This sort of absolutely false equivalence only serves to strengthen the complacency of those of us who live in societies that retain greater degrees of freedom.
Passing thru the immigration checkpoint in Shanghai and having a kiosk take my photo without warning, and respond with a dystopian smiley face and shutter sound, was one of the more creepy things to happen to me.
Doesn't every airport has CCTV recording of every corner? China may be monitoring much more, but being taken a photo inside airport does not sound intrusive to me.
I'm sure some sort of facial recognition is being used at many airports thru CCTV. Walking up to a kiosk that doesn't look like a camera, and having my photo snapped with a smile, while I was simply looking around for where to scan my boarding pass by my face accidentally lined up with the camera, is what creeped me out. Hard to describe, not sure if that makes sense.
Yes! Recently had the same experience at that airport.
It's not so much the fact of taking the picture that disturbed me - I fully expected to be catalogued, and filmed, in 1) an international airport and 2) in China. OK, if I had my way with society, we wouldn't be doing that, but that's the status quo right now and I can deal with it.
It's that I felt I was being tricked into it. Having your biometric picture taken and saved is somewhat intimate, I want to at least mentally prepare myself and pose for the camera. It's mainly an emotional problem. It is just a bit short shoving somebody into a foto booth.
My personal opinion is that China is often quite tone-deaf when it comes to being dystopian and creepy. The actual security practices are not too different from what we have in the west, but the way they present them make them seem like from a bad movie.
Of course, traveling from most places they already have a photo from your visa application. (I'd also note that, at least according to the visa processing service, they're very fussy about the quality of the visa photo. Absolutely no shadow, contrasting shirt, etc.)
SHENZHEN—Gan Liping pumped her bike across a busy street, racing to beat a crossing light before it turned red. She didn’t make it. Immediately, her face popped up on two video screens above the street. “Jaywalkers will be captured using facial-recognition technology,” the screens said.
Facial-recognition technology, once a specter of dystopian science fiction, is becoming a feature of daily life in China, where authorities are using it on streets, in subway stations, at airports and at border crossings in a vast experiment in social engineering. Their goal: to influence behavior and identify lawbreakers.
Ms. Gan, 31 years old, had been caught on camera crossing illegally here once before, allowing the system to match her two images. Text displayed on the crosswalk screens identified her as a repeat offender.
It makes them build their lives around the assumption that only activities that everyone else seems to be doing, are safe to do.
You could say that in more (relatively) free societies it is also this way. But no. In China the default position is "everything is forbidden unless explicitly permitted" whereas in the US for example this is flipped to the near opposite position, "everything is permitted unless it involves doing something forbidden."
Brin's argument is that as the technology to record everything becomes so cheap that the cost is trivial, trying to enforce privacy and anonymity in a sea of cameras is a losing battle. We're better off as a society if we allow the recording and de-anonymization of public spaces, but we should also make this information free to anyone. In return for the loss privacy in public spaces, we should demand that the wealthy and powerful give up some of their privacy as well. Obviously, the wealthy and powerful will fight to keep their privacy, but as recording devices become ubiquitous the landscape favors those pushing to set information free rather than those trying to secure it.
To relate it to the story here, rather than fighting the anonymity of private citizens who commit minor trespasses like jaywalking, we should be focusing on uncovering trespasses committed by those in power. Say, the financial dealings of Xi Jinping or Donald Trump.
Completely disagree. Instead, we make it illegal to record people in public spaces without warning and consent. Make it a criminal offence with strong penalties, especially for the publication of people-identifying records. It should be illegal to set up a camera on one's fence along a highway and publish the license plates and times of cars passing by.
Whether or not it's a good thing given the advent of ubiquitous facial recognition software, that's never ever going to happen. You're basically arguing for photography being banned in public spaces. The fact that would almost certainly be unconstitutional in the US is probably the least of the barriers to implementing such a law.
