pressure is off to actually do anything about the problem.
Complaining about it when the other guy is in is rhetorically advantageous; actually doing something about it when you're in costs political capital. So now we get to see what they do. But based on the existing media rhetoric, the implication seems to be more police state rather than less.
Of course, the media is not just The Media, it's also this. So write your Congress critters.
1) The police can get away with stuff even when the public has clear video proof of wrong-doing. Usually that's enough to at least trigger the "sacrifice a scapegoat" process, but not here.
2) The police can get away with violating not only policy, but actual laws.
That's not my experience. I'm not claiming that it is never true just that as far as I can tell, in the UK and Norway, it is mostly not.
Forget that! Police should be held to a “higher” standard. These are people we’ve trusted to walk around with guns and big sticks. Shit’s so backwards.
I just want to remind everyone that police are civilians too. I also sometimes forget
– a person who is not a member of the police or the armed forces
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/civil...
– one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civilian
– a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/civilian
I’m a little curious, why should they be considered civilians?
2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
Governments will have to address the elephant in the room? Why on earth would they ever do that?! This system is working perfectly. They write the laws! The police (and army) are their force! That is what governments do!
Perhaps, they could write a law and apply it retrospectively do square things off tidily, but why bother?
But really, once you have total control over what is considered right or wrong, why would they change anything?
You should take a listen to the Quash - a legal insider to gain a better understanding of how things work: https://the-quash.captivate.fm/episode/politicians-lie-its-t...
And the busses of people in mexico.
Crime?
If a community is suffering from a very high crime rate (and some American cities are amongst the most violent cities in the world) - why are we prioritizing one set of rights (right to privacy) over another (right to personal security, right to raise children in a safe environment)? In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.
And there is a class component to this. If you live in a nice safe (and affluent) neighborhood, I'm sure privacy is much more important to you because you don't have to worry about your children being hurt by or recruited into gangs on the way to school. You don't have to worry about getting mugged or assaulted walking to the store. If you live in a community with a high crime rate, are you sure you want to focus on privacy and rights of criminals?
You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that empirical fact. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that infringing on our right to privacy makes use safer in any meaningful way - though I have seen evidence to indicate it, in fact, makes us less safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
The solution instead might be the same with deepfakes: fill everything with junk data.
The basic steps to stop these issues are
1. (The local authority) mandates that all contracts with vendors indicate that they do not perform facial recognition services for the police 2. (The local authority's) lawyers sign off on vendor contracts ( already happens ) 3. The auditors verify that no one is paying/expensing a facial recognition vendor.
Generally, working around your employers legal/audit mechanisms is grounds for termination. If the problem is data sharing with partner agencies... then the local authority needs a privacy law on criminal evidence that could be used for facial recognition.
Open source versions will be here before long.
In those situations, the prosecution may succeed, which actually adds incentive to conduct the illegal investigations.
Police leaders should go to prison if they willfully violate the law.
Another challenge is sunk cost. San Diego for example has LED street lights that are also cameras and microphones, being used for machine learning. Would they ever rip those out if they were deemed illegal? Or would they just pause the collection and wait for people to forget? [1]
[1] - https://www.govtech.com/smart-cities/Smart-Streetlight-Data-...
If they are indicted they often have special rules for how and when they will be arrested / interrogated through union contracts. A way to solve this is legislation at the local level that a) makes some of these specific unequal rules illegal, but also b) fixes the inhumane parts of the justice system for everyone.
The idea that the law is applied equally is a total fiction.
And those who should be opposing it most passionately will be applauding it’s use, because they started with ‘the bad guys’.
It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.
From Susan Landau's 2016 testimony[1] before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone:
>> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques."
>> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations."
>> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based."
Whenever law enforcement complains that they need tools that give them access to more data they never mention that they have access to far more data than any point in history. Yes, some types of data they have used in the past may be going dark, but they have gained an incredible breadth of new tools.
Unfortunately, learning new investigation techniques requires money, training, and effort. Shoveling as much data as possible onto the problem makes the actual investigation more difficult, but they do it anyway when it also acts de facto as another source of power. ~sigh~ This crap needs to be reigned in. Fast.
[1] (pdf) https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG...
In the 2012 riots did the police really have no street presence at all? That's not what I remember.
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All we can do is try to make a society where that doesn’t matter.
IMO such a society is as anarchic as possible, though “as possible” is still well short of the level in, say, The Culture; the exact level is dynamic and tech-dependent.
I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible).
It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."
For example in France we're in a permanent "state of emergency" since the attacks in 2015 (and now with covid), which grants more rights to the government/police and let them bypass some legal safeguards for "the greater good" but of course it's already being abused, not against terrorists, but against protesters, people squatting land to protest against projects that would have a negative impact on the environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend), &c.
Today, it is my impression that much data is only used to reconstruct events after the fact, rather than gaining a priori knowledge to prevent an incident in the first place.
(And, to make it clear - I am not suggesting 'progress' as outlined above is desirable...)
Ratcheting up automation is what would make it different to me. While there are exceptions, for the most part, police look at all this data after they know about a crime.
They have most of what they need to use the info to discover crime and automatically cite people. As a simple example, ANPR in two places could issue a speeding ticket if the time elasped between two scans is low enough. I'm sure it's happening somewhere, maybe a toll road. The difference would be when it's widespread.
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The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)
Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?
I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain. If it would prevent a kid from getting kidnapped, or someone getting raped, or murdered, or even just getting hit by a hit-and-run driver, that I would agree to have my life JenniCam'd[2]. The fact is, it's already happening. E.g. your smart phone uploads your location data which is then sold off. Your smart TV sends pictures of the screen to the cloud. Your smart router listens to your conversations. Your smart electricity meter sends telemetry. Smart streetlights know where the cars are, smart cars know where the people are (a fleet of networked self-driving cars (auto-autos) is a ubiquitous surveillance system.) Etc.
Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry.
[1] "Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy ("Grundiocracy"? Ew.)
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream)
As a country, the United States has decided that the Bill of Rights was important enough to write down, even if some bad people get to go free.
As a country, the United States also decided that wiretapping is illegal except when permitted in a specific instance, with approval from a judge.
You may think it's okay, but our Founding Fathers and our predecessors decided that these things weren't okay, likely do to immediate dangers they had just been experiencing.
Arguably, the software and practices that Snowden exposedallow after-the-fact wiretapping, where everything was recorded, but not looked at prior to the fact. I argue that is against the spirit of the wiretapping laws, myself.
It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.
> Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
No we can't, and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.
> Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?
To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.
It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.
> I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.
I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.
I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.
> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.
If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.
I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if it tried it would be undermined by other governments.
In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but it doesn't seem to have played out that way.
> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
> No we can't,
What would prevent it?
> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.
I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?
Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it? If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then that should be written into the law.
For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?
> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.
Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that day did not stem from insufficient information.
> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.
That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology (which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall into some sort of dystopian system.
> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.
> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.
I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping? That's the question.
I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a few hours.
We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.
> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.
To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!
That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap and unevenly enforced.
Just like follicle investigators of the past, if it's completely inaccurate who cares because you can just scare some 19-year-old into a plea bargain. People with money won't be affected, they'll have high price lawyers who will get this ' evidence' thrown out.