We may need laws that treat these cameras as something like a wiretap. They can be there streaming their data to data stores, but accessing that data would require warrants that are limited in scope. The data could be used for answering specific, legally justifiable questions, not for everyday surveillance and profiling.
e.g. It would be valid to use these cameras to answer who was at a crime scene, when, and where did they go that day. It would not be valid to reconstruct a web of everyday associations stretching back months for someone just because an officer didn't like the way they look.
matthewdgreen · 2h ago
I think we need to understand and accept that this stuff is inevitable as the technology gets cheaper. If the cops don’t do it themselves, private industry will do it for them and sell it or hand the data over as a “public service.” The only way out of this is to make an affirmative series of laws that make the construction of anything resembling a tracking database illegal and heavily-fined, but we’re not there. Even privacy-friendly Europe isn’t close to putting those restrictions on its police.
pilingual · 33m ago
First, in the US this type of thing violates the fourth amendment as the Institute for Justice will prove in court with ALPRs. It could be set up such that it does not, but for whatever reason these companies are greedy and make it broad rather than narrow in scope.
Second, I just won't patronize your establishment, shopping center, or municipality if you do. I'd like to go to the UK, but because of this policy I will not. Menlo Park pushed back against ALPRs: I'll go there. I went to a different ski shop because the one closest to me has an ALPR. And so on.
microsoftedging · 26m ago
Genuine question, what's wrong with ALPR? (Coming from someone in the UK)
alasarmas · 9m ago
So, this may be different in the UK, but in the US a large majority of travel occurs in private cars, so omnipresence of ALPRs is close to collecting data on everybody and knowing what everybody is doing at all times.
One might assume from a game-theoretical perspective that this is no different from living in a village where essentially everyone knows everyone’s business, and the knowledge that that knowledge is mutual prevents people from acting badly with the information that they have. However, in the situation where a small minority of people have knowledge about everyone else, and not vice versa, this can give that minority unearned power over everyone else.
In practice, it doesn’t feel great. I hope this answered your question.
dylan604 · 2h ago
No private industry will do anything without it being profitable. Handing it over as a public service would mean they are making money with that data in other ways. What would be those other ways? I can't think of anything that's not dystopian hell, so maybe to make that not legal???
matthewdgreen · 2h ago
The answer is that these databases are hugely valuable for targeted advertising and marketing, and if they’re relatively cheap to build then that makes everything even easier. Law enforcement gets access because in most countries the law allows them to make data requests to existing companies, and “we aren’t going to help the cops solve a murder” is bad PR when you’ve already collected the relevant data.
BirAdam · 1h ago
Sufficient tax breaks would likely do it.
bbarnett · 1h ago
This has already happened, and the police and others pay for access.
cluckindan · 1h ago
> private industry will do it for them and sell it
This is already how it works in many cities.
causality0 · 1h ago
One of the inevitable consequences of the legal conceit that images belong to the person who owns the camera, not the person who owns the face.
ghaff · 41m ago
People do have publicity rights for their image being used in some contexts such as an advertisement. But not sure what rights to your image would even look like in the context of random public photographs or video in general.
masfuerte · 3h ago
A similar thing happened with automatic number place recognition. With no public debate the police built a nationwide network of ANPR cameras. The Information Commissioner opined that it was probably illegal. But rather than recommending prosecutions, he recommended that the law be changed to legitimise the police law breaking.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 2h ago
How are you harmed by it?
matthewdgreen · 2h ago
The neat thing about these databases is that you’ll never know. Can a lender buy access to them? How about your abusive ex, who knows and/or is a cop? The stalker who somehow knew just where that woman would be when he killed her, was that just bad luck or did he slip someone a few hundred bucks or buy the data from a data broker?
There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.
allthenopes25 · 1h ago
> Can a lender buy access to them?
In the UK (as in the case we're discussing)? No.
> How about your abusive ex, who knows and/or is a cop?
Like all other PNC access, this gets logged. Police genuinely do get disciplined and fired for abusing the PNC. Random officers cannot randomly look up plates on ANPR: only traffic police or more senior officers can and it, like every other access, gets logged.
The Data Protection Act allows us to find out who has been disciplined, demoted or fired, and the Met for example answer those.
> The stalker who somehow knew just where that woman would be when he killed her, was that just bad luck or did he slip someone a few hundred bucks or buy the data from a data broker?
