Slashdot Mirror
The Unblinking Eye
McAdder writes: "The LA Times is running an article about how Tampa police scanned the faces of BowlGoers as they passed through the turnstyles, and compared the images to images of people with criminal history. I wonder if they'd frisk me if I wore one of those Nixon masks ;>" It seems the story first appeared in the St. Petersburg Times.
> If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out.
Tell that to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked to protest the government in power and was trying to unseat them by peaceful and lawful means. However, those in power liked being in power and didn't care for his activities.
First, they labeled him a Communist (not that a free society can ever "outlaw" something like that). Then they began the investigation. They bugged his phones. They discovered that he was having an affair. They sent him a letter urging him to commit suicide to avoid having this information leaked.
J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of the FBI at the time. For the most part, Hoover's actions today are considered by the mainstream to be excessive. Nevertheless, the main FBI headquarters are named after him, so I don't know how much "mainstream" thinking pervades the FBI.
This wasn't the work of a military junta running the country, these were just ordinary, elected Americans. Imagine if someone really unscrupulous were elected.
The LAPD, until very recently, made a habit of keeping phone taps and files on celebrities. You never know when that might come in handy.
Nixon used the IRS to harass his opponents. He felt compelled to resign after covering up a break-in of his (mainstream) political opponents headquarters.
Either through clerical error or massive corruption, the Clinton White House had detailed FBI dosiers on prominent Republicans. And Clinton was never voted out of office. Even after his Attorney General burned to death a religious cult. The accusation alone that the cult leader was molesting children was enough to convince most Americans that Koresh got what he deserved.
In a democracy, you do NOT give the ruling power the means to destroy any political opposition. While you've removed "crime" by 70%, you've virtually guaranteed that any political opponent can have his every move tracked.
But at least your property is safe, I guess...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Which is fine as long as the authorities don't object to anything you do. But maybe one day you want to oppose something. Maybe City Hall is planning a waste incinerator upwind from you, and you suspect that the relationship between the builders and the politicians is a mite closer than it ought to be.
So you start being a nuisance. You write letters, you get articles in the local press, you organise demonstrations. At some point you become sufficiently annoying that someone decides to take some extra-legal action. A list of your comings and goings for the last few months might be very interesting. Have you been in any bars where drugs get traded, for instance? A few examples, taken out of context, could easily be used to get a search warrant to turn your house upside down. A search of computer data could be tacked on to the end of such a warrant, enabling them to take your computer. And so it goes on.
The bottom line is: knowledge is power. If you let them have knowledge about you then you let them have power over you. The danger (and it is a very real danger) is that they will abuse this power.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
How do you "lose your rights" by getting your damn picture taken when you enter a private building of your own volition? If you wanted to set up a camera to take pictures of people on your property, shouldn't you have the right to do that? If so, then why doesn't that right extend to other property owners?
If you would deny property owners the right to protect their property by imposing draconian limitations about what they can and cannot do on their own property, I submit that it is you that is infringing on essential liberties, and you that are advocating a dangerous, authoritarian police state.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
The truth is that security cameras and other surveillance technology is ubiquitous and the technology behind them is only going to improve and get as cheap as dirt. The question is, as a society are we going to do about it? Judging from how the discussion has gone so far, i can only shake my head. Lets move the discussion passed, the police surveillance is "good vs evil" stage.
For those who believe that having the police check every ones face as they enter the gate at the Super Bowl is a good thing, are you naive? How do you know that your not? I'm sure they kept the camera's secret because It would creep people out to know that they were being scanned against known criminals, yet they did it anyway. How do you know that they are just looking out for your interests, what did they do they deserve this level of trust from you? This is a very powerful tool in the hands of the police that can be used for both good or ill. What's to prevent them from betraying this trust in the future?
For those who are apposed to this kind of Technology, lets get past the 1984 analogies. Let me remind you that, You don't need technology to create a very chilling authoritarian state, and technology only played a minor role in the book. For better or worse the technology exists and fortunately the picture of the future for most of us is not a "boot stomping on a human face". In fact surveillance can act in reverse, making the police much less likely to beat someone if they believe that they themselves are being
watched. Watching the watchers watch may one key to preventing the abuse of this technology.
Someone who has put a great deal of thought on the matter is David Brin, and I'm quite surprised that is lucid thoughts on this matter has not yet come up in this thread. This short piece in Wired and this Discussion are a good place places start. From what I can tell, many of you have not been exposed to these ideas yet. I put these in the "must read" category.
Enjoy.
They spent who knows how many bucks to install cameras, high-speed data lines, a control center, and links to municipal, state, and federal databases of bad guys. And positively identified no known perps.
Because they were looking in the wrong direction, perhaps?
The middle linebacker of the Ravens, Ray Lewis, is presently on probation as a result of his plea bargain in two homicides a year ago. The news media made quite a stir a while back about the alarmingly high percentage of NFL players with criminal records. A former receiver for the Carolina Panthers, Rae Carruth, was just convicted of felonies for his involvement in the death of his wife; Mark Chmura, formerly of the Green Bay Packers, is presently on trial for sexually molesting his 17-year-old babysitter.
Why are the cops looking at the fans?
We lose our rights by a thousand little slices. Fingerprinting was only for criminals, now we get fingerprinted for drivers licenses. Metal detectors were only for airports and high schools that had riots. Now, it's for any government building.
Fight Spammers!
But this is slashdot. 99% of the posters here are incurably paranoid; it's part of the enterance requirements.
To those who are whining about it: would it be wrong for police to look at pictures of known criminals, and then keep a lookout for them? Of course not; that's essentially what they do all the time. So what's so wrong about having them use technology to do their job better and more effectively? It sometimes seems like slashdotters can't realize that law enforcement is a good thing. We should try to fix its problems rather than try to destroy it at every turn.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
...that's what my mother would say. "I'd gladly give up a minor freedom if it would help catch criminals."
Of course, she's never had her door broken down by cops with the wrong address in the middle of the night, without so much as a semblence of an apology, either.
She's never had her car confiscated because a pot seed (from her nephew's friend) was found in her vehicle.
She's never had her boat drilled full of holes because an invited guest's son was being watched by the Coast Guard.
She's never been stopped and had all of her cash "impounded" because she matched a "profile."
She's never been questioned because she bought an airline ticket with cash.
Of course, she's a Republican, too, so your mileage may vary...
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
This technology was originally developed for use with mug shots, which are taken with calibrated camera position and lighting. Maybe they even work under those conditions. The idea is supposedly that they measure features like the distance between your eyes and ratio of that to mutual distance to your mouth which can't be altered by disguise. In fact, though, my friends continue to play relatively unmolested. They have been nailed by this tech a couple of times, but not nailed by it countless other times, even at places known to use it.
I am also completely unconvinced that this system won't produce errors -- especially when used with photos taken in public space, with uncalibrated lighting and uncontrolled camera angles. There are just too many people in the world and the resolution of the photos is too poor that there won't be some schlep whose nose, eyes, and mouth will all be dimensionally similar enough to mine to cause us to raise each others' alarms.
I figure this tech will last until the first bona fide innocent tourist is roughed up by cops who are convinced he is a big-time felon, then the Big Brother types will go back to dreaming of tracking us with implants.
I wonder -- the article says they identified 17 wanted pholx in the crowd. Did they act on this "discovery?" If not, how do we know these 17 lawbreakers were ID'ed accurately? Answer: We don't. If they really thought this was such hot shit they would have demonstrated its utility by making a few arrests, and it would have certainly made this article. But they aren't quite as stupid as they sound. They know it isn't perfect, and I'm betting even the developers know it never will be.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
A little less paranoia would go a long way
Let's see how far it would go...
POTENTIAL BOSS: I see from your DoubleClick profile that you surf several porn sites. Geekporn.com? Isn't it bad enough that you surf porn, but geek porn? You disgusting pervert. And salon.com as well - a bunch of dangerous free-thinkers, if you ask me. We block them at the firewall.
YOU: that wasn't me...it was my next door neighbor using my computer...
BOSS: According to our police check, you have seven speeding tickets - automatically deducted by the drive-through EZ-pass system when it detected that you must have been speeding to go from entrance to exit so quickly. Scofflaw as well! And here's a picture taken from a traffic light that shows you jumping the light. My my.
YOU: it was only a few miles an hour over the limit...
BOSS: What about this? Police camera records show that you are often in an area of the city associated with deviant lifestyles.
YOU: It's near a subway stop I use...I only pass through...honest!
BOSS: They also show that you had lunch FIVE times last month with a married woman who is not your wife.
YOU: She's a coworker...
BOSS: I'm sure. Perhaps we could ask her husband what he thinks of that. Also...I see that your medical record shows that you had a prostate exam five years earlier than is recommended for men. Do you have some sort of problem that we should know about? Also, a genetic test showed a positive marker for early heart-disease. That's too bad - we like our workers healthy.
YOU: I was merely being cautious, and that gene doesn't mean that I'll GET heart disease...
BOSS: Whatever. Your credit-card buying records show that you subscribe to Playboy and also take karate lessons. The only thing worse than a pervert is a violent pervert.
YOU: Karate's just a hobby...
BOSS: Your credit report is bad as well - you paid 30 days late 3 times in 5 years. That's not the sort of person that we want representing our firm. I've gotten the picture of a lawbreaking, immoral pervert who probably belongs in jail. I'm sorry, you're an untouchable.
YOU (silently): (maybe I should have been a little more paranoid!)
Oh, I suppose there is the possibility that "Big Brother" might take the pictures of you entering the Super Bowl and use them to control your life. Imagine how it might end up wrecking an otherwise-successful job interview:
Use your heads. A little less paranoia would go a long way.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I would really love to see the software that is capable of determining that I am breaking into a car rather than, say, wiping birdshit off the windshield before entering it. This makes the facial recognition thing look like ELIZA for the TRS-80 by comparison.
Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
You really should pay more attention to American politics. Do you think our democracy "worked" as you describe for the folks of darker complexion who were discouraged from voting in Florida by police checkpoints near the polls, or the ones who were unceremoniously dumped from the rolls because a database (built by a company closely allied with one and only one of our two major political parties) said they were felons?
I suppose your city doesn't see it as a major problem if a few people get stopped by the cops and questioned for a few minutes because some computer in a basement fucked up. But if your genes had the bad taste to give you a similar facial profile to some Genuine Bad Dude (tm) so that you got stopped all the time your personal self, I bet your attitude would change quick. Especially in the UK, land of the infamous Terrorist Act that allows you to be held without bond and interrogated for, what is it, 7 days? Yep, I'm sure you wouldn't mind being dragooned every time you entered a new city where you weren't personally known because this shit had become universal, after all, it's for the public good, right?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Crime in Glasgow city centre has fallen by some 70% since this system was introduced, and the city has become a much safer place to socialise in.
These types of systems are permeating the UK at an amazing rate, and they are really showing results. As long as they are controlled by the police, and used in a responsible manner according to the law, I really have no problem with it at all. You have to be incurably paranoid to have a problem, I think. Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.