It's only a matter of time before someone invents glasses, masks, hats, or devices that are specifically designed to throw off these systems. Then the surveillance state will up the game by referencing other data - height, shoe type, clothing preferences, activated mobile phones, association with other known people ...
We have cameras that image right through fabric, so, forget burqas. Such cameras are used to identify terrorist by seeing right through those face scarves and ski masks they are often seen wearing.
If people start using these this will mean that they have accepted that public space is a hostile environment you can't enter without protection. We are building a pretty sad future society.
Addition: and our best and brightest are working at Google and Facebook to develop the necessary infrastructure.
Well I already feel like that while driving. The cops aren't out there to help you, they're actively looking for wrongdoing. The problem with that is anyone who happens to fall into a targeted political group will be "wrongdoing" no matter what.
To be an intelligent person and watch these things going on is the doorway to madness.
That's legally been the case for decades. Anything in the public view is exempt from whatever privacy rights we have left, and has been for quite some time.
That's not true, while technically true in a legal sense, practically we had privacy via anonymity in the masses. It took a large amount of effort to track a single person.
Of course governments and bussiness don't want this to change because they can take advantage of this with the new technology.
But it doesn't mean that the previous laws are appropriate for today, nor imo should any legal precedents apply any more because the situation has significantly changed.
>That's not true, while technically true in a legal sense,
That is true in a legal sense. That's why I put "legally" at the beginning.
The point is there are no legal hurdles to overcome for the government. These are the most difficult and this is absolutely true. Legally we have very little if any privacy in public. The only hurdles are technological ones, which automate the inspection of people in public areas. (i.e. facial recognition cameras).
Police can spy on your in your own home legally, if you leave a window open, because you just made that part of your home public. They'll setup across your yard and watch you with telescopic lenses. Police also spy on people in their own homes using IR and thermal cameras, which cannot be defeated easily, and this crosses (leaps) the boundary of your home being private. Apparently the thermal radiation emitted is now public space. I remember this in court, but don't remember the outcome.
I suspect though that when these laws were made, lawmakers didn't anticipate the ease and scope of which automation could make spying. Maybe they'll reconsider, but the police departments have a lot of sway over lawmakers, so I seriously doubt it.
Have no doubt though, police aren't interested in your privacy, they are interested in arrest counts. Privacy laws are an inconvenient burden to their jobs and they will use any methods they can think of to circumvent your privacy rights and argue technicalities in court. They will usually win.
Of course, all of this was enabled with the War on Drugs.
The constution was written more then 200 years ago based on the world back then. Maybe it's time to adapt the rules to our world. I don't think the authors of the Constitution even remotely imagined the possibility that one institution could have perfect surveillance of the whole country. But that's where we are going if we don't change the rules.
The constitution has plenty of privacy rights, our government just chooses to circumvent them through sly interpretation, backed up by the courts.
The legal ability of police to spy that we have today is such circumvention.
But to your point, if the government of the last 5 decades is willing to skirt the constitution as written, I'm not sure how much a new one with stronger verbiage will fair.
It seems the Constitution leaves a lot to room for interpretation. Otherwise placing people on the supreme court wouldn't be such a big deal. Tightening up some paragraphs would probably help a lot.
Note that if you completely change everything about you, a system could detect that something is fishy because it can't match you with anyone.
A work-around would then be to instead mimic someone (and make sure that the someone is not being seen by any camera at the same time as you, and that they could realistically be in the same place as you).
Gait recognition fails because your gait changes regularly. Something as simple as a sprain and you move very differently, but even new shoes ends up making a noticeable difference.
Already dealt with by an FR process called "liveness detection" - this is used to identify prosthetics on the face and similar methods of disguise. It entails looking for the blood flow pulse under your skin, correct temperature variations across the face and similar.
Nah, then the surveillance state will simply make those illegal, and trigger an arrest warrant when they are unable to detect a face.
This is already happening btw, with bans on facial covering clothing (e.g. the niqab, but it's automatically extended to balaclavas and full helmets when worn off of a motorcycle) in e.g. France.
That's the geek attitude here, thinking it's a technical problem. But it's a human one, and no amount of smartness will fix it.
If you have a surveillance state, it will not "will up the game by referencing other data". It will simply make the gears illegal, and the price to pay harsh. Now you won't dare wearing them and if you do, you are guilty even if you are not a criminal, and tagging yourself as such, making it easier for the police to find you.
Yes, exactly. And another element of the geek attitude is overestimating the number of people willing to adopt a burdensome technological solution in the name of (a very particular kind of) freedom.
Most people will just accept the new surveillance reality and then act according to the state's wishes, exactly as most drivers slow down when they see a cop by the side of the road.
If China doesn't have the resources to stop all actual crime, they certainly don't have the resources to stop people from wearing makeup, sunglasses or hats.
Depends how many people are avoiding facial recognition.
A large railway station can have 15 to 100 million passenger entries per year [1]. That means if 0.1% of people hide from facial recognition, cops at such stations could arrest 40-270 people per day. And with a suspect arrested, a photo showing them in disguise, and a police witness, it's an open-and-shut case.
That's way more cases closed per cop-hour than investigating complex crimes like burglary, murder or rape. Just what you want, if your police chief is judged on their clean-up/arrest rates.
And if order of fewer people than that are avoiding facial recognition? Then you've got a surveillance state.