Data brokers do not get PNC data in the UK. And you're imagining an unnecessarily fantastical, conspiratorial explanation of a stalker who "somehow knew where" some woman would be, when stalkers clearly manage this adequately by, like, ordinary stalking skills (and are rarely unknown to their victims in the first place; they usually have knowledge that was volunteered or was acquired firsthand). Women don't need this imaginary scenario to feel fear: old-fashioned hiding in a car and waiting will do it. More high-tech: hiding an AirTag will do it. Following on Facebook will do it.
Also imagining third party violence that happens due to police data access is irrelevant: police officers themselves commit violence. Probably start there.
> There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.
They are in the UK.
Are face recognition cameras a bad thing in the hands of the UK police? Probably sometimes yes. But these conspiratorial hypotheses don't need airing.
FWIW, I still think the US perception of the UK "surveillance state" is largely misplaced and is based on poor journalism about simple numbers of cameras that has never been adequately put into context.
These facial recognition cameras cannot be instantly used on some big national police surveillance mechanism because in essence no such system exists: the vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are not operated by police at all.
Most cameras are operated by local and regional councils (access for which the police would need to issue warrants or make detailed subject/time requests) or private businesses (ditto).
And most of the huge number of cameras the police imagine aren't connected to anything more complex than Ring. Even with Ring footage, British police find that if they want to use doorbell camera footage, it is faster to arrange a time to visit the owner or at best knock on the door of the householder and ask for it to be emailed or copied to an SD card. They do not have broad instant access, much less broad, instant, warrantless access.
The biggest risk is not outright abuse but malfeasance/misfeasance overuse, much more dull-witted, instant and humdrum: for example some of the operators perceive the desire not to walk past one of them to be evidence of criminal intent, and they use that as a justification for a stop and search.
lm28469 · 1h ago
Religious registries were a harmless little census thing in Germany... well until 1933 at least. Once the system is in place and the data collected you need very strong institutions to protect the people
The 23 and me fuck up is also a good example, data is forever, laws and morales are very temporary
dghlsakjg · 1h ago
I don’t know for sure since we don’t know who has access to that data, but if I were an auto insurance company, I would love to know which of my customers tend to go out in inclement weather, or after midnight when the roads are statistically more dangerous.
Took me less than a minute to think of that example. I’m sure there’s more ways that information could be used against my interests.
allthenopes25 · 1h ago
But you don't need access to ANPR for this, particularly.
You just ask the customer to tell you, perhaps with one of those driving monitoring apps/devices that people use to lower premiums. Pretty commonplace now.
FWIW, having worked on car insurance applications, most insurance companies do not much care about microtargeting consumers in this way. Beyond looking at their claims history and the kind of car they are driving, it is a large-scale numbers game, and the way you know which customers, for example, tend to go out more at night when it is dangerous is to look at their age (more likely very young) and gender (more likely male). And then you just make them all pay more. There's no particular reason to get any more forensic than that; it's more costly and it probably doesn't deliver much extra value.
And if young drivers complain, "hey, I am an excellent safe driver, I've done my advanced test, and I don't take risks", you say: "Great. Use one of our driving monitoring apps or devices, prove it and we'll happily give you lower premiums!"
I could tell you a couple of horror stories I am not going to repeat on the internet because they are old news now and times have changed, but I really must say, it's not necessary to imagine what government data could be used for in the hands of insurance companies: it's much more likely that insurance companies will simply incentivise customers to hand over the data. People who want lower premiums will jump through all sorts of hoops to get them.
smcin · 2h ago
The US's first "Cop City", the $117m Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, officially opened April 29, 2025, despite years of opposition and a suppressed effort to get a referendum against it on the ballot. [0] Did not get any discussion here on HN at all. [1] characterizes it as "a massive, militarized police training compound in the Weelaunee Forest in the southeast outskirts of Atlanta" and lists its security partners as Flock Safety (automated license plate reader (ALPR) vendor, #58 fastest-growing company) and Motorola Solutions. [1] lists its Corporate and Nonprofit Foundation Donors and Sponsors: finance, real-estate companies, Acuity Brands, AT&T, Cushman & Wakefield, KPMG, McKesson, Invesco, Rollins, Synovus and others, Arthur Blank Foundation, The Bierenbaum Family Foundation, Connolly Family Foundation, The Goizueta Foundation, of Atlanta, Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, of Atlanta, O. Wayne Rollins Foundation, of Atlanta, J. Bulow Campbell Foundation and others.
(FYI the parent Guardian article is about England and Wales, not the US. There is a similar level of surveillance cameras but comparing use of force to the US, police in England and Wales only fatally shot 2 people in 2023/24 [2], 24 deaths in or following police custody and a further 60 fatalities defined as other deaths during or following police contact. for which [2b] is a report with demographics.)
