Apparently you don't know many police officers. This, in fact, was inevitable, following specifically from the circumstance that many police officers are also reserve soldiers and spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan using those tools. I'd estimate the vast majority of law enforcement organizations in the US have personnel that are also in the reserves or guard. I deployed with many police officers, and heard many of those police officers talk specifically about getting a hold of these biometrics tools for use in law enforcement back home.
You're right that not everyone shares my somewhat unique perspective, and so to those who have no relationship with police officers and are therefore ignorant of the facts, it may seem fallacious. And also it's fun to make those quippy accusations, so I understand the impulse.
Personally, I kinda of tired of veterans thinking they would be great cops when their tour ends! I was told by a Cop friend that what matters is still how well you do on the written, physical tests, and the Psy. Evaluation. They do like some college, and civilian experience. Military experience is not seeked out like it was in the past.
Being a soldier and being a Cop are take different skill sets. I don't want to get into all the differances, and I don't want to argue with anyone, but I'll take a shy security guard, over a "gung ho" guy who wants to see some action? Our streets are not the streets of Iraq, or Afganistan.
I have the highest regard for any ex-military. I think you guys/ladies should get first shot at any federal job--including jobs that involve public safety.
I think most of you know by now that being veterans doesn't mean much to most civilian police departments in the hiring process. It should because you served your country, and need a job when you get home. Most of you are intelligent enough to realize civilian police departments should not be run like
military operations. I do cringe when I hear, usually ex-marines talk/think they will be shoe-ins when they get home and apply to the academy. (I hope you guys don't take this wrong way, but I think most you know what I'm getting at?).
Meaning--war is vastly different than basically revenue collection, and dealing with the public! Yes--most departments are still training officers in a military fashion, but that's been changing. Hopefully, it will change quicker? The more progressive departments are changing training procedures as I write this, at least that's what I heard. One of the biggest reasons, I was told was the proliferation of lawsuits that are being levied against aggressive, illegial police tactics, and cameras are Everywhere. The days of coverups/"Blue code of Honor" are over, for the most part. My friend said they are over. I haven't seen much of a change yet.
No, your perspective is absolutely the right one: It is critically imperative that we separate warzones from domestic law enforcement in every way possible. I personally believe that combat vets should not be allowed to serve as police officers. Security guards? Sure. Bodyguards? Sure. Law enforcement? No. That's my personal opinion, because it should not be normal to flashbang a building, kick the door in, and rush inside with weapons drawn. But that's how American police departments are beginning to serve warrants for traffic violations. And it doesn't end there, but in particular that distinction is incredibly important. You hit the nail on the head and I could not possibly agree with you more.
Agreed! This is a perfect example of people arguing "slippery slope!!" when the tech first came out and getting shouted down repeatedly. Now they're being vindicated, as it's absolutely happening exactly as predicted.
My point is that the slippery slope argument is often used and no matter how many times people say it's invalid or unlikely, is often right.
I completely misinterpreted your comment. I read your comment as saying that I was guilty of the fallacy. You're right, though, it seems people are quick to make this kind of argument about this issue, as though we're supposed to believe that our police forces aren't being militarized.
Your perspective is not very unique, there are a lot of veterans due to high churn. It is my experience that there is very little crossover between the military and police. Of the hundred-something guys in my last company, only two went on to law enforcement. A few years ago I had a nonmilitary friend go through one of the country's top police academies, and his stories aligned with my experiences - there weren't a lot of veterans in his class. The local PD has 120 officers, of that only two are veterans (neither of them were combat arms). I have my theories about why this is, but that is another discussion.
So the whole narrative, where police militarization is due to veteran hires, rings pretty hollow for me. What we are seeing here is the result of an end-justifies-the-means mentality. The military has the same mentality, but this is very deliberately tempered by a focus on honor and duty - something that law enforcement lacks by comparison.
That's interesting. What was your MOS? In the infantry, we had a much higher ratio of police officers, and I was in a few different units which had higher ratios than yours. In my last company alone we had -- roughly estimating here -- fifteen or twenty law enforcement officers of various kinds.
0331, infantry machine gunner. We saw a lot of combat in Fallujah, which might have taken the starch out of most. There is also the timing to consider, 01 to 05 were interesting years for the military - a very large injection of middle and upper middle class folks.
Maybe there are more police officers are in the Army than the Marines. It is definitely a significant demographic in line units in the Army guard and reserves. FWIW we had the opposite happen: When I joined in 2000, there were a lot of college kids and middleupper-middle class people. After the wars started, it was basically people coming off of active duty to serve the rest of their 8 years (four active, four guard/reserve), poor people that couldn't afford college otherwise (myself included) and law enforcement. There was an enormous shift, and a kind of unspoken understanding before Iraq that anybody that didn't want to be in combat needed to get out. And so they found ways -- like PT tests and paperwork (and I suppose drug tests and DUIs) -- to get out.
I knew that the cultures were different, but I never would have guessed that the Army had post-9/11 recruit quality problems - especially for combat arms. When the fourth 9/11 anniversary rolled around the USMC leadership was sweating bullets and pulling out all the stops for retention, because the enlisted pool was the best it had been in living memory.