As an extremely privacy-supporting individual, I can kind of see where he's coming from, however:
I don't think it would work if we didn't apply it to everyone equally. I don't care what your job is, or how many "state secrets" it deals with, no exceptions.
I also think it would bring ~10 years of extreme societal collapse as we would realize that most of our social norms make no sense, and those things that we demonize are actually quite common.
> I also think it would bring ~10 years of extreme societal
collapse as we would realize that most of our social
norms make no sense, and those things that we demonize
are actually quite common.
Sure. I would guess that racism is indeed probably more common than most people realize. But don't get me wrong: Just because something is common, doesn't mean we should move to just accepting it. I think it would actually highlight how subtly and unconsciously racist many people are, which would help us solve that problem.
I was thinking of things more like: functional drug users, sexual-practices, etc.
Do they really think that their false-positive rate is low enough in this setting that they should just put accusations on screens like that? Well, how low is their false-positive rate in this setting?
Interesting. I think the way to defeat this would be for everyone to jaywalk all the time, as often as possible. It would be even more interesting if the software actually displays the number of times the person has been caught. Gamify it and such.
Non-Chinese shouldn't kid ourselves. Our governments want to do this too, and probably will. Drones with gigapixel cameras hovering over metro regions. Security cameras and police cars that continuously scan the faces of pedestrians and other drivers. It will happen.
But probably not openly, at least not for a while. Can't imagine that the US or a European country could display the faces of jaywalkers on the street without large scale protest (especially since this is not really considered a crime).
> (especially since this is not really considered a crime)
The seed is already planted: it is ok to display the face of a citizen, as long as he's a criminal. No debate about what kinds of public need does supersede the privacy rights of the individual citizen, or what kind of crimes would justify this kind of behavior from the part of the government. It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays.
All they have to do now is to lower (or I'd say, keep lowering) the threshold; jaywalking is right around the corner.
>"It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays."
Whether you display them publicly or not, if they broke the law, they should be punished. We can't live in some magical limbo situation where we simultaneously have laws and not enforce them most of the time. I.e.: If the tech is there to apply the laws that have currently been "agreed" by the public, then there should be no question or overriding factors to consider.
Talk of privacy and "individual rights" is just distracting fluff in that context. We've already decided that certain actions merit punishment. We're just now upset that the coming omnipotent presence of surveillance can actually make us adhere to the things we've been whacking other people over the head with. You know, the ones that "got caught" doing it.
Either that, or simply start repealing all these non-sense laws that we don't actually want to punish people for. The third alternative is a gigantic mess of exceptions and "buts" that want to enable us to eat our surveillance cake, and sometimes keep it. Make no mistake, that is exactly what the "privacy" folks are advocating for. More bureaucracy.
I got screamed at by a police officer here in Austin TX for jay-walking. It was only my de-escalation of the situation that allowed me to escape with a warning, after about ten minutes of haranguing and accusatory questions about what I thought I was doing.
Unlike the PRC, most of us live in governments where there is significantly more decentralization of power, and where those power centers are significantly more responsive to public pressure.
It's incumbent upon all of us to apply that pressure and work to maintain that decentralization. It's especially incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems and b) develop counter-measures.
Purportedly there are non-obvious sunglasses/frames that attempt to make it more difficult for such scanners to operate. The success rate of these devices ranges from "not at all" to "seems to work".
a visor with (very, very) bright IR LEDs over your face could hide you from camera sensors; i've seen something like this used to defeat license plate scanners, and i know that LEDs have greatly improved power efficiency in the last decade, but i don't have any experience in this kind of thing. maybe someone can pick up this idea and run with it if it's feasible.
Depending on the details of how the system is used and the availability of political remedies (or lack thereof), I think direct action would be justified.
Decentralized observation, citizens watching citizens, citizens watching the powers that be- and if necessary decentralized anti-terrorism surveilance.
That is acceptable.
While NSA and Prism still happened. It's the 'Technologist' that developed it. Who's to say if Snowden didn't whistleblow things might get closer to what's described in the article?