At this rate they should just make everyone wear a big QR code containing our names and social security numbers on our shirts. A sort of license plate for people. Would save on processing power at least.
Buttons840 · 2h ago
Technology seems destined to bring everything to light. My only wish is that those in positions of power are the first to be dragged into the light.
latentsea · 9m ago
Power is protected.
ivape · 2h ago
So, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Bodycams on congressmen/women and senators? If you're on the job, the bodycam stays on.
0_____0 · 2h ago
Public facial recognition and ALPRS database. It would be chaos.
kwertyoowiyop · 3h ago
This will make murder mystery shows harder to write. Even now they usually put in some line about how they don’t have traffic camera coverage in the critical area, and they ignore getting location data from suspects’ phones.
cortesoft · 3h ago
I have always thought that futuristic police state movies and shows underestimate how oppressive a fully capable, automated surveillance apparatus could be.
Movies like Minority Report try to show the surveillance state as being a struggle to overcome, but it is still always too easy. Computers don’t get distracted, scale perfectly, and can run 24-7. You can’t just sneak away with your head down, because the machines would have tracked you into a place, would know exactly who is in every building, and would be able to associate the person exiting a building with the person who went in. They wont forget.
matthewdgreen · 2h ago
Look at how quickly the cops tracked Luigi Mangione. It’s not clear how much face recognition (as opposed to manual search) contributed to that, but even for a person who wore a mask, all it took was a slip up where he took the mask off in one place.
I am not saying this is a bad thing in the case of a pre-planned murder. But it does make it obvious how hard it might be to evade notice in the future, assuming you are doing it for more legitimate privacy reasons.
dylan604 · 2h ago
If you go into a building and change clothes, they will not remember. Of course, we're assuming that the place you went into does not have cameras accessible to the system. At some point, building codes/permits will start requiring cameras specifically to feed into this system.
cortesoft · 45m ago
If the system sees someone exit a building and that person does not match someone the system saw enter the building, the person could be flagged and tracked as possibly being someone else who entered the building. Once the system accounts for everyone else who entered the building (by seeing when they exit), the system would be able to correlate that the unknown person who exited is the same as the only unaccounted for person who exited
dylan604 · 40m ago
If that building in an apartment building? Someone from an apartment building might not enter before leaving on the same day. How far back in the camera's history does the system look for that person entering?
cortesoft · 28m ago
This is the point... computers can watch 24/7 and never forget or get distracted. The system could look weeks back, and will never forget a person.
dylan604 · 14m ago
until someone finds that certain cameras are unavailable, or that something has obstructed the view for a significant enough time to cause reasonable doubt
giantg2 · 1h ago
Changing clothes does nothing against gait recognition.
dylan604 · 1h ago
Change your shoes with a rock/tack in one of them. Tie your laces together. There's all sorts of ways to change your gait
cortesoft · 25m ago
Well, then the system could flag you because it doesn't know who you are. Someone walks out of a building with a gait that doesn't match the gait of anyone known to have entered the building. It would follow the person to the next building and the next, until it figures out who they are via the process of elimination (or if it see you go back to your normal gait). Then, the system would note (and store forever) that you have multiple gaits, and would never fall for the trick again.
dylan604 · 17m ago
you have way more confidence in AI than I do. "never fall for the trick again" bwahahaha. it can't even tell the same answer twice, or tell you the correct answer the first time for everything.
cortesoft · 10m ago
This wouldn't have to be AI. I think you are underestimating how good tracking systems already are, and will continue to improve, and become cheaper and cheaper to deploy.
tough · 3h ago
AI generated deepfakes solve this you can't trust the cameras footage now
octo888 · 1h ago
This will achieve 3 things:
1. No reduction in crime
2. A huge chilling effect on the innocent population, further subduing people and paving the way for more authoritarianism.
3. Large amounts of profit for a private company
smegma2 · 1h ago
How would it chill things that aren’t crimes without deterring actual crimes? This seems like a convenient set of assertions if you’re a priori against surveillance. You’re also missing the aspect of catching crime rather than deterring it.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 1h ago
Perhaps not coincidentally, that's the same thing that generally happens with gun control laws.