Everybody knows that bootcamp is designed to provide a common experience and rebuild recruits, standardizing to the military's brand of discipline and morality - like interchangeable-parts from the industrial revolution. I've wondered what distance that influence would cover in one's life, because so far it is still holding up in interesting ways. I've talked to guys I hadn't heard from in ten years, and despite differences in profession and family situation, a pretty strong pattern has emerged in uncommon political/philosophical thought.
So maybe the influence is much more local. Maybe some soldiers become cops because their drill instructors withheld affection :)
Heh, "withheld affection"... I'm going to use that.
I should say there wasn't so much a problem with recruit quality, as the people I mentioned were just as good at soldiering as the others, but it was certainly different. Most of the men in my family were in the Marine Corps at some point, and I worked with Marines on my second and fourth tours, so I have a little bit of insight into what you mean about the culture difference. Also I should say I always enjoyed working with Marines.
And with respect to your other point, I think military service is so valuable for individuals that I strongly support conscription. I believe only good things could come of requiring every person to go serve in the military (or Peace Corps or something) for two years when they turn 18. If we did that, I think the problems we're facing as a nation would see some positive change within a single generation, and I'm confident enough in that statement that I am sure you feel the same way. For all the things I hated about the Army, the physical and psychological tools they equipped me with have helped enrich my life in so many ways. Every time I think about my feelings about this, I picture that scene from Starship Troopers when the guy wheels his chair out from the desk and he's missing a leg and has a prosthetic arm, but he shakes Johnny's hand and says "Good for you. The infantry made me the man I am today"[0] and that's how I personally feel about it. I mean, I have all my fingers and toes, but I feel like that guy. Including the tragedy, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
The antics and over-the-top bravado, reaching levels of self parody, is an acquired taste - the family connection must have provided a measure of inoculation. There is a reason why they always put the infantry barracks in the furthest corner of the base, next to the grenade range - because even Marines get tired of the self promotion. I spent several months instructing in a joint service training program at Quantico, and honestly the Army personnel bugged the hell out of me because it was so hard to get a rise out of them :) The Army's leadership in program management and standards development was always impressive, the transition to COTS procurement in the 90s is a real bummer when you look at all the interesting stuff the military was doing: Ada, IDEF1X, etc.
As far as conscription, I think that would be close to the worst thing ever. From a utilitarian perspective: it would be incredibly expensive and would reduce force readiness. From a moral perspective: it is pretty hard to logically justify the threats of violence organic to such an endeavor - threats against the intended benefactors, civilians. I might have agreed with you 10 years ago, if the infantry remained all volunteer under such a program, but the utilitarian arguments no longer appeal to me. I wish I could put my finger on exactly what bit of information flipped the switch in my brain and made me an anarchist, but it was a pretty long process. It probably occurred around the time that I was spending a lot of time studying first order logic and cybernetics (As you can see, I'm a big fan of technology once popular in the 70's). Applying lessons from those fields, related to scaling working systems, to social systems - leads to the idea that a social system founded on an immoral precept will never be able to compete against a system founded otherwise. The test is pretty easy, if a rule has an exception then the problem to which the rule applies was not well defined and this leads to serious scaling issues. I could go on for hours, but I don't think anybody really wants that.
Regrets. I don't have any, aside from not taking math more seriously as a kid. I am rational and self interested, the product of my experiences - so if I had it all to do over again, I would. But, if there was a button I could press that would magically bring a few former Fallujah residents back to life - I would press it.
BTW, the Starship Troopers reference is interesting because the author, Heinlein, has a Naval Academy grad who used the book as a platform to describe his preferred philosophy of governance. Ayn Rand did the exact same thing with Atlas Shrugged. Both are good reads, but I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that I lean more towards Rand's objectivism.
Well, I can't say I'm surprised to hear what you've said in your last sentence. It seems most people in the military and veterans adopt this mindset. I really don't like labels, and I've always been kinda strange, and likewise have some very "strange" ideas about how the world should work. But suffice it to say that I am ultimately an anarchist, but also very much a socialist. I would like to see big government and big capitalism die in a fire, but a skeleton remain that provides social welfare for those that aren't capable of providing for themselves. I have married into becoming a Swede, and don't mind the high tax rate because of the social benefits it funds. What I've found in talking with people from all parts of the spectrum is that generally, most people share the sentiment that corporate capitalism and huge government is bad, and that individuals should be empowered to change their own fate. Once you get rid of the us-versus-them of people defaulting to defending their favorite color, you get a lot of "Yeah, veterans missing legs and orphans and the poor should be offered a leg up, and capitalism is a pretty good tool for a lot of things" from both sides. You get a lot of this kind of discourse in Sweden, for example, where there is instead fierce and fallacious arguing in the States.