You don't need a disguise. You just need some accessories or make up to throw off the neural network. Humans are still much better at facial recognition than computers, but even they can get thrown off by make up. There's no way to tell if someone is intentionally trying to avoid facial recognition or regularly wear makeup or sunglasses.
We carry phones that track our every move, and could probably stop them with little faraday bags. Credit card bags are popular, phone bags are not, so I think most people don't care sadly.
Kids today might not remember, but a big reason for carrying a phone traditionally was to receive a phone call. A farady bag is about as much use as turning it off.
Most of the time people contact me by instant message or comments for social stuff, and emails for work stuff. It's rare that I get a call that wasn't pre-arranged.
Actually I'd feel rude phoning someone without arranging it first. Not terribly rude, but a little uncomfortable. What if they are driving or in an important meeting?
So maybe phones are there to let me check messages and alerts when convenient. A huge proportion of the money you paid for that phone went on the data modem after all. It isn't really a phone means voice, or sound. But folders on a computer are not made of paper. It's just a word.
> Actually I'd feel rude phoning someone without arranging it first. Not terribly rude, but a little uncomfortable. What if they are driving or in an important meeting?
Then they don't answer it. It's called self control!
Are spam calls really a problem in your country? I've taken 24 calls in the last 7 days, none of which were spam. I'm not sure the last time I received a spam call was.
LOL
Literally as I typed that above my phone started ringing, I didn't recognize the number, answered it, and it was a spam call. Lasted 12 second. That's the only one in my "recent" calls, which go back to March 27th. What are the chances.
>>Actually I'd feel rude phoning someone without arranging it first.
Things have evolved to this? How do you arrange the phone call? Call them to ask if you can call them :) ? If you have to think about it or are unsure, then don't call them.
sorry but you need to make your circle smaller. The people you pay (accountants, lawyers etc) will accept your calls by definition, but if your uncle is bothered by your phone call then you, in essence, have no uncle.
I'm happy to say that my problem is different, I'm not fond of phone calls, but when I call them, they're thrilled.
It’s not just what you wear and how you look. There are many more ways for AI to identify you: the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you move your hands or tilt your head, etc. Keeping track of all these subtle giveaways of yourself would be relatively easy for AI, much harder for humans to keep track of or to hide.
Several different types of these physical deterrents to FR have been available for several years, and this is after state actors employed them for their own operations. The FR industry has multiple methods to mitigate, as well as recognizes that FR is merely one biometric of many possible identification methods. The passive nature of FR is great, but it is not the only technology with passive identification capabilities. FYI, I'm at a leader in the FR industry, writing the FR applications used by many. (www.CyberExtruder.com)
Question that struck me immediately after reading this headline: As someone in his 20’s who splits time living between western Europe and the US, just how plausible is my fear of seeing something like this either here or in my home country in my lifetime?
Another one which got a bit of press was Download (music festival) in 2015: "A police force has defended scanning the faces of 90,000 festival-goers this weekend and checking them against a list of wanted criminals across Europe."
In the UK I suspect this is already in place and will become more and more accurate as time goes on. That's inevitable. What concerns me is that in the US it won't be the government doing it, but it will be private companies, targetted adverts will appear as you walk past billboards (Facebook Shadow profile 12491123 is approaching billboard 9874, switch to hemorrhoid cream advert)
I think the US already has big private networks of number plate recognition cameras that sell feeds to cops, bounty hunters, advertisers, and traffic alert companies. It wouldn't be much of a hop.
I can't remember the name of the project, but at least NY is full of CCTVs that record and index everything (ie tracking the position of cars, pedestrians all with searchable characteristics ie colors, car models, biometrics etc).
But I haven't heard about "retail" data sales or any data sales/private sector services in general.
It's already tested in Germany (a Berlin train station afair) for viability with volunteers. A similar test a few years ago failed (too many false negatives, afair).
The real question to ask yourself is of all the groups you belong to (HN readers, people in their 20s, etc, etc) will any of them fall out to the point that the system flags you as deserving of "driving while black" treatment at any point in the future.
I am at ISC West right now, a global security conference held in Vegas every year. I write FR and my company's software is in over a half dozen partner booths, as well as our tech is the FR core for several others. Due to the recent gun violence at Parkland, in Vegas, and on and on we are talking with many, many school districts, large retail chains, city officials, private and public parks, and reps of high net worth families who want FR systems up and operating yesterday. You're gonna see FR blanket the United States. It has already started.
How good would you say the tech is? E.g., if Facebook put cameras outside a football stadium with 60k people, how many people would they correctly recognize? And how many false positives would be generated?
I ask because I'm wondering how much China's announcement here is a stunt that goes well beyond the state of the art.
The tech is there, it works. The current hurdle is getting understanding between the practical limitations of modern computers, the resolutions and image characteristics of various cameras. Trying to use a 2K or 4K video stream simply overwhelms the current generation of processors in the systems 'normal' organizations can afford. Plus those video streams are often up-scaled and are lower resolution in their hardware, very wide angled, and placed poorly for FR. Basically, the tech is there, but the practical aspects of using FR with typical financial and logistical constraints is not there yet. This practical aspect is just the normal learning curve.
Facebook's FR is nowhere but FB, forget it. There is a range of false positive rates, depending upon how an FR system is employed. The best resource for the state of the art is probably this: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8173.pdf
(FYI, my work is vendor "L")
Depends on the cameras, but I would imagine Facebook and Google's tech + data to be able to positively identify 99% or more of the people. Especially with multiple shots per person. Accuracy might be as high as 99.9% if you have drones go over the crowds, and have high res cameras at chokepoints.