They're all built on a flawed principle - that criminals don't have and will not use workarounds. In reality, only law-abiding people have no workarounds.
latentsea · 5m ago
Well... as someone living in a country with strict gun control laws who marvels at the dumb shit that goes on in America, I can say for certain that at least here the average run of the mill crazies don't have access to firearms and thank bloody goodness.
amelius · 2h ago
What is this slippery stuff on this slope?
lenerdenator · 1h ago
Tyranny can always come. All you can do is be ready for it to come to you.
vladms · 2h ago
Let's not ignore though that there are some people with some control. These systems do not appear because of a small conspiracy but because a lot of people think they are OK and don't bother to understand the issues and organize to fight them.
I know an ex-policemen that is a good man but hated working in the police because the "public" was aggressive and were challenging them constantly (would not name the country or specific stories). From their point of view "automatization" would make police job safer and easier, and convincing them of the contrary has few chances.
The more "not-connected" is the society (with people not having a friend that is "a policeman", "a firefighter", "a teacher", etc), the more problems we will have no matter the technology...
freeone3000 · 2h ago
Why would I want to be friends with someone who murders with impunity? Who considers “the public” someone to control? Who considers themselves above question?
blooalien · 2h ago
> Why would I want to be friends with someone who murders with impunity? Who considers “the public” someone to control? Who considers themselves above question?
Because they're not all that way, and some of them still do genuinely try to "Protect and Serve"? And then you have the others mentioned "fire fighters", "teachers", etc, again many of whom are just tryin' to do some good in the world. Hunt all those good ones down and hold them up as examples of how the rest should be trying to do their jobs. Just complaining about the bad ones and acting like they're the only ones certainly doesn't make the situation any better for them or us.
Oarch · 3h ago
Will they ban all types of face coverings? I couldn't imagine this happening in the UK, it's too culturally sensitive.
In which case, what good does it do?
n8cpdx · 3h ago
Plenty of criminals don’t bother covering their faces. Even when they plan their crime in advance and know there are cameras.
Yes, except "law" enforcement. In scare quotes because there will be no law.
Teever · 4h ago
This is unavoidable and the only way to mitigate the negatives is sousveillance.[0]
I reject claims by law enforcement that this will lead to making their lives less safe and that they will need to take steps to mitigate it including wearing masks and not giving out their names.[1]
In small towns of old every knew the police and judge, where they lived and which schools their children attended because their kids may have even sat next to them in class. This was fine and served as a moderating force for the worst impulses of law enforcement.
I don't think sousveillance will do a thing to avoid the following scenario:
The criminal underclass becomes even more 'under' as fairly large numbers (integer percentage of the population) of people are forced to avoid known camera locations. All of a sudden someone's kid can't take the bus to work/school because they have a failure to appear warrant stemming from apprehension in a flashmob or participation in a sideshow or some other 'lifestyle' crime associated with certain ethicities, which inevitably adds to the political spice level. Essentially everyone in certain areas will start wearing shiesties/masks, which is unlikely to ease tensions. Involvement with the criminal justice system will now carry even more of a 'weight' as being flagged by the system can happen anywhere, not just in traffic stops.
You'll have massive complaints when accountability comes crashing down on the significant population of Americans who are frequent fliers with the criminal justice system. This will be true even if cameras only alert on known faces in preloaded databases (e.g. active warrants), something that's going to be pretty hard to argue against with most of the standard arguments used against license plate readers — hard to argue a violation of privacy if it only alerts on known bad guys and doesn't keep any history.
And in terms of sousveillance, plenty of people would happily stand up and claim credit for a system that alerts only on known 'bad guys,' so deanonymizing them won't work. Further, it's really hard for politicians argue against it when the counterargument is "you literally want to protect known murderers, kidnappers, and child molesters from being apprehended."
ChrisMarshallNY · 2h ago
Not sure how well that would work.
When Yugoslavia disintegrated, and old ethnic hatreds flared up, neighbors for decades, would suddenly rat out or attack their neighbors. Same with Rwanda.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
This was true of pretty much everyone in small towns of old, or even in city neighborhoods of old. Everyone knew each other, or at least knew a stranger when they saw one. People saw who was talking to whom, and gossiped about it.
swayvil · 3h ago
Who gets to be anonymous and who doesn't? Cops or regular people? Mods or users?
And there's the separation between public and private conversation too. Where do we draw that line?
I had a post removed the other day. The moderator's identity (or psuedoidentity) remained hidden. Mine didn't of course. The conversation over his motive and actions remained hidden from public view too.
And that seems bad to me.
So ya, that line.
perching_aix · 2h ago
The sousveillance GP suggests seems to address exactly that kind of asymmetry, if even just partially. Or do I misunderstand what you're getting at?
worldsayshi · 3h ago
People will be more likely to carry surveillance capitalism devices than devices that store data for some idea of public good.