In my teens, I used to abhor the idea of conscription. But traveling the world as an adult (outside of the military kind of "travel"), I saw systems with conscription and that conscription having a direct positive impact on the public's participation in government, which seems to most maximally bring to fruition the will of the people, whatever their collective wishes are. A distant cousin of "an informed decision is the best decision, regardless of what is chosen". Places like Israel and Finland. Interestingly, Sweden abolished conscription in the early 2000s, and I believe there is a resultant apathy in the youngest generation that is pretty plain and obvious and generally acknowledged even among that generation. It is very interesting to have watched that happen, and I believe having abolished conscription is directly to blame for that apathy.
With respect to your magic button, the way I look at it is that everyone eventually meets their demise. A mantra my best friend instilled in me is that everything happens for a reason. I don't want to get into religion because we're not on mushrooms and that is a whole universe unto itself, but the point I'm trying to make here is that our current mindset and state of being has come at a price. The important thing to say here is that we don't get to set the price. Our experiences cost real, actual lives. I also carried a machine gun my entire time in the Army, at various times I was also a Bradley gunner and a .50 gunner. We pressed buttons that gave us experiences at a cost that we didn't choose. That's just the way the world worked out for us in those moments, and it is what it is. What I'm driving at is that it is difficult or impossible to speculate about what our lives would be like without those costly experiences, because those experiences are necessarily driving our decisions today. It took a lot of time for me personally to come to this point, and what it ends up doing is really brings those costs to bear, so that I get much more out of life than I would otherwise. Once I stopped feeling numb about the whole thing, even going out for a run on the trail next to my house in the suburbs feels like a gift, and that's a pretty profound realization, considering the general attitude of apathy a lot of the population of the developed world feels. They take life for granted.
So, that was a tangent, maybe also not directly addressing all of the things you've said. But maybe helps quantify some of the reasons I've said what I've said.
Heh, I have a friend who would say the same thing - "Everything happens for a reason." My response was always, "Everything happens because it happens." We all have to choose at what level of abstraction we spend most of our time. Logically I understand that free will is an illusion, because it requires the impossible - deciding to decide before making a decision. Nihilism can be very therapeutic in small doses, unfortunately I don't think the DoD will consider it for treatment to PTSD :)
While I won't spend a lot of time considering the absence of free will, analysis paralysis, propositional logic is pretty comfortable - once subtle violations of axioms are skylined. As I consider self ownership to be universally preferable, any system requiring its forfeiture is simply wrong. Even in a democracy one does not enjoy self ownership, as every voter owns some small part of everybody else vulnerable to the results of a vote.
This way of thinking can at best be a cold comfort, but it is nice no longer feeling that sense of crisis when new information hits your brain and violates the prior model of the world.
The Metropolitan Police have had "forward intelligence teams" (FIT) filming demonstrations for some time in order to identify people.
Note that, as people are increasingly demanding that police wear body cameras to record evidence of possible police abuse, these cameras can also be fed to image recognition systems.
I heard from a colleague who went on a tour of a CCTV control centre in London that it was being used on surveillance camera live streams at least 15 years ago.
I can believe it, although I can also believe it not working very well with pre-HD cameras and 2000s machine vision. Presumably it's part of the ""ring of steel""?
Unconstrained face recognition from NIR sensors (often used in CCTVs) is studied substantially less than on images acquired from visible light sensors (for obvious reasons). There's a few face recognition datasets (e.g., SCFace, MBGC Portal Challenge) that aimed to change this, but it still far from meeting the same accuracies we see from Google/Facebook.
Ah yes, so they can put that we have attended demonstrations into "our file" which will be trotted out against us if we ever decide to run for office. Also, they can easily tag us for arrest because we attended a protest, then pick us up at some point in the future, avoiding messy riots or icky looking violent arrests.
What a great time we are being set up for. I wonder if the anti-recognition camo patches are done yet?
Or sedition and lese majesty. This technology can be used to enforce laws hostile to the masses as well as it can help enforce laws friendly to us. Since we do not control it, it will inevitably be used for both.
In areas where violent and property crimes are high, it will be a blessing. In places where law enforcement is used mainly for supplementing municipal revenue, it will be a curse. And where the government uses the law as a weapon against dissent, it will be a nightmare.
>> In areas where violent and property crimes are high, it will be a blessing. In places where law enforcement is used mainly for supplementing municipal revenue, it will be a curse. And where the government uses the law as a weapon against dissent, it will be a nightmare.
This is true of almost any police tool. I mean you can apply to guns, pepper spray, probable cause, etc. As a blanket statement reply: It really comes down to implementation and training.
Really though, i'm not arguing for or against face recognition in local law enforcement. As a biometrics researcher i love to see real applications that actually work for the community, but as someone who disagrees with mass collections, outside of the obvious, such as a license photo or voluntary admittance to a NEXUS/TSA pre-check/Global Entry program, i worry.
The question is how many false positives the systems has and whether it will be used as "probably cause" for stuff. Also, eventually they might connected to body cameras and public security cameras and start tracking everyone. If it seems to far fetch, read up on license plate scanning databases used today.
>> "I think it's helpful for people to understand that their fears that they're being tracked or that they are somehow having their privacy violated by tracking their personal pursuits over time is not even something we have the capabilities of doing. And we have no interest in that."