Yes, US is more democratic and power is more decentralized, but without guardians or more awareness from the citizens, it's easily a slippery slope. Think UK and Theresa May. All Powers want more power.
It's especially incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems
Keep in mind, this necessarily includes not building those types of systems for their own use either.
Once a private entity has collected some juicy data, the government gets roll up and say "I'll help myself to some of that." And at that point the company has also preemptively conceded the vast majority of principled opposition to government use of such systems by exploiting them for commercial reasons.
You're being naive. Pervasive LPR and facial recognition technology has been publicly acknowledged and broadly deployed on highways and chokepoints like bridges. I'm sure that pedestrian monitoring has been deployed in facilities like airports and places like Manhattan, although I don't recall seeing any reporting on the topic.
Decentralization isn't as protective as you might think, as most capital funding for this type of public safety infrastructure comes from Federal grants.
Technologists have no professional ethical duties, licensure or other reasons to behave ethically. It's unrealistic to assume that individuals will choose some vague ethical position over money.
a) Western municipalities have deployed similar systems, albeit with massively significant differences in use case
b) Western political structures aren't perfect
c) the professional ethical obligations of technologists have yet to be codified
I'm certainly in agreement with you on all of these points, but I'm unclear on your argument. Is it just that many talented people will happily contribute to building a nightmarishly repressive socio-technical apparatus if the money is good enough? Again, no disagreement there, the article itself, and the many other stories on HN related to the shenanigans of Western security agencies, is ample proof of that.
Without a legal or moral framework that protects civil liberties, individual actors won't make consistently ethical choices because there is no penalty for making an unethical choice and no common understanding of what is or isn't ethical.
If you ask a CPA or Attorney to do something contrary to their professional code of ethics, they will typically tell you "no" -- their livelihood is at stake.
The grey areas in IT are much broader and more situational. Is pervasive surveillance to protect citizens from terrorists unethical? Is it unethical to automatically police jaywalking? Is it unethical for me to use facial recognition to identify people approaching my home? There is no right answer to these questions.
London's Heathrow airport has facial recognition cameras everywhere before the border checkpoint. They consist of small turbine-shaped cameras mounted in the ceiling, with a rotating circle of LEDs designed to catch your attention and make you look directly at the camera.
I've forgotten the company name, but I googled it at the time and it was indeed a facial recognition hardware company.
They already do. They are just not as open about it. Here in the us when you get your drivers license, or state ID they ensure the photo is optimal for facial recognition. I also wouldn't be surprised if they where starting to do the same thing for student IDs in middle & high schools.
2016: "Retailers are increasingly using facial recognition technology to track your face. With an estimated 59% of UK fashion retailers doing it, is the anonymity of cities an outdated idea?"
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/03/revealed-faci...
His writings critical of the West go largely ignored in the West, which again isn't that surprising. For example his forward for Animal Farm was famously censored from publication.
> 2017: "New York plans to install vast system of facial recognition cameras that matches drivers licenses to social media accounts at bridges and tunnels "
Wow. Just, wow. And I agree: even governments that "don't want to do it" will be compelled to at the first horrific incident that could have been prevented with the technology. The only way to stop that from happening is to outlaw it. I simply don't believe there are very many Edward Snowdens in the world.
First, threat of terrorism is real.
Second, monitoring citizens' behavior does not automatically translate to totalitarianism.
Personally I prefer safety. And I avoid showing myself over online for privacy concerns. But I do not call safety measure a poly to implement totalitarian government.
If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly. I personally have no idea how to prevent without close monitoring.
China is different, it has always been totalitarian. It's natural for the government to monitor citizens without much resistance. This is a statement, without value judgement.
If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly. I personally have no idea how to prevent without close monitoring.
Why shouldn't the burden be on the other side? Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism? That states will actually use it that way, when the threat of terror is so politically useful?
Because without making a strong case along those lines first, you can't even take the "I'll trade privacy for safety" position in good faith at all.
The 9/11 attackers were already subjects of surveillance when they attacked. The Boston Marathon bombers were already being closely monitored but were not stopped.
Disciplinarians, cops for example, have dreamed of omniscience since the dawn of time. The panopticon dates to the 1790s! Despite the fact that we come closer to a state of all-seeing every day, I'm not aware of any compelling evidence that it's actually turning out to be very useful to prevent violent crime or acts of terror.
Not only that, but those enforcing the law are no less likely to break it. Giving the authorities this level of power is just inviting the most corrupt and immoral of them to run wild with official immunity.
Police live under a fundamental illusion that people can be divided into good or bad, ignoring the role of circumstances, ease of deniability and special pleading in how it actually goes down. Most of all with their own abuse of power.
Clearly, terrorism is a symptom. Its cause is not bad people are not monitored, but they have various reason to think harm innocent people is the only way to advance their objectives.
Can anyone address such issues? Unlikely. History has shown that terrorism is seldom solved, they are extinguished, through escalation to war or complete annihilation of the weaker part.
Do I support monitoring? Not always. But if I am not feeling safe, I am OK to sacrifice some privacy and take some risk of being harmed by the government.
I am not saying you should agree with this, but that's my thoughts.
> Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism?
This way of reasoning seems fine, but really is just a way of showing me being using unfounded argument to support my claim. In reality, as I said, solving terrorism is not monitoring's job, but it makes me feel safe, because someone is doing something that can reduce the risk (not substantially).
The evidence I know of that hint at monitoring being effective is from the Italians, where they say they thwart terrorism by closely monitoring and infiltrating potential groups. I remember reading that the Italian police says it takes 20 people to monitor one person effectively (will need to find a link). That kind of man-power is hard to scale.
> If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly.
Attack the root cause of the problem, namely alienation of youths [0] (Aarhus Model). These preventative systems of surveillance only foment opportunities for abuse.
I agree it will happen. We will become better and better at building hardware and making that hardware do what we want, it will become easier and easier for a government to create such a surveillance system. Still, efforts to protect the privacy of citizens are worthwhile.
In addition to trying to protect the privacy of citizens, we should also be trying to make our government as transparent as possible. Ideally, the people would have the government under surveillance more closely than the government has the people under surveillance.
Damn I wasn't aware of gigapixel cameras unless you're talking in the future. I tried to look that up and "gigapixel" photos came up (although none of them/links seemed to work)
> * Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify fugitives [2]
Not just China. Police in Wales (UK) are already using facial recognition systems[1] and have in fact already arrested at least one person because of it, just this month[2].
Interesting, I think I saw this same exact example at GTC 2016. Although, on a quick search on mobile - I can't find the talk...
It was a Chinese company discussing their surveillance in major cities and their use of GPUs for their form of video compression. With the specific goal of keeping the data as small as possible.
It was the most dystopian talk I've ever been at, and the presentors were all smiles and laughs.
I honestly question how well it works at scale with hundreds of millions of faces at different angles. I asked them about this, and they said it won't be long now to fix. Their explanation was they only need one accurate view of their face to tag those people. Then they just track them where ever they go.
Not just that, but everyone has a unique way they walk, called their gait, so if you are identified once (usually by facial recognition) your gait can be used to identify you forever after, even if you try to hide your identity.
Only way to go undetected then is to purposely change your gait and other things, but the important thing here is:
We are at a point where the effort you have to go through to remain anonymous in the public is so high that it may not be worth the effort.
A few years back,I read about Chinese research on gait analysis via floor tiles that can uniquely identify you by calculations on weight and shear forces as you walk over them. I thought it was evil, but brilliant, out-of-the box thinking.
No doubt that once voice recognition, speech to text and NLP advances enough you'd have public safety microphones always looking out for counter-revolutionary speech and terrorist activity.
1984 is fantasy because the telescreens couldn't scale with a human listener. Worry not, deep learning will bridge the gap.
Anybody can take photos or videos in public area, so does the government. If you are so paranoid about your privacy, stay at home, order online, simple as that.
If you are paranoid and a good make-up artist, there's CV Dazzle.
If you are paranoid and not a good make-up artist, you may have to settle for glasses and clothing with integrated LEDs designed to confuse known recognition algorithms. Or maybe just start wearing masks and veils in public.
Yes, but they don't make a record of your gait at the DMV and print it on your official ID card, do they?
They might be able to track John/Jane Doe #1 across a plaza, and maybe match that up across multiple cameras, but without a reference database connecting gaits to public identities, there is a possibility that without reasonable suspicion, the data for John/Jane Doe #1 would have to be purged before it could be linked to you.
Of course, a state-level actor that chooses not to obey the law could retain those data indefinitely, and eventually identify you via statistical analyses. If you don't want that to happen, you will need to get politically active and make public oversight of agencies that perform surveillance of the public an issue.
Otherwise, you might have to wear specialized clothing and shoes that change heel height and sole shape as you walk.
The government worries me more than people/companies for two reasons:
1) The government can track me everywhere with cameras anywhere they want in public; companies would be mostly restricted to when I walk past their franchises in most cases (drones could be an issue, but cross that bridge when we get to it)
2) The government agencies have motivation and a history of suppressing new or bothersome political parties which challenge their budgets. Ether by spreading dirt gathered via other activities or jailing activists such things are at least substantially harder for a company to accomplish.
Was going through a UK airport and noticed they had some cameras with a silly looking LED light on them so I googled the manufacturer:
http://www.hrsid.com/product-mflow#queue
They supply facial recognition hardware/software that can track you across your journey in an airport accurately.
It's not a huge leap to get it over an entire CCTV network.
The silly looking swirly light is intended to attract attention so that people will look directly into the camera. [Seriously. I found it in a technical description.]
while 90% of this is really bad to everyone(privacy, oppression,etc), I see there is a small bright side , that the criminals can now be caught so quickly these days there from some news I read.
the videos are all connected and facials are recognized quickly(a few seconds for millions of faces), they tracked down criminals(and their cars) who was on the run for thousands of miles all the way, in less than 24 hours sometimes. I think the whole project was called something like "peaceful city project".
in US, where surveillance cameras are scarce to find in most public areas, you need eye witness all the time, many cases take years to resolve, if at all.
Yeah, 'criminals' are caught quickly when they harm an important businessman's mistresses' niece and it makes a good cctv news blurb. Not so much otherwise
Basically, in the future, we're all stone-faced automatons, helplessly clawing at the walls of a social cage that demands our thoughts must be at least neutral and aloof, if not explicitly happy and positive.
As if western governments were not already looking into this, (heck they''ve probably already implemented such policies for all we know). The only difference is that China is a no BS nation, they are actually (and surprisingly) very open about it. Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is not the story itself but the sheer hypocrisy of the western press / media. I think the time has come for us to take a good look at ourselves in the mirror and accept ourselves for what we actually are.
The creepiness factor aside, I'm trying to imagine how you'd implement a system to keep track of 1.3 billion people via face recognition. The hardware demands alone are mind boggling.
103 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadIt's not so much the fact of taking the picture that disturbed me - I fully expected to be catalogued, and filmed, in 1) an international airport and 2) in China. OK, if I had my way with society, we wouldn't be doing that, but that's the status quo right now and I can deal with it.
It's that I felt I was being tricked into it. Having your biometric picture taken and saved is somewhat intimate, I want to at least mentally prepare myself and pose for the camera. It's mainly an emotional problem. It is just a bit short shoving somebody into a foto booth.
My personal opinion is that China is often quite tone-deaf when it comes to being dystopian and creepy. The actual security practices are not too different from what we have in the west, but the way they present them make them seem like from a bad movie.
SHENZHEN—Gan Liping pumped her bike across a busy street, racing to beat a crossing light before it turned red. She didn’t make it. Immediately, her face popped up on two video screens above the street. “Jaywalkers will be captured using facial-recognition technology,” the screens said.
Facial-recognition technology, once a specter of dystopian science fiction, is becoming a feature of daily life in China, where authorities are using it on streets, in subway stations, at airports and at border crossings in a vast experiment in social engineering. Their goal: to influence behavior and identify lawbreakers.
Ms. Gan, 31 years old, had been caught on camera crossing illegally here once before, allowing the system to match her two images. Text displayed on the crosswalk screens identified her as a repeat offender.
“I won’t ever run a red light again,” she said.
"It's for the greater good"
You could say that in more (relatively) free societies it is also this way. But no. In China the default position is "everything is forbidden unless explicitly permitted" whereas in the US for example this is flipped to the near opposite position, "everything is permitted unless it involves doing something forbidden."
Brin's argument is that as the technology to record everything becomes so cheap that the cost is trivial, trying to enforce privacy and anonymity in a sea of cameras is a losing battle. We're better off as a society if we allow the recording and de-anonymization of public spaces, but we should also make this information free to anyone. In return for the loss privacy in public spaces, we should demand that the wealthy and powerful give up some of their privacy as well. Obviously, the wealthy and powerful will fight to keep their privacy, but as recording devices become ubiquitous the landscape favors those pushing to set information free rather than those trying to secure it.
To relate it to the story here, rather than fighting the anonymity of private citizens who commit minor trespasses like jaywalking, we should be focusing on uncovering trespasses committed by those in power. Say, the financial dealings of Xi Jinping or Donald Trump.
We already have courts and laws, however being rich and well connected offers a degree of immunity.
I don't think it would work if we didn't apply it to everyone equally. I don't care what your job is, or how many "state secrets" it deals with, no exceptions.
I also think it would bring ~10 years of extreme societal collapse as we would realize that most of our social norms make no sense, and those things that we demonize are actually quite common.
You might also be interested in: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/this-ma...
Like racism?
I was thinking of things more like: functional drug users, sexual-practices, etc.
One can make the same argument about height-ism, ugly-ism, or money-ism.
> (especially since this is not really considered a crime)
The seed is already planted: it is ok to display the face of a citizen, as long as he's a criminal. No debate about what kinds of public need does supersede the privacy rights of the individual citizen, or what kind of crimes would justify this kind of behavior from the part of the government. It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays.
All they have to do now is to lower (or I'd say, keep lowering) the threshold; jaywalking is right around the corner.
Whether you display them publicly or not, if they broke the law, they should be punished. We can't live in some magical limbo situation where we simultaneously have laws and not enforce them most of the time. I.e.: If the tech is there to apply the laws that have currently been "agreed" by the public, then there should be no question or overriding factors to consider.
Talk of privacy and "individual rights" is just distracting fluff in that context. We've already decided that certain actions merit punishment. We're just now upset that the coming omnipotent presence of surveillance can actually make us adhere to the things we've been whacking other people over the head with. You know, the ones that "got caught" doing it.
Either that, or simply start repealing all these non-sense laws that we don't actually want to punish people for. The third alternative is a gigantic mess of exceptions and "buts" that want to enable us to eat our surveillance cake, and sometimes keep it. Make no mistake, that is exactly what the "privacy" folks are advocating for. More bureaucracy.
It's incumbent upon all of us to apply that pressure and work to maintain that decentralization. It's especially incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems and b) develop counter-measures.
Better, do it all year long.
this wouldn't defeat something like gait detection though: http://www.geradts.com/html/Documents/gait.htm
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528835-600-cameras-... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925574/ [3] http://www.ai.mit.edu/research/abstracts/abstracts2001/visio...
1. A character in a Cory Doctorow novel does this for the same reason.I can't remember which novel though.
Yes, US is more democratic and power is more decentralized, but without guardians or more awareness from the citizens, it's easily a slippery slope. Think UK and Theresa May. All Powers want more power.
Keep in mind, this necessarily includes not building those types of systems for their own use either.
Once a private entity has collected some juicy data, the government gets roll up and say "I'll help myself to some of that." And at that point the company has also preemptively conceded the vast majority of principled opposition to government use of such systems by exploiting them for commercial reasons.
Decentralization isn't as protective as you might think, as most capital funding for this type of public safety infrastructure comes from Federal grants.
Technologists have no professional ethical duties, licensure or other reasons to behave ethically. It's unrealistic to assume that individuals will choose some vague ethical position over money.
a) Western municipalities have deployed similar systems, albeit with massively significant differences in use case
b) Western political structures aren't perfect
c) the professional ethical obligations of technologists have yet to be codified
I'm certainly in agreement with you on all of these points, but I'm unclear on your argument. Is it just that many talented people will happily contribute to building a nightmarishly repressive socio-technical apparatus if the money is good enough? Again, no disagreement there, the article itself, and the many other stories on HN related to the shenanigans of Western security agencies, is ample proof of that.
If you ask a CPA or Attorney to do something contrary to their professional code of ethics, they will typically tell you "no" -- their livelihood is at stake.
The grey areas in IT are much broader and more situational. Is pervasive surveillance to protect citizens from terrorists unethical? Is it unethical to automatically police jaywalking? Is it unethical for me to use facial recognition to identify people approaching my home? There is no right answer to these questions.
I've forgotten the company name, but I googled it at the time and it was indeed a facial recognition hardware company.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/
http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-eye-sky/
It's already pervasive:
1998:"Face-recognition CCTV launched" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/face-recognition-cctv-laun...
2015: "A scheme widely used by UK stores to identify criminals is testing facial recognition technology, the BBC has learned." http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35111363
2016: "Retailers are increasingly using facial recognition technology to track your face. With an estimated 59% of UK fashion retailers doing it, is the anonymity of cities an outdated idea?" https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/03/revealed-faci...
2014: "UK, the world’s most surveilled state, begins using automated face recognition to catch criminals" https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186435-uk-the-worlds-mos...
2014: "CCTV cameras on Britain's roads capture 26 million images every day" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/23/cctv-cameras...
2017: "New York plans to install vast system of facial recognition cameras that matches drivers licenses to social media accounts at bridges and tunnels " http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4167854/New-York-ins...
You can google for more, watch out for those black helicopters tonight.
Wow. Just, wow. And I agree: even governments that "don't want to do it" will be compelled to at the first horrific incident that could have been prevented with the technology. The only way to stop that from happening is to outlaw it. I simply don't believe there are very many Edward Snowdens in the world.
Personally I prefer safety. And I avoid showing myself over online for privacy concerns. But I do not call safety measure a poly to implement totalitarian government.
If you have a systematic approach to achieve safety and counter terrorism, without monitoring citizens, then please state it briefly. I personally have no idea how to prevent without close monitoring.
China is different, it has always been totalitarian. It's natural for the government to monitor citizens without much resistance. This is a statement, without value judgement.
Why shouldn't the burden be on the other side? Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism? That states will actually use it that way, when the threat of terror is so politically useful?
Because without making a strong case along those lines first, you can't even take the "I'll trade privacy for safety" position in good faith at all.
The 9/11 attackers were already subjects of surveillance when they attacked. The Boston Marathon bombers were already being closely monitored but were not stopped.
Disciplinarians, cops for example, have dreamed of omniscience since the dawn of time. The panopticon dates to the 1790s! Despite the fact that we come closer to a state of all-seeing every day, I'm not aware of any compelling evidence that it's actually turning out to be very useful to prevent violent crime or acts of terror.
Police live under a fundamental illusion that people can be divided into good or bad, ignoring the role of circumstances, ease of deniability and special pleading in how it actually goes down. Most of all with their own abuse of power.
Clearly, terrorism is a symptom. Its cause is not bad people are not monitored, but they have various reason to think harm innocent people is the only way to advance their objectives.
Can anyone address such issues? Unlikely. History has shown that terrorism is seldom solved, they are extinguished, through escalation to war or complete annihilation of the weaker part.
Do I support monitoring? Not always. But if I am not feeling safe, I am OK to sacrifice some privacy and take some risk of being harmed by the government.
I am not saying you should agree with this, but that's my thoughts.
> Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism?
This way of reasoning seems fine, but really is just a way of showing me being using unfounded argument to support my claim. In reality, as I said, solving terrorism is not monitoring's job, but it makes me feel safe, because someone is doing something that can reduce the risk (not substantially).
edit: link on Italian anti-terrorist efforts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-...
Further debate on the SlateStarCodex subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6j8703/cult...
Attack the root cause of the problem, namely alienation of youths [0] (Aarhus Model). These preventative systems of surveillance only foment opportunities for abuse.
[0] - http://psy.au.dk/fileadmin/Psykologi/Forskning/Preben_Bertel...
In addition to trying to protect the privacy of citizens, we should also be trying to make our government as transparent as possible. Ideally, the people would have the government under surveillance more closely than the government has the people under surveillance.
* MIT Technology review has a story on this [1]
* Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify fugitives [2]
* JD (i.e., the competitor of Alibaba which is somewhat analogous to Amazon here) You can pay for deliveries using facial recognition [3]
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough-te...
[2] http://gbtimes.com/china/police-robot-makes-china-debut
[3] https://qz.com/1009155/chinas-second-largest-ecommerce-compa...
Not just China. Police in Wales (UK) are already using facial recognition systems[1] and have in fact already arrested at least one person because of it, just this month[2].
[1] https://www.south-wales.police.uk/en/newsroom/introduction-o...
[2] https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/police-automat...
It was a Chinese company discussing their surveillance in major cities and their use of GPUs for their form of video compression. With the specific goal of keeping the data as small as possible.
It was the most dystopian talk I've ever been at, and the presentors were all smiles and laughs.
I honestly question how well it works at scale with hundreds of millions of faces at different angles. I asked them about this, and they said it won't be long now to fix. Their explanation was they only need one accurate view of their face to tag those people. Then they just track them where ever they go.
1984 is fantasy because the telescreens couldn't scale with a human listener. Worry not, deep learning will bridge the gap.
What a disaster!
If you are paranoid and not a good make-up artist, you may have to settle for glasses and clothing with integrated LEDs designed to confuse known recognition algorithms. Or maybe just start wearing masks and veils in public.
They might be able to track John/Jane Doe #1 across a plaza, and maybe match that up across multiple cameras, but without a reference database connecting gaits to public identities, there is a possibility that without reasonable suspicion, the data for John/Jane Doe #1 would have to be purged before it could be linked to you.
Of course, a state-level actor that chooses not to obey the law could retain those data indefinitely, and eventually identify you via statistical analyses. If you don't want that to happen, you will need to get politically active and make public oversight of agencies that perform surveillance of the public an issue.
Otherwise, you might have to wear specialized clothing and shoes that change heel height and sole shape as you walk.
1) The government can track me everywhere with cameras anywhere they want in public; companies would be mostly restricted to when I walk past their franchises in most cases (drones could be an issue, but cross that bridge when we get to it)
2) The government agencies have motivation and a history of suppressing new or bothersome political parties which challenge their budgets. Ether by spreading dirt gathered via other activities or jailing activists such things are at least substantially harder for a company to accomplish.
They supply facial recognition hardware/software that can track you across your journey in an airport accurately.
It's not a huge leap to get it over an entire CCTV network.
That's evil.
the videos are all connected and facials are recognized quickly(a few seconds for millions of faces), they tracked down criminals(and their cars) who was on the run for thousands of miles all the way, in less than 24 hours sometimes. I think the whole project was called something like "peaceful city project".
in US, where surveillance cameras are scarce to find in most public areas, you need eye witness all the time, many cases take years to resolve, if at all.
https://www.kairos.com/diversity-recognition
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
Eagle Eye movie:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/