This world being us closer to the solution: build ecosystems where data is stored in s way that is owned by the community rather than a company.
perching_aix · 2h ago
In Russia of all places, internet companies maintain the city webcams and locals can tune in on-demand. Had a Discord mate show it to me. Although from a hosting and technical standpoint, this is still squarely in the centralized ownership terroritory, but the idea is there.
_DeadFred_ · 2h ago
The Unites States just approved what, 20 billion, to build infrastructure for a new national police people identification unit? Just like the patriot act after 9/11, the giant new 'ICE' budget is going to transform America, and not in a good way. And that 20 billion additional for internal policing is never going away, just look at the TSA. And mission creep will set in, just look at FISA courts and 'parallel reconstruction' now being the norm and no one cares.
I tell my kids this isn't normal, this isn't what the US used to be like, but they don't know any different, so to them giving up just a little bit of this (like we did with the Patriot Act) isn't a big deal.
blooalien · 2h ago
> I tell my kids this isn't normal, this isn't what the US used to be like, but they don't know any different, so to them giving up just a little bit of this (like we did with the Patriot Act) isn't a big deal.
That's why books like "1984" used to be required reading in grade-school Literature class (fully supported policy by the History and Civics class teachers), and the "messier" bits of our nation's history were taught openly as "mistakes to be learned from so that we never repeat them" way back when I was a kid and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth...
The idea was (as one teacher explained to me) that we would learn the dangers to watch out for, and as good little patriots, we'd always be ready to defend the freedoms of our great nation whether threatened from without or within.
galacticaactual · 3h ago
What say all of you who worked on the AI that powers this?
kunzhi · 2h ago
"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success."
e.g. It would be valid to use these cameras to answer who was at a crime scene, when, and where did they go that day. It would not be valid to reconstruct a web of everyday associations stretching back months for someone just because an officer didn't like the way they look.
Second, I just won't patronize your establishment, shopping center, or municipality if you do. I'd like to go to the UK, but because of this policy I will not. Menlo Park pushed back against ALPRs: I'll go there. I went to a different ski shop because the one closest to me has an ALPR. And so on.
One might assume from a game-theoretical perspective that this is no different from living in a village where essentially everyone knows everyone’s business, and the knowledge that that knowledge is mutual prevents people from acting badly with the information that they have. However, in the situation where a small minority of people have knowledge about everyone else, and not vice versa, this can give that minority unearned power over everyone else.
In practice, it doesn’t feel great. I hope this answered your question.
This is already how it works in many cities.
There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.
In the UK (as in the case we're discussing)? No.
> How about your abusive ex, who knows and/or is a cop?
Like all other PNC access, this gets logged. Police genuinely do get disciplined and fired for abusing the PNC. Random officers cannot randomly look up plates on ANPR: only traffic police or more senior officers can and it, like every other access, gets logged.
The Data Protection Act allows us to find out who has been disciplined, demoted or fired, and the Met for example answer those.
> The stalker who somehow knew just where that woman would be when he killed her, was that just bad luck or did he slip someone a few hundred bucks or buy the data from a data broker?
Data brokers do not get PNC data in the UK. And you're imagining an unnecessarily fantastical, conspiratorial explanation of a stalker who "somehow knew where" some woman would be, when stalkers clearly manage this adequately by, like, ordinary stalking skills (and are rarely unknown to their victims in the first place; they usually have knowledge that was volunteered or was acquired firsthand). Women don't need this imaginary scenario to feel fear: old-fashioned hiding in a car and waiting will do it. More high-tech: hiding an AirTag will do it. Following on Facebook will do it.
Also imagining third party violence that happens due to police data access is irrelevant: police officers themselves commit violence. Probably start there.
> There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.
They are in the UK.
Are face recognition cameras a bad thing in the hands of the UK police? Probably sometimes yes. But these conspiratorial hypotheses don't need airing.
FWIW, I still think the US perception of the UK "surveillance state" is largely misplaced and is based on poor journalism about simple numbers of cameras that has never been adequately put into context.
These facial recognition cameras cannot be instantly used on some big national police surveillance mechanism because in essence no such system exists: the vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are not operated by police at all.
Most cameras are operated by local and regional councils (access for which the police would need to issue warrants or make detailed subject/time requests) or private businesses (ditto).