Ars 'creeped' out a couple of people by getting the license location data and doing look ups on people's plates. So yes, they may not be able to track everyone every where, but if someone wanted to know where 'you' were going it would be trivial to figure out. I'm not as worried about police and the .gov having the data. I'm more worried about when 'bad' people get access to that data and use it for nefarious purposes.
See the Federal security clearance hack for an example.
In Ferguson -- a city with a population of 21,000 -- 16,000 people have outstanding arrest warrants, meaning that they are currently actively wanted by the police.
Probably downvoted for asking a question in order to make an oblique point, which was that improving the efficiency of an unjust process makes it less just. I don't think anyone can argue that actually enforcing all those arrest warrants would improve the situation - does it really make sense to lock up 3/4 of a town? No, obviously not. But then they sit there ready to be used as justification for other police action.
>> improving the efficiency of an unjust process makes it less just
Your right here, but fighting the tools that improve efficiency also doesn't solve the systematic problem, only puts focus on those tools.
>> don't think anyone can argue that actually enforcing all those arrest warrants would improve the situation - does it really make sense to lock up 3/4 of a town? No, obviously not.
Enforcement is left to the officer/department/prosecutor. The tools merely provide the officer with additional means of conducting their work in the field.
>> But then they sit there ready to be used as justification for other police action.
Comes off as quite bitter, but there's an actual point here. There is a consistent need to be "hard on crime", and provided your point that there is "average of more than one outstanding 'warrant' per person" in Ferguson suggests that finding additional means to identify those with warrants is a good thing - to, again, be "hard on crime". However, the fact is that if a person has a warrant, then even a simple license plate/ID check will return the same information. In an 'active' system, the officer would need to manually take a photo to return any matches - this is not much different than the ID check.
Though in a 'passive' system the officer would be notified of the individual's warrants as they pass by. This system is clearly the most invasive and feared amongst HN readers, and while a warrant can be issued for innocuous things like missing child support payments, the same system could also be used to identify those who are suspected of more serious crimes. I don't necessarily agree with locking up someone because they missed a payment or two (your "unjust process"), but I'd much rather fight those issues separately rather than condemn a piece of technology.
Then, why do warrants exist? For that matter, why have a police force at all? According to your argument, locking up a percentage of the population doesn't make sense, so let's just let everyone do whatever they want, amirite?
There is also a more recent take on this, a series called Psychopass. In many ways it's more disturbing, because it highlights the most problematic parts of such centralized non-transparent systems. Worth watching.
Maybe? We've incrementally come a long way from when we were executing people for stealing, trying blacks with all white juries, etc. What makes you think we're headed incrementally in another direction?
Besides, the tools becoming available allow for much more subtle oppression, and that's the point being made here: you point at gross and obvious abuses of the past, when we can do much worse much more quietly.
Your jury, for example? Why care about skin color when what you really want is employment history, or socioeconomic class, or whatever other advertising criteria best help a prosecutor win a case?
EDIT: At least post counter-arguments before downvoting, folks. Rayiner used a strawman and distraction "oh ho, but but but ~executing thieves~!" as a way of discrediting a reasonable opinion "You know, little by little we can end up in a Minority Report sort of world". I was merely responding in kind.
There's a Chinese saying that it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.
People can express racism without it being overt, yet it can be just as destructive. In a relatively recent North Florida murder case, the jury was pruned to be all-white by the white prosecuter, citing a "sympathetic age similarity" with one of the prospective black jurors, who was 34. The defendant was 19.
Oh yeah, and thanks for the frog in the boiling water scare. We should certainly have the conversation. This is probably not the best forum. HN just isn't built for it.
Remember in the early 2000s when ECHELON was revealed? Remember how people called them conspiracy theorists, wingnuts?
Not so crazy now, but the accusations of "conspiracy" are still flying. There will not be any real apology from the public once these new technologies are used against them.
The technology is agnostic and can be used in ways not originally envisioned. What happens when every police appearance is captured and then run through say social media scans for 'ID' purposes?
> Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan
Mighty good it did them there...
It's disturbing that no matter how much technology police gets, they always seem to want more. I mean, look at the encryption backdoor debate. We're being monitored in all ways imaginable, and apparently it's still not enough.
What is your measure of success? In fact, the field biometrics system worked really well for human network mapping - which was it's intended purpose. We defeated a lot of IED networks in part because of this tool.
That's my point though. You can't say that the overall effort failed, therefore all of the pieces must be worthless. The success of GWOT was not based on biometrics collection capabilities.
Yes, we also completed our research and development of the technology. So that like all Military tech, it can be gifted to US Law Enforcement. The war was just a beta test for biometerics and served as the only justifiable pretext for the development of this tech.
Most of its utility will be in the civilian sphere. Inevitably, they'll be scanning your face every time you buy a beer.
People asking for body cameras on all police, whether net benefit or not, need to understand everything that is coming with it. That includes automatic facial identification of everyone. Police will simply no longer have to ask for ID. Obscuring your face is already being made illegal... (see: burqa bans)
So i looked up burqa bans and found this: http://qz.com/326086/the-places-in-the-world-that-have-a-bur... which basically only has 2 European countries banning it nationally, and just a few more who implement local bans or have attempted to ban it. Provided the constitutional religious freedoms we have in the US, it seems very unlikely that a similar ban would pass here. In terms of obscuring your face, there are anti-mask laws, but they really pertain to protests/riots.
I'm not suggesting that the ban is good, or other countries will not follow suit, however it just seems like quite a jump to make - because 6 countries have some form of a ban on a burqa we have to watch out for face recognition. Should we not wear a cross if we're Christian because Syria persecutes Jehovah’s Witnesses?
In 2011, France went even further, forbidding concealment of people’s face in public—through a burqa, niqab (a version of the veil that leaves a slot for a woman’s eyes), but also masks or balaclavas
President Sarkozy wants 2011 to be the year that "vidéoprotection" goes mainstream, and has set a target of 60,000 cameras watching public spaces around the country by the end of this year, up from the current 20,000.
Oh ok. Yea that's a good point. Though i stated in another reply that images of unconstrained users from NIR sensors is still an active and less successful form of face recognition. It's actually part of what i work on!
I don't think there is anyway the technology doesn't get used. The only option is going to be transparency and openness in the data collected so it becomes harder to hide abuse. Privacy will be what dies.
You've made a great point here, and certainly this should be involved in conversations about police wearing body cams. I'm still for body cams, though-- the inherent trustworthiness of the police's word must be ended permanently, and there is only one way to make that so.
Eventually the video from body cams will be scraped for ID information, which can then be cross referenced with the cell phone data they pull from the local Stingray or dustbox. They've got your name, your face, your digital communications, and your physical location tracked over time, controlled at the metro level, all without any kind of warrant/oversight or consent from you. Pair this with an ARGOS equipped drone, and you could easily show a live map of where "problematic" individuals are. Reaching that point is a totalitarian panopticon, and 100% enforcement of the law becomes possible, criminalizing everyone.
At what point does the complex of this technology constitute a search/seizure that requires a warrant? At what point does this complex of technology constitute an unreasonable search or seizure? When does this cross the line into being illegal or unconstitutional, if we aren't already there? I mean, there's no legal participation needed to follow me around all day via a sky camera, snoop my communications all day for content and metadata, note all of my purchases, note all my interactions with others, note my general state when in view of police body cams, and generally scrutinize me 100% of the time.
I would also take this moment to note that these issues are separate from the NSA-related dragnet, though they are indeed likely to be integrated into it eventually. The body cams and police technology are about physical surveillance and enforcing physical compliance and "orderliness". The NSA is about enforcing and surveying ideological and norm compliance.
When I read that soldiers were forcing Iraqi civilians to do iris scans several years ago, I knew that eventually we'd see police in the USA doing the same thing here.
The concerning thing is that our police here seem to think that they are soldiers who are in Iraq.
They also fail to recognize that scanning large swaths of civilians breeds intense resentment from an already hostile population and ends up causing more support for the insurgency. Knowing American cops, I can't envision an iris scan being committed without some snarky negging from the officer.
And the federal RealID program provides a nice comprehensive dataset to train the computers with. This is the veiled motivation behind ID laws that are being promoted as protecting the public from terrorists, sex offenders, or voter fraud. But what the US government really wants is to introduce a loophole in the 4th amendment by outsourcing policing. It's not an illegal search if it's done by a private company. And they don't have to respond to FOIA requests either.
Based on what is in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act), i don't see any provisions mandating everyone having a government ID from the RealID program. Rather, "sets requirements for state driver's licenses and ID cards to be accepted by the federal government for 'official purposes'". Also the mandated IDs for 'voter fraud' were largely a political ploy to prevent certain people from voting, not to collect information.
From the video it looks like they're just preventing face detection (probably using OpenCVs implementation of Viola Jones), though i don't think an actual recognition system would do much better when provided a picture of you with lights shining in the middle of your face. For most systems, a combination of a hat, scarf, and sunglasses will work just fine (but keep in mind, if the system uses NIR sensors then sunglasses won't work - they only block UV light).
If you’re worried about Big Brother monitoring you from security cameras, Japan has developed eyewear that can keep you anonymous.
The Privacy Visor consists of a lightweight, wraparound, semitransparent plastic sheet fitted over eyewear frames. It’s bulky and not exactly stylish, but it could have customized designs.
It’s meant to thwart face-recognition camera systems through a very simple trick. It reflects overhead light into the camera lens, causing the area around the eyes to appear much brighter than it normally does.
Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Stealth Wear continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance.
Presented by Primitive at Tank Magazine were a suite of new designs that tackle some of the most pressing and sophisticated forms of surveillance today. The countersurveillance solutions include a series of ‘Anti-Drone’ garments and the Off Pocket™, a privacy accessory that allows you to instantly zero out your phone’s signal.
How long until they're outlawed just like encryption will.
edit: is there any proper way to easily quote text? So that it stays text wrapped.