Correlate this with cell phone data and probably they have 100% accuracy. There is a reason Google Fi exists.
I say all this as a happy Google User and a developer of Face Recognition Technology. Those in the know realized privacy has been dead for awhile now. Generally computers can do most anything we can do in say 200 ms or less with the proper training data, and they generally do it better than humans. The giants have all the data they need, they just need to spend time annotating training sets and running analysis over larger and larger sets until they reach super human performance.
The Netherlands, which is a surveillance state, has boasted quite some time ago that they can track everyone's movement everywhere at least in the big cities.
The police is also so overstaffed that there is hardly any need for automation.
In some sense I'm not worried too much about FR tech on its own. A few generations ago, most of us lived in small-enough contexts that human facial recognition served to identify us all the time anyhow. What I do worry about is the degree to which the video data and facial profile data is centralized.
Look at current surveillance cameras in the US as an example. There are a lot of them now, but data is held by a wide variety of people and institutions, and most of them just don't care about it unless something criminal happened.
If an individual school or workplace adds FR to their cameras such that they alerted to strangers in restricted areas, I wouldn't worry about that at all. If they own the data and have their own FR profiles, that's cool by me.
But that's very different than China's effort, where they're clearly working toward complete coverage of 1.4 billion people, with strongly centralized control. Now that they have president-for-life Xi, that's a lot of authoritarian potential.
'China man' seems like a good way to suggest both the nationality and gender of the person, and the location of the incident, towards the beginning of the headline.
That’s a headline style called the “noun pile”, at which the BBC excels. This one is tame by their standards (but I agree it’s jarring to put “China” and “Man” together that way).
Thanks, I learned something new today: "noun pile-ups" allow the insertion of many key words into a small slot. It's something I've noticed unconsciously, but now I can recognize it. Interesting that the practice is more prevalent in the British press.
>Although the term has no negative connotations in older dictionaries,[1][2] and the usage of such parallel compound terms as Englishman, Frenchman and Irishman[3] remain unobjectionable,[4] the term Chinaman is noted as offensive by modern dictionaries and is no longer the preferred nomenclature
In other words, BS creating an issue when there's none. Chinaman is fine.
Yes, we should also start calling black people a term they used to be called because it used to be okay. Why is it that some people lack the miniscule amount of decency required to respect a person's or group's preferences on what they like to be called? What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?
>Yes, we should also start calling black people a term they used to be called because it used to be okay.
Actually we're not all US-based here, and we don't have any historical baggage with our black people like that.
Plus, instead of worrying about words, maybe people should focus on stopping cop shootings, mass incarcerations, red-lining and other, non-trivial matters, affecting black people?
And yes, one does preclude the other. One is hypocritical theater, the other is actual change -- opportunity costs and all.
>What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?
There was no "respecting another's preferences". It was mostly due to people having insignificant lives (sic) and compensating by being worried about words on behalf of another. Nobody actually asked the Chinese...
"Chinaman" hasn't been the preferred nomenclature since at least 1998 (when The Big Lebowsky came out). Here, as others have noted, it's China man, though.
> The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature.
In the american context it actually is different. Chinaman is a derogatory term for a chinese person and pretty offensive. Its obviously not used in a derogatory way in this context but the association that is made is distracting from the article’s content.
The bigger question is why are China advertising this
1) Was the man actually caught by someone acting undercover and they want to protect the agent's identity with plausable deniability
2) Does the system not actually work very well (say a 1 in 100k hit rate), but they want people to think that if they are wanted, they can't hide, so they'll either turn themselves in, or be less likely to do the (unspecified) crime in the first place
3) Is there pressure that this project is overrunning/overbudget and they need a PR win to keep those higher up in the government happy
There's also the possibility that they want to show (fake) the supposed power of this system even to their own citizens to elevate the apparent reach of the government.
Say what you want about rights, but Chinese government is ruthlessly efficient about what it wants done, and it rarely loses (except for the recent trade relations fiasco)
The surveillance AI knows nothing of the difference between malum in se (crime!) and malum prohibitum ("crime"). The pamphleteer protesting local corruption and the strongarm robber are caught in the same trap.
Some kind of Orwellian world we inhabit ain't it? And here I thought those '80s dystopian/cyberpunk sci-fi films where the street hackers had random slashes of paint on their faces was just some kind of edgy tribal thing! In fact, it was as though someone had a time machine and went back and planted those ideas somehow.
I don't know if this is the main reason, but I read an article saying that Chinese companies were starting to export this tech to other countries. So that would be one way to "advertise" its effectiveness.
Also, the more China gets other countries to enable the same kind of censorship and surveillance it does, too, the more it won't stand-out as a sore thumb and the less it will be called out by "principled" leaders in the future.
> Contrast with the US which keeps it's NSA spying and data collection private. Until it isn't.
I think the USA is a bit behind China and the UK in applying surveillance technology to target individuals for petty things. Sure , it's technologically viable, but it seems there's no will yet to punish the evil jay walker with the full force of law.
I've worked in the industry for since 2003. Algorithm improvements in the past few years have been impressive. Plus if you set up a decent chokepoint at the ticket gate and get good images things are even easier for the algorithm.
This is almost certainly a silly question, but if I can't ask here, then who else will know?
Is there any methods out there which would let me fry surveillance cameras? EMP is a thing, but I have no idea of how that works. Can I fit an EMP into my pocket or do I need to drive a Truck worth of equipment? Is there some laser I could use to damage the lens or digital "eye" in the camera for good?
I am not a criminal, my life isn't that exciting, but I was wondering what tools are out there to combat surveillance cameras?
Not going out in public. Disabling surveillance cameras is considered vandalism and / or destruction of public property. And I'm sure the FCC and co won't like it much if you were to have a jammer to disrupt signals in the air either.
I don't know if you could have an EMP device focused enough to fry a camera without wrecking all the smartphones in the area. Maybe a powerful laser could be used to blind the sensor instead? Seems more practical to me. I wouldn't advise trying any of that though, I doubt you'll achieve much and in the current climate I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up with terrorism charges or something.
Put on a hard hat, retroreflective vest, and tool belt with lineman tools, and they won't even notice you were there.
Present an unremarkable, expected pattern, and the brain will forget you just as easily as it forgets an individual fern in the forest. In that sense, the lowest 10 feet of the climb is the most risky, as most people don't look up that often.
Paintball markers are likely a better choice, but very high cameras will still be out of reach. And then there is the issue of finding the cameras, but something like http://www.jet-protect.com/CS300Klanding.html can help...
Once a technology becomes pervasive and mature enough, it is no longer a question of finding hacks, workarounds, or tricks to fool the system. You might be able to do it for a time, but eventually your luck or attention will fail you and you will lose. ("Losing" may or may not have serious consequences for you, depending on how far you fall outside of social norms.)
When a technology becomes powerful enough, the only real solutions available to you are political, or in other words the so-called "four boxes of liberty". Or you can drop out of society, which unfortunately most often requires joining a tiny niche community full of weird social dropouts. Or you can just accept it. None of these are ideal, but hey, at least you have options...
Most current FR systems are required to operate through existing camera networks - organizations do not want to replace their existing cameras networks for the addition of FR. Those cameras have issues with illumination dynamic range - meaning an easy mitigation is to wear one of those baseball caps with blinky leds on them, as well as some eyeglass frames have (fashion) leds on them as well. Those small lights cause the camera to adjust for the brightness of the leds, causing the face to have reduced dynamic range - enough of a reduction to make FR on faces captured in this situation to be highly unreliable, if a face can be recovered at all.
I have a friend who is a private investigator. He mostly films people committing insurance fraud. His stories are amazing. My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk, but my friend had stalked the guys facebook, and saw that he was planning on attending this festival with thousands of people. Probably lots of walking. The trick was finding the guy. So he went to the parking lot and quickly tracked down the guy's car (before he was a PI, he repossessed cars, he's a pro at finding cars). After that, he went to the info desk and told them the guys car's lights were on. They made a quick announcement, and he went back to the parking lot to watch. Dutifully his target came back, looked, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back. My friend spent the rest of the night filming the guy walking, jumping, having a good time.
He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\",
When he catches a guy he saves the company tens of thousands of dollars. He only needs to catch one guy a week for it to be economically feasible to use his time. By the time they give him the case, there had already been a number of red flags.
However automation will allow everyone claiming this sort of beenfit on insurance to be automatically followed, evidence automatically gathered, and perhaps a minimum wage flunky in India to give it a once over before the automated summons is sent.
The cheat will be caught far sooner, and the PI will be out of a job.
Of course those who aren't cheating will also be caught, as the cameras identify people who look very similar, and the courts listen to how the camera has a 1 in a million chance of being wrong (therefore will identify 350 people in the US as being the same person).
It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation.
What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.
> "He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\ "
But they don't scale up with numbers or across geographically. The scary thing about automated processes of facial recognition is precisely the ability to scale to everyone and everywhere.
This and other automated tracking/recording/etc methods will basically make privacy a thing of the past. It should be illegal, because without privacy, there can't be democracy (see the Facebook scandals as an example).
Even assuming everybody in that village knows everybody else to the degree that Facebook knows you, it is at least mutual; ol' Grandma Francine knows I'm foolin' around but I know what Grandma Francine got up to when she was my age and who her daughter's real dad is, too. What private things do you know about the people serving ads to you? Nothing. Yesterday I saw someone on HN discussing their download of info from Facebook, which is supposed to include what advertisers know what, and they found they couldn't even find the advertiser's company name in Google.
And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.
So instead of privacy, I think we should push/work on transparency/openness on all side as much as possible. Facebook know everything about me, I want to know everything about facebook too.
maybe not, but those technologies are spreading everywhere... including license plate readers at every corners... which is why Steve Jobs didn't have one on his car... But he could have been tracked some other ways... with the wireless sensors in his tires for example (and most cars communicate wirelessly with the manufacturer)
I've been getting into OSINT since I started talking with the arms control community (over my concerns about mass cyber attack and autonomous vehicles) and you'd be floored at how shitty the tools they use are.
If you're even a halfway decent data scientist or cyber security professional you'd be 10x more effective at actually munging through data and finding people. Even simple things like munging through millions of records with regexes are hard for them.
It's not surprising to me that they think low tech ways are the most effective. The tools they use are really horrible and pale in comparison to basic shell scripting, let alone scipy.
But that does not scale for elite globalist AI and robotics based total domination control of society. When you have human investigators you have a human weak link that could turn on you. Robots and AI don't ask questions .... ever.
> My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk
Isn't this something that the insurance company would be able to confirm by forcing the person to undergo a medical exam? Seems hard to imagine that such a disability can be faked well enough to fool a doctor.
Controversial and likely to be downvoted but what's the problem here? Surely it's good that a law breaker has been caught? If you're in China, you play by their rules, no?
"Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example". Elsewhere, in a letter, he described the Panopticon prison as "a mill for grinding rogues honest"."
So everyone else is force into being surveilled as well? In the US military, there are health and comfort inspections. They have a legitimate use: inspect the living quarters on base to ensure that personnel are living in safe, habitable conditions. That's not what they're used for.
Word had passed that there was a small Rx drug ring in the barracks. Why search only the accused rooms when you can search the entirety of the barracks all at once. I didn't have any contraband in my room. I don't think I ever had any contraband. Did that matter? Nope.
Sometime between 5 and 6 AM, we were all made to unlock all of our drawers and cabinets, exit our rooms immediately, and wait. If you didn't unlock something, they'd cut the locks with bolt cutters. You'd return to a room that was absolutely ransacked. Seriously - it looked like a thief was quickly sprinting from room to room tossing everything in sight while hoping to find a hidden stash of jewels.
Sounds a bit far-fetched for the general public right? Hardly! This is the same thing as a summary no-knock warrant.
That's the trick: to sway your attention to the good without considering the bad.
The bad here is scope creep of the surveillance network, particularly in a totalitarian regime. But once you've acquiesced to the "good" parts of it, you will rationalize the bad parts unless you think critically.
This sort of automated policing forces people to live in fear. Having to live by the letter of the law makes society paranoid, and that's distinctly unhealthy. It makes it very easy for a corrupt government to extend their control over the people too. And lastly, everyone breaks the law in minor ways. You might speed in your car by a couple of mph, or jaywalk once in the wrong place, or drop some litter in a controlled area. Just imagine living in the knowledge that a mistake like that will be caught, and you will be arrested for it (and maybe lose your job and livelihood because of that). This is definitely a bad thing.
It's not the "will" be arrested that matters. It's that you "can" be arrested is held over people's heads to prevent them from voicing dissent or standing up to the government.
I mean, I live in fear now that going slightly over the speed limit I'll be caught. You never know if the police are nearby, so in public you live by the letter of the law. I don't understand how this changes that is all :)
Are you saying that you can not realize the idea that a full enforcement capacity of the law will change people's relationship to law enforcement or do you implicitly say that tsuch potential change is nothing to worry about?
Honest question as the first is just a capacity problem and the second (I guess) a moral argument.
Yeah that's not how I see this issue at all. I see it more as a terrible tool for an oppressive regime to use, but for most it's probably fine. Unless they went crazy and started mailing people tickets, like they do with red light cameras, I don't think it will be bad. Many of those cameras get fought anyway under our right to face your accuser if taken to court.
"If you're in China, you play by their rules, no?"
No. No one goes a day without breaking, at least, a minor law, especially in places where many laws are straight up crazy. Perfect surveillance, the power to make up laws, and the power to enforce them is too much for any one entity to have.
First they used it on those that had committed crimes, and nobody spoke up. Then they used it on (etc.) and nobody spoke up. When finally they used it on me, there was noone left to speak up.
I think there's something to be said for the ability to realize you (as a criminal) have made a mistake, and decide to just leave everything and start over.
So long as you're laying low enough to not draw any attention, it seems like in many cases this would be a better thing than the cost of the criminal justice system and incarceration, plus the way incarceration seems to ruin any life that had any value beforehand.
This isn't to say that this option should be encouraged, or even allowed to work a lot of the time. But the fact that there's some flexibility there, keeping the system from complete bureaucratic ossification, has some value to society.
Some people were born in China, and haven't had a chance to opt in to the rules.
Sometimes the rules are not just. Perhaps you like Falun Gong. Perhaps you're a member of a disliked race/religion/hair color/etc.
In addition to making it much harder to avoid getting caught without going full Ann Frank, this makes it much harder for individuals who recognize that the law is unjust and are in a position to let it slide actually let it slide. After all, the cameras will get you eventually.
The problem is not that they caught a criminal (assuming they actually were a criminal by sensible standards). The problem is the concentration of power this implies, and the abuse potential that comes with that power. One of the greatest dangers to human flourishing historically has been concentration of power.
the bbc publishing an article with "China man" in it's title, meant to identify someone of Chinese origin just made my day. Stay classy, bcc and thanks for the grin
The fact that the comment section isn't littered with reference to "The Big Lebowski" says a lot about HN. Much of it is very good -- serious discussion undiluted by the tempting instant gratification of easy shots.
I still miss some humor, but maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe its civilization ou barbarie, seriousness or eternal september.
Wow. And we're to believe that? I get it; that's the excuse for putting them there (on street cars) but really, they never get used for anything else? Like pervasive public surveillance by the state?
Read carefully to identify the source: Police said the 31-year-old, who was wanted for "economic crimes", was "shocked" when he was caught.
The source was Chinese police. So, in essence, this is propaganda, not news.
Propaganda: information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented
I have a feeling that this technology will do to crime what fingerprinting did back in the days.
Lots of crime being recorded on camera and data saved but we do not yet have the ability to process that information. Soon though, a lot of people are going to be arrested 10-20 years later for crimes that they never imagined they could be caught for.
The future socialist authoritarians masquerading as "liberals" envision for you. It's already almost as bad in the UK where you are picked up by the police for saying things that offend people who are stealing the whole country away from the native population.
When every second of your life is recorded and might have to be accounted for -- what a burden.
And we already know how hard it can be, at times, to explain a moment of strange-looking but innocent behavior to police.
All the more so if you are an unfavored, targeted minority (of whatever form: Race, class, intellect, psychology...).
It's not just the recording. It's what people in power (of various sorts) may do with it.
You know how you don't like it when a stranger in your vicinity seems to take an unusual interest in you?
This. All the time.
Discretion gets driven out of the equation, when there's a permanent record that anyone might use, at any time, rather than a momentary decision that passes, by those in one's presence.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadBut wearing large sunglasses in the evening, or a hat that covers part of your face, can be used as a signal that you're hiding something.
Amongst some other projects by Adam Harvey centered on facial recognition: https://ahprojects.com/projects/
Addition: and our best and brightest are working at Google and Facebook to develop the necessary infrastructure.
To be an intelligent person and watch these things going on is the doorway to madness.
Of course governments and bussiness don't want this to change because they can take advantage of this with the new technology.
But it doesn't mean that the previous laws are appropriate for today, nor imo should any legal precedents apply any more because the situation has significantly changed.
That is true in a legal sense. That's why I put "legally" at the beginning.
The point is there are no legal hurdles to overcome for the government. These are the most difficult and this is absolutely true. Legally we have very little if any privacy in public. The only hurdles are technological ones, which automate the inspection of people in public areas. (i.e. facial recognition cameras).
Police can spy on your in your own home legally, if you leave a window open, because you just made that part of your home public. They'll setup across your yard and watch you with telescopic lenses. Police also spy on people in their own homes using IR and thermal cameras, which cannot be defeated easily, and this crosses (leaps) the boundary of your home being private. Apparently the thermal radiation emitted is now public space. I remember this in court, but don't remember the outcome.
I suspect though that when these laws were made, lawmakers didn't anticipate the ease and scope of which automation could make spying. Maybe they'll reconsider, but the police departments have a lot of sway over lawmakers, so I seriously doubt it.
Have no doubt though, police aren't interested in your privacy, they are interested in arrest counts. Privacy laws are an inconvenient burden to their jobs and they will use any methods they can think of to circumvent your privacy rights and argue technicalities in court. They will usually win.
Of course, all of this was enabled with the War on Drugs.
The legal ability of police to spy that we have today is such circumvention.
But to your point, if the government of the last 5 decades is willing to skirt the constitution as written, I'm not sure how much a new one with stronger verbiage will fair.
Note that if you completely change everything about you, a system could detect that something is fishy because it can't match you with anyone. A work-around would then be to instead mimic someone (and make sure that the someone is not being seen by any camera at the same time as you, and that they could realistically be in the same place as you).
I don't think you would last long, though. And horses are probably not allowed at most concerts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY5KTVA_2ys
This is already happening btw, with bans on facial covering clothing (e.g. the niqab, but it's automatically extended to balaclavas and full helmets when worn off of a motorcycle) in e.g. France.
If you have a surveillance state, it will not "will up the game by referencing other data". It will simply make the gears illegal, and the price to pay harsh. Now you won't dare wearing them and if you do, you are guilty even if you are not a criminal, and tagging yourself as such, making it easier for the police to find you.
Most people will just accept the new surveillance reality and then act according to the state's wishes, exactly as most drivers slow down when they see a cop by the side of the road.
A large railway station can have 15 to 100 million passenger entries per year [1]. That means if 0.1% of people hide from facial recognition, cops at such stations could arrest 40-270 people per day. And with a suspect arrested, a photo showing them in disguise, and a police witness, it's an open-and-shut case.
That's way more cases closed per cop-hour than investigating complex crimes like burglary, murder or rape. Just what you want, if your police chief is judged on their clean-up/arrest rates.
And if order of fewer people than that are avoiding facial recognition? Then you've got a surveillance state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
You need to make one mistake, just one. Plus, these people stick like sore thumbs
Most of the time people contact me by instant message or comments for social stuff, and emails for work stuff. It's rare that I get a call that wasn't pre-arranged.
Actually I'd feel rude phoning someone without arranging it first. Not terribly rude, but a little uncomfortable. What if they are driving or in an important meeting?
So maybe phones are there to let me check messages and alerts when convenient. A huge proportion of the money you paid for that phone went on the data modem after all. It isn't really a phone means voice, or sound. But folders on a computer are not made of paper. It's just a word.
Not that I'd suggest putting your phone in a bag.
Then they don't answer it. It's called self control!
LOL
Literally as I typed that above my phone started ringing, I didn't recognize the number, answered it, and it was a spam call. Lasted 12 second. That's the only one in my "recent" calls, which go back to March 27th. What are the chances.
Things have evolved to this? How do you arrange the phone call? Call them to ask if you can call them :) ? If you have to think about it or are unsure, then don't call them.
I'm happy to say that my problem is different, I'm not fond of phone calls, but when I call them, they're thrilled.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/05/met-police-f...
I would suspect if there has already been one public announcement then it will actually have been used covertly for quite a while.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-33132199
The real question to ask yourself is of all the groups you belong to (HN readers, people in their 20s, etc, etc) will any of them fall out to the point that the system flags you as deserving of "driving while black" treatment at any point in the future.
I ask because I'm wondering how much China's announcement here is a stunt that goes well beyond the state of the art.
Facebook's FR is nowhere but FB, forget it. There is a range of false positive rates, depending upon how an FR system is employed. The best resource for the state of the art is probably this: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8173.pdf (FYI, my work is vendor "L")
I say all this as a happy Google User and a developer of Face Recognition Technology. Those in the know realized privacy has been dead for awhile now. Generally computers can do most anything we can do in say 200 ms or less with the proper training data, and they generally do it better than humans. The giants have all the data they need, they just need to spend time annotating training sets and running analysis over larger and larger sets until they reach super human performance.
The police is also so overstaffed that there is hardly any need for automation.
Look at current surveillance cameras in the US as an example. There are a lot of them now, but data is held by a wide variety of people and institutions, and most of them just don't care about it unless something criminal happened.
If an individual school or workplace adds FR to their cameras such that they alerted to strangers in restricted areas, I wouldn't worry about that at all. If they own the data and have their own FR profiles, that's cool by me.
But that's very different than China's effort, where they're clearly working toward complete coverage of 1.4 billion people, with strongly centralized control. Now that they have president-for-life Xi, that's a lot of authoritarian potential.
We use *man for all kinds of ethnicities, Chinaman or China man is no different.
'China man' seems like a good way to suggest both the nationality and gender of the person, and the location of the incident, towards the beginning of the headline.
The Language Log describes them here:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1206
And lots more examples:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=277
Choice examples:
“China Ferrari sex orgy death crash”
“Brighton photo studio jobs misery”
What's better to the ear or shorter often prevails over consistency.
In other words, BS creating an issue when there's none. Chinaman is fine.
Actually we're not all US-based here, and we don't have any historical baggage with our black people like that.
Plus, instead of worrying about words, maybe people should focus on stopping cop shootings, mass incarcerations, red-lining and other, non-trivial matters, affecting black people?
And yes, one does preclude the other. One is hypocritical theater, the other is actual change -- opportunity costs and all.
>What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?
There was no "respecting another's preferences". It was mostly due to people having insignificant lives (sic) and compensating by being worried about words on behalf of another. Nobody actually asked the Chinese...
And there are 3 billion people that speak English. Not all carry the same baggage the US have with respect to racial slurs.
Even if it's the same language, in other places Chinaman just means "a man from China", no slur intended or transmitted.
Or can you imagine if they just used "Jew man" to mean a "Jewish man?"
Is it really that hard to use Chinese man?
This has spawned the amusing FloridaMan meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/FloridaMan/
> The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYOzUHnPJvU
Florida man does not carry this cultural baggage.
Thank you for bringing it up. I also don't understand why some people get so offended when they are told that certain words can cause harm to others.
I always try to be respectful and if someone tells me that a word or a name hurts them, then I just won't use it around them.
Surveillance Capitalism Will Continue til Morale Improves (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5VN72ZjDE)
1) Was the man actually caught by someone acting undercover and they want to protect the agent's identity with plausable deniability
2) Does the system not actually work very well (say a 1 in 100k hit rate), but they want people to think that if they are wanted, they can't hide, so they'll either turn themselves in, or be less likely to do the (unspecified) crime in the first place
3) Is there pressure that this project is overrunning/overbudget and they need a PR win to keep those higher up in the government happy
There's also the possibility that they want to show (fake) the supposed power of this system even to their own citizens to elevate the apparent reach of the government.
Say what you want about rights, but Chinese government is ruthlessly efficient about what it wants done, and it rarely loses (except for the recent trade relations fiasco)
Assuming it was a fiasco, which is not very clearly the case (if you speak about the tarrifs thing).
And for the humans in charge of the AI there is no such distinction so the AI is working as intended.
Also, the more China gets other countries to enable the same kind of censorship and surveillance it does, too, the more it won't stand-out as a sore thumb and the less it will be called out by "principled" leaders in the future.
Striking fear into citizens; literally state terrorism.
I think the USA is a bit behind China and the UK in applying surveillance technology to target individuals for petty things. Sure , it's technologically viable, but it seems there's no will yet to punish the evil jay walker with the full force of law.
State DMVs in the US get press hits all of the time when they upgrade facial recognition systems and catch people with multiple driver licenses.
Is there any methods out there which would let me fry surveillance cameras? EMP is a thing, but I have no idea of how that works. Can I fit an EMP into my pocket or do I need to drive a Truck worth of equipment? Is there some laser I could use to damage the lens or digital "eye" in the camera for good?
I am not a criminal, my life isn't that exciting, but I was wondering what tools are out there to combat surveillance cameras?
We Brits are quite capable of removing cameras
https://www.crewechronicle.co.uk/news/local-news/speed-camer...
https://www.expressandstar.com/news/2018/04/13/police-appeal...
Electric jamming won't work if they are wired.
Present an unremarkable, expected pattern, and the brain will forget you just as easily as it forgets an individual fern in the forest. In that sense, the lowest 10 feet of the climb is the most risky, as most people don't look up that often.
It was discussed on Bruce Schneier's blog, on which the topic of camera detection comes back regularly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100611052640/http://nexgadget.... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/detecting_bei...
I mean, this is the kind of stuff you would have found on phrak, 2600 and the likes back in the day.
(no snark, just an observation)
When a technology becomes powerful enough, the only real solutions available to you are political, or in other words the so-called "four boxes of liberty". Or you can drop out of society, which unfortunately most often requires joining a tiny niche community full of weird social dropouts. Or you can just accept it. None of these are ideal, but hey, at least you have options...
http://www.ilda.com/camera-sensor-damage.htm
I have a few crappy old cameras laying around, if I can find my purple laser pointer, I'll test and see what happens.
He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\",
The cheat will be caught far sooner, and the PI will be out of a job.
Of course those who aren't cheating will also be caught, as the cameras identify people who look very similar, and the courts listen to how the camera has a 1 in a million chance of being wrong (therefore will identify 350 people in the US as being the same person).
It's DNA evidence problems all over again.
It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation.
What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.
> He tells me he’s most familiar with the low tech ways
FTFY. Interesting story though, always neat to see how people like that operate.
> It's common on the Internet.
FTFY :^)
Fixed that for you.
But they don't scale up with numbers or across geographically. The scary thing about automated processes of facial recognition is precisely the ability to scale to everyone and everywhere.
And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.
In addition, moving was even more devastating then than it can be now. Mutual aid and social networks were everything, outsiders not trusted.
Wouldn't surprise me if China essentially made privacy illegal some time in the future.
You would have to suspect that the Chinese government aren’t missing this aspect.
If you're even a halfway decent data scientist or cyber security professional you'd be 10x more effective at actually munging through data and finding people. Even simple things like munging through millions of records with regexes are hard for them.
It's not surprising to me that they think low tech ways are the most effective. The tools they use are really horrible and pale in comparison to basic shell scripting, let alone scipy.
Isn't this something that the insurance company would be able to confirm by forcing the person to undergo a medical exam? Seems hard to imagine that such a disability can be faked well enough to fool a doctor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Word had passed that there was a small Rx drug ring in the barracks. Why search only the accused rooms when you can search the entirety of the barracks all at once. I didn't have any contraband in my room. I don't think I ever had any contraband. Did that matter? Nope.
Sometime between 5 and 6 AM, we were all made to unlock all of our drawers and cabinets, exit our rooms immediately, and wait. If you didn't unlock something, they'd cut the locks with bolt cutters. You'd return to a room that was absolutely ransacked. Seriously - it looked like a thief was quickly sprinting from room to room tossing everything in sight while hoping to find a hidden stash of jewels.
Sounds a bit far-fetched for the general public right? Hardly! This is the same thing as a summary no-knock warrant.
The bad here is scope creep of the surveillance network, particularly in a totalitarian regime. But once you've acquiesced to the "good" parts of it, you will rationalize the bad parts unless you think critically.
This sort of automated policing forces people to live in fear. Having to live by the letter of the law makes society paranoid, and that's distinctly unhealthy. It makes it very easy for a corrupt government to extend their control over the people too. And lastly, everyone breaks the law in minor ways. You might speed in your car by a couple of mph, or jaywalk once in the wrong place, or drop some litter in a controlled area. Just imagine living in the knowledge that a mistake like that will be caught, and you will be arrested for it (and maybe lose your job and livelihood because of that). This is definitely a bad thing.
Honest question as the first is just a capacity problem and the second (I guess) a moral argument.
No. No one goes a day without breaking, at least, a minor law, especially in places where many laws are straight up crazy. Perfect surveillance, the power to make up laws, and the power to enforce them is too much for any one entity to have.
So long as you're laying low enough to not draw any attention, it seems like in many cases this would be a better thing than the cost of the criminal justice system and incarceration, plus the way incarceration seems to ruin any life that had any value beforehand.
This isn't to say that this option should be encouraged, or even allowed to work a lot of the time. But the fact that there's some flexibility there, keeping the system from complete bureaucratic ossification, has some value to society.
Sometimes the rules are not just. Perhaps you like Falun Gong. Perhaps you're a member of a disliked race/religion/hair color/etc.
In addition to making it much harder to avoid getting caught without going full Ann Frank, this makes it much harder for individuals who recognize that the law is unjust and are in a position to let it slide actually let it slide. After all, the cameras will get you eventually.
On a side note: Now I had to research who Jacky Cheung (the artist in said concert) is and was not disappointed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrfp1DKyhKw
Three hours of Broadway style pop concert. Fascinating.
Civilization's about to get a whoooole lot more sci-fi!
[0]: https://cvdazzle.com/
I still miss some humor, but maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe its civilization ou barbarie, seriousness or eternal september.
This is happening already in a lot of countries.
For example in The Netherlands we have facial recognition in street cars so they can detect people who have a public transport ban. Since 2013.
The source was Chinese police. So, in essence, this is propaganda, not news.
Propaganda: information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
Lots of crime being recorded on camera and data saved but we do not yet have the ability to process that information. Soon though, a lot of people are going to be arrested 10-20 years later for crimes that they never imagined they could be caught for.
And we already know how hard it can be, at times, to explain a moment of strange-looking but innocent behavior to police.
All the more so if you are an unfavored, targeted minority (of whatever form: Race, class, intellect, psychology...).
It's not just the recording. It's what people in power (of various sorts) may do with it.
You know how you don't like it when a stranger in your vicinity seems to take an unusual interest in you?
This. All the time.
Discretion gets driven out of the equation, when there's a permanent record that anyone might use, at any time, rather than a momentary decision that passes, by those in one's presence.