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Lip-Reading Surveillance Cameras
mrogers sends us to Infowars for the following news from the UK, "which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy": "'Read my lips..."' used to be a figurative saying. Now the British government is considering taking it literally by adding lip reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras in order identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everyone says. Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."
While I agree that the UK fares worse than the US in these regards, that still does not mean that there is a vast "conspiracy" afoot in the US. However, it is clear that, slowly but surely, personal liberty is gradually being suppressed in favor of security in the US. While the parent may be a tinfoil-hatter, that doesn't make his point invalid. The patriot act, guantanamo bay, warrantless wiretapping, etc. could all be called unconstitutional. So, while an unwritten constitution provides less protection than a written one, either can be usurped when the individuals in power find that their personal interests are best protected by "unconstitutional measures".
Succinctly put, citizens can't depend on their governments to provide them with rights. They must demand these rights for themselves. In both the US and the UK, the respective protections of personal liberty were not created by the government, they were created by dissident groups who managed to establish said rights, often with the opposition of the ruling parties. The truly terrifying thing is that few seem committed to any sort of positive action. Everyone bemoans the degradation of these rights, but there are few groups actively doing anything about it; and the groups that are doing something (ACLU, EFF, etc.) are subjects of public scorn. So, rather than relying on political systems (The Constitution, the courts) as you suggest, more emphasis needs to be placed on collective action.
And yes, I know that 99% of the people in any given population are far too apathetic to actually do anything.
What about the masks that everyone was wearing during the SARS epidemic? I still see those in airports, so it wouldn't be too out of the ordinary.
If the UK goes forward with this scheme, they're getting scammed. I know, from research and real-world experience with people with intensive speech-reading training, that lipreading will yield, at most, about 25% of speech. There are simply too many words that look alike or resist analysis to grasp more than that. You can fill in some of the blanks by the situational context, body language and residual hearing, if there is any. But frankly I see this as an effort to take advantage of gullible government agencies by touting a gee-whiz technological solution that won't work.
So, who, exactly, has an expectation of privacy when they're in public? Yeah, yeah, surveillance bad, privacy good, rah rah rah, but seriously, if you don't want your business to be public, then keep it in private.
Either that, or talk about incredibly private things that are virtually guaranteed to make whatever poor schlub is reading the transcripts incredibly uncomfortable. Or say things that are so unbelievably suspicious that they'll have no choice to investigate, and when it turns out to be complete fabrication remind them it was their ill-conceived idea to read your lips in the first place.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Unfortunately, many of us see these particular dumbasses as muscling in on the rival dumbasses' territory -- any likely alternative is probably going to be just as bad or worse. Yes, there are minority parties I can vote for, but there are enough people who reckon that if you're doing nothing wrong there's nothing to fear [1] that those parties don't have much chance. As somebody said a couple of elections ago, we're faced with a choice of being forced to eat s*** and being forced to eat s*** with razor-blades.
[1] True enough -- provided that all those with access to the data are and always will be benign and competent...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Speech reading technology is based on...human speech. It won't tell the difference between "mom" and "bomb". Just look in a mirror yourself when saying those two words. Just 30% of spoken speech is on the lips anyway so it's hard as hell to speech read anyone, and I've been doing it my entire life.
I still can't tell if someone is saying "I love food" versus "I love you".
Has anyone else here figured out how accurate this recognition package is right now?
license plate recognition systems are in use all over the UK. Several motorways (I think they're called freeways in the USA) have several such cameras on them for calculating average speed and hence detecting if speed limit has been broken (i.e. 2 cameras are placed x miles apart, if a car traversed those x miles in under y minutes then they must have been speeding). Thankfully you apparently have to be averaging 30 miles over the speed limit (so travelling at over 100 mph) to get caught by them.
They are set to be rolled out across the UK soon and tied into the national police databases (as has already been done in the city which the killers got caught). As I say though, the vast, vast majority of people here support their use for hunting criminals. It's only their speed enforcement duties which hopefully will get people worked up.
I think the major difference here as opposed to say the USA, is that vast majority of people in the UK wouldn't consider their license plate being registered on a police database somewhere as an invasion of their privacy. People in the UK are worried about corporations having their personal data, not the government; whereas it seems in the USA, the opposite is the case.