> edit: is there any proper way to easily quote text? So that it stays text wrapped
Don't put four spaces in front of quoted text. Just use some quote-indicator character. Most people on HN use >, but anything is fine so long as it's clear what you're quoting.
80 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadYou're right that not everyone shares my somewhat unique perspective, and so to those who have no relationship with police officers and are therefore ignorant of the facts, it may seem fallacious. And also it's fun to make those quippy accusations, so I understand the impulse.
Being a soldier and being a Cop are take different skill sets. I don't want to get into all the differances, and I don't want to argue with anyone, but I'll take a shy security guard, over a "gung ho" guy who wants to see some action? Our streets are not the streets of Iraq, or Afganistan.
I have the highest regard for any ex-military. I think you guys/ladies should get first shot at any federal job--including jobs that involve public safety.
I think most of you know by now that being veterans doesn't mean much to most civilian police departments in the hiring process. It should because you served your country, and need a job when you get home. Most of you are intelligent enough to realize civilian police departments should not be run like military operations. I do cringe when I hear, usually ex-marines talk/think they will be shoe-ins when they get home and apply to the academy. (I hope you guys don't take this wrong way, but I think most you know what I'm getting at?).
Meaning--war is vastly different than basically revenue collection, and dealing with the public! Yes--most departments are still training officers in a military fashion, but that's been changing. Hopefully, it will change quicker? The more progressive departments are changing training procedures as I write this, at least that's what I heard. One of the biggest reasons, I was told was the proliferation of lawsuits that are being levied against aggressive, illegial police tactics, and cameras are Everywhere. The days of coverups/"Blue code of Honor" are over, for the most part. My friend said they are over. I haven't seen much of a change yet.
Agreed! This is a perfect example of people arguing "slippery slope!!" when the tech first came out and getting shouted down repeatedly. Now they're being vindicated, as it's absolutely happening exactly as predicted.
My point is that the slippery slope argument is often used and no matter how many times people say it's invalid or unlikely, is often right.
So the whole narrative, where police militarization is due to veteran hires, rings pretty hollow for me. What we are seeing here is the result of an end-justifies-the-means mentality. The military has the same mentality, but this is very deliberately tempered by a focus on honor and duty - something that law enforcement lacks by comparison.
Everybody knows that bootcamp is designed to provide a common experience and rebuild recruits, standardizing to the military's brand of discipline and morality - like interchangeable-parts from the industrial revolution. I've wondered what distance that influence would cover in one's life, because so far it is still holding up in interesting ways. I've talked to guys I hadn't heard from in ten years, and despite differences in profession and family situation, a pretty strong pattern has emerged in uncommon political/philosophical thought.
So maybe the influence is much more local. Maybe some soldiers become cops because their drill instructors withheld affection :)
I should say there wasn't so much a problem with recruit quality, as the people I mentioned were just as good at soldiering as the others, but it was certainly different. Most of the men in my family were in the Marine Corps at some point, and I worked with Marines on my second and fourth tours, so I have a little bit of insight into what you mean about the culture difference. Also I should say I always enjoyed working with Marines.
And with respect to your other point, I think military service is so valuable for individuals that I strongly support conscription. I believe only good things could come of requiring every person to go serve in the military (or Peace Corps or something) for two years when they turn 18. If we did that, I think the problems we're facing as a nation would see some positive change within a single generation, and I'm confident enough in that statement that I am sure you feel the same way. For all the things I hated about the Army, the physical and psychological tools they equipped me with have helped enrich my life in so many ways. Every time I think about my feelings about this, I picture that scene from Starship Troopers when the guy wheels his chair out from the desk and he's missing a leg and has a prosthetic arm, but he shakes Johnny's hand and says "Good for you. The infantry made me the man I am today"[0] and that's how I personally feel about it. I mean, I have all my fingers and toes, but I feel like that guy. Including the tragedy, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoPTPe33PQY
As far as conscription, I think that would be close to the worst thing ever. From a utilitarian perspective: it would be incredibly expensive and would reduce force readiness. From a moral perspective: it is pretty hard to logically justify the threats of violence organic to such an endeavor - threats against the intended benefactors, civilians. I might have agreed with you 10 years ago, if the infantry remained all volunteer under such a program, but the utilitarian arguments no longer appeal to me. I wish I could put my finger on exactly what bit of information flipped the switch in my brain and made me an anarchist, but it was a pretty long process. It probably occurred around the time that I was spending a lot of time studying first order logic and cybernetics (As you can see, I'm a big fan of technology once popular in the 70's). Applying lessons from those fields, related to scaling working systems, to social systems - leads to the idea that a social system founded on an immoral precept will never be able to compete against a system founded otherwise. The test is pretty easy, if a rule has an exception then the problem to which the rule applies was not well defined and this leads to serious scaling issues. I could go on for hours, but I don't think anybody really wants that.
Regrets. I don't have any, aside from not taking math more seriously as a kid. I am rational and self interested, the product of my experiences - so if I had it all to do over again, I would. But, if there was a button I could press that would magically bring a few former Fallujah residents back to life - I would press it.
BTW, the Starship Troopers reference is interesting because the author, Heinlein, has a Naval Academy grad who used the book as a platform to describe his preferred philosophy of governance. Ayn Rand did the exact same thing with Atlas Shrugged. Both are good reads, but I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that I lean more towards Rand's objectivism.
In my teens, I used to abhor the idea of conscription. But traveling the world as an adult (outside of the military kind of "travel"), I saw systems with conscription and that conscription having a direct positive impact on the public's participation in government, which seems to most maximally bring to fruition the will of the people, whatever their collective wishes are. A distant cousin of "an informed decision is the best decision, regardless of what is chosen". Places like Israel and Finland. Interestingly, Sweden abolished conscription in the early 2000s, and I believe there is a resultant apathy in the youngest generation that is pretty plain and obvious and generally acknowledged even among that generation. It is very interesting to have watched that happen, and I believe having abolished conscription is directly to blame for that apathy.
With respect to your magic button, the way I look at it is that everyone eventually meets their demise. A mantra my best friend instilled in me is that everything happens for a reason. I don't want to get into religion because we're not on mushrooms and that is a whole universe unto itself, but the point I'm trying to make here is that our current mindset and state of being has come at a price. The important thing to say here is that we don't get to set the price. Our experiences cost real, actual lives. I also carried a machine gun my entire time in the Army, at various times I was also a Bradley gunner and a .50 gunner. We pressed buttons that gave us experiences at a cost that we didn't choose. That's just the way the world worked out for us in those moments, and it is what it is. What I'm driving at is that it is difficult or impossible to speculate about what our lives would be like without those costly experiences, because those experiences are necessarily driving our decisions today. It took a lot of time for me personally to come to this point, and what it ends up doing is really brings those costs to bear, so that I get much more out of life than I would otherwise. Once I stopped feeling numb about the whole thing, even going out for a run on the trail next to my house in the suburbs feels like a gift, and that's a pretty profound realization, considering the general attitude of apathy a lot of the population of the developed world feels. They take life for granted.
So, that was a tangent, maybe also not directly addressing all of the things you've said. But maybe helps quantify some of the reasons I've said what I've said.
While I won't spend a lot of time considering the absence of free will, analysis paralysis, propositional logic is pretty comfortable - once subtle violations of axioms are skylined. As I consider self ownership to be universally preferable, any system requiring its forfeiture is simply wrong. Even in a democracy one does not enjoy self ownership, as every voter owns some small part of everybody else vulnerable to the results of a vote.
This way of thinking can at best be a cold comfort, but it is nice no longer feeling that sense of crisis when new information hits your brain and violates the prior model of the world.
Note that, as people are increasingly demanding that police wear body cameras to record evidence of possible police abuse, these cameras can also be fed to image recognition systems.
What a great time we are being set up for. I wonder if the anti-recognition camo patches are done yet?
Incrementalism is a powerful tool for exerting an unstoppable force onto something which would otherwise notice that force and resist it.
In areas where violent and property crimes are high, it will be a blessing. In places where law enforcement is used mainly for supplementing municipal revenue, it will be a curse. And where the government uses the law as a weapon against dissent, it will be a nightmare.
This is true of almost any police tool. I mean you can apply to guns, pepper spray, probable cause, etc. As a blanket statement reply: It really comes down to implementation and training.
Really though, i'm not arguing for or against face recognition in local law enforcement. As a biometrics researcher i love to see real applications that actually work for the community, but as someone who disagrees with mass collections, outside of the obvious, such as a license photo or voluntary admittance to a NEXUS/TSA pre-check/Global Entry program, i worry.
To quote:
>> "I think it's helpful for people to understand that their fears that they're being tracked or that they are somehow having their privacy violated by tracking their personal pursuits over time is not even something we have the capabilities of doing. And we have no interest in that."
Ars 'creeped' out a couple of people by getting the license location data and doing look ups on people's plates. So yes, they may not be able to track everyone every where, but if someone wanted to know where 'you' were going it would be trivial to figure out. I'm not as worried about police and the .gov having the data. I'm more worried about when 'bad' people get access to that data and use it for nefarious purposes.
See the Federal security clearance hack for an example.
Today.
> And we have no interest in that.
Today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/22/ferguson-warrants-p...
A more interesting one is here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-robinson/the-shocking-f...
In Ferguson -- a city with a population of 21,000 -- 16,000 people have outstanding arrest warrants, meaning that they are currently actively wanted by the police.
Your right here, but fighting the tools that improve efficiency also doesn't solve the systematic problem, only puts focus on those tools.
>> don't think anyone can argue that actually enforcing all those arrest warrants would improve the situation - does it really make sense to lock up 3/4 of a town? No, obviously not.
Enforcement is left to the officer/department/prosecutor. The tools merely provide the officer with additional means of conducting their work in the field.
>> But then they sit there ready to be used as justification for other police action.
Comes off as quite bitter, but there's an actual point here. There is a consistent need to be "hard on crime", and provided your point that there is "average of more than one outstanding 'warrant' per person" in Ferguson suggests that finding additional means to identify those with warrants is a good thing - to, again, be "hard on crime". However, the fact is that if a person has a warrant, then even a simple license plate/ID check will return the same information. In an 'active' system, the officer would need to manually take a photo to return any matches - this is not much different than the ID check.
Though in a 'passive' system the officer would be notified of the individual's warrants as they pass by. This system is clearly the most invasive and feared amongst HN readers, and while a warrant can be issued for innocuous things like missing child support payments, the same system could also be used to identify those who are suspected of more serious crimes. I don't necessarily agree with locking up someone because they missed a payment or two (your "unjust process"), but I'd much rather fight those issues separately rather than condemn a piece of technology.
Besides, the tools becoming available allow for much more subtle oppression, and that's the point being made here: you point at gross and obvious abuses of the past, when we can do much worse much more quietly.
Your jury, for example? Why care about skin color when what you really want is employment history, or socioeconomic class, or whatever other advertising criteria best help a prosecutor win a case?
EDIT: At least post counter-arguments before downvoting, folks. Rayiner used a strawman and distraction "oh ho, but but but ~executing thieves~!" as a way of discrediting a reasonable opinion "You know, little by little we can end up in a Minority Report sort of world". I was merely responding in kind.
People can express racism without it being overt, yet it can be just as destructive. In a relatively recent North Florida murder case, the jury was pruned to be all-white by the white prosecuter, citing a "sympathetic age similarity" with one of the prospective black jurors, who was 34. The defendant was 19.
http://youtu.be/M3H9sgyltko
Oh yeah, and thanks for the frog in the boiling water scare. We should certainly have the conversation. This is probably not the best forum. HN just isn't built for it.
Not so crazy now, but the accusations of "conspiracy" are still flying. There will not be any real apology from the public once these new technologies are used against them.
Mighty good it did them there...
It's disturbing that no matter how much technology police gets, they always seem to want more. I mean, look at the encryption backdoor debate. We're being monitored in all ways imaginable, and apparently it's still not enough.
What is your measure of success? In fact, the field biometrics system worked really well for human network mapping - which was it's intended purpose. We defeated a lot of IED networks in part because of this tool.
Most of its utility will be in the civilian sphere. Inevitably, they'll be scanning your face every time you buy a beer.
On the bright side, as long as we keep underfunding police forces, maybe that reduces the surveillance apparatus? </sarcasm>
I'm not suggesting that the ban is good, or other countries will not follow suit, however it just seems like quite a jump to make - because 6 countries have some form of a ban on a burqa we have to watch out for face recognition. Should we not wear a cross if we're Christian because Syria persecutes Jehovah’s Witnesses?
In 2011, France went even further, forbidding concealment of people’s face in public—through a burqa, niqab (a version of the veil that leaves a slot for a woman’s eyes), but also masks or balaclavas
http://www.connexionfrance.com/cctv-video-surveillance-prote...
President Sarkozy wants 2011 to be the year that "vidéoprotection" goes mainstream, and has set a target of 60,000 cameras watching public spaces around the country by the end of this year, up from the current 20,000.
So i guess i'm confused what you're getting at here.
Eventually the video from body cams will be scraped for ID information, which can then be cross referenced with the cell phone data they pull from the local Stingray or dustbox. They've got your name, your face, your digital communications, and your physical location tracked over time, controlled at the metro level, all without any kind of warrant/oversight or consent from you. Pair this with an ARGOS equipped drone, and you could easily show a live map of where "problematic" individuals are. Reaching that point is a totalitarian panopticon, and 100% enforcement of the law becomes possible, criminalizing everyone.
At what point does the complex of this technology constitute a search/seizure that requires a warrant? At what point does this complex of technology constitute an unreasonable search or seizure? When does this cross the line into being illegal or unconstitutional, if we aren't already there? I mean, there's no legal participation needed to follow me around all day via a sky camera, snoop my communications all day for content and metadata, note all of my purchases, note all my interactions with others, note my general state when in view of police body cams, and generally scrutinize me 100% of the time.
I would also take this moment to note that these issues are separate from the NSA-related dragnet, though they are indeed likely to be integrated into it eventually. The body cams and police technology are about physical surveillance and enforcing physical compliance and "orderliness". The NSA is about enforcing and surveying ideological and norm compliance.
I'm not even allowed to wear a baseball cap in my local public library.
They also fail to recognize that scanning large swaths of civilians breeds intense resentment from an already hostile population and ends up causing more support for the insurgency. Knowing American cops, I can't envision an iris scan being committed without some snarky negging from the officer.
Maybe take off the tinfoil once in awhile.
There is already some work in the privacy clothing area. Almost makes it look like items for a sci-fi RPG.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2969732/privacy/how-japans-pr...
http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear/ How long until they're outlawed just like encryption will.edit: is there any proper way to easily quote text? So that it stays text wrapped.
Don't put four spaces in front of quoted text. Just use some quote-indicator character. Most people on HN use >, but anything is fine so long as it's clear what you're quoting.