And most of the huge number of cameras the police imagine aren't connected to anything more complex than Ring. Even with Ring footage, British police find that if they want to use doorbell camera footage, it is faster to arrange a time to visit the owner or at best knock on the door of the householder and ask for it to be emailed or copied to an SD card. They do not have broad instant access, much less broad, instant, warrantless access.
The biggest risk is not outright abuse but malfeasance/misfeasance overuse, much more dull-witted, instant and humdrum: for example some of the operators perceive the desire not to walk past one of them to be evidence of criminal intent, and they use that as a justification for a stop and search.
The 23 and me fuck up is also a good example, data is forever, laws and morales are very temporary
Took me less than a minute to think of that example. I’m sure there’s more ways that information could be used against my interests.
You just ask the customer to tell you, perhaps with one of those driving monitoring apps/devices that people use to lower premiums. Pretty commonplace now.
FWIW, having worked on car insurance applications, most insurance companies do not much care about microtargeting consumers in this way. Beyond looking at their claims history and the kind of car they are driving, it is a large-scale numbers game, and the way you know which customers, for example, tend to go out more at night when it is dangerous is to look at their age (more likely very young) and gender (more likely male). And then you just make them all pay more. There's no particular reason to get any more forensic than that; it's more costly and it probably doesn't deliver much extra value.
And if young drivers complain, "hey, I am an excellent safe driver, I've done my advanced test, and I don't take risks", you say: "Great. Use one of our driving monitoring apps or devices, prove it and we'll happily give you lower premiums!"
I could tell you a couple of horror stories I am not going to repeat on the internet because they are old news now and times have changed, but I really must say, it's not necessary to imagine what government data could be used for in the hands of insurance companies: it's much more likely that insurance companies will simply incentivise customers to hand over the data. People who want lower premiums will jump through all sorts of hoops to get them.
(FYI the parent Guardian article is about England and Wales, not the US. There is a similar level of surveillance cameras but comparing use of force to the US, police in England and Wales only fatally shot 2 people in 2023/24 [2], 24 deaths in or following police custody and a further 60 fatalities defined as other deaths during or following police contact. for which [2b] is a report with demographics.)
[0]: "Atlanta’s controversial ‘Cop City’ training center opens after years of fighting" https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/at...
[1]: "The Companies and Foundations behind Cop City" https://afsc.org/companies-and-foundations-behind-cop-city
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/319287/deaths-during-or-...
[2b]: https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/our-work/research-and-stati...
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-ski-mask-ban-bala...
At this rate they should just make everyone wear a big QR code containing our names and social security numbers on our shirts. A sort of license plate for people. Would save on processing power at least.
Movies like Minority Report try to show the surveillance state as being a struggle to overcome, but it is still always too easy. Computers don’t get distracted, scale perfectly, and can run 24-7. You can’t just sneak away with your head down, because the machines would have tracked you into a place, would know exactly who is in every building, and would be able to associate the person exiting a building with the person who went in. They wont forget.
I am not saying this is a bad thing in the case of a pre-planned murder. But it does make it obvious how hard it might be to evade notice in the future, assuming you are doing it for more legitimate privacy reasons.
1. No reduction in crime
2. A huge chilling effect on the innocent population, further subduing people and paving the way for more authoritarianism.
3. Large amounts of profit for a private company
They're all built on a flawed principle - that criminals don't have and will not use workarounds. In reality, only law-abiding people have no workarounds.
I know an ex-policemen that is a good man but hated working in the police because the "public" was aggressive and were challenging them constantly (would not name the country or specific stories). From their point of view "automatization" would make police job safer and easier, and convincing them of the contrary has few chances.
The more "not-connected" is the society (with people not having a friend that is "a policeman", "a firefighter", "a teacher", etc), the more problems we will have no matter the technology...
Because they're not all that way, and some of them still do genuinely try to "Protect and Serve"? And then you have the others mentioned "fire fighters", "teachers", etc, again many of whom are just tryin' to do some good in the world. Hunt all those good ones down and hold them up as examples of how the rest should be trying to do their jobs. Just complaining about the bad ones and acting like they're the only ones certainly doesn't make the situation any better for them or us.
In which case, what good does it do?
I reject claims by law enforcement that this will lead to making their lives less safe and that they will need to take steps to mitigate it including wearing masks and not giving out their names.[1]
In small towns of old every knew the police and judge, where they lived and which schools their children attended because their kids may have even sat next to them in class. This was fine and served as a moderating force for the worst impulses of law enforcement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance [1] https://calgaryherald.com/news/calgary-police-service-doxing...
The criminal underclass becomes even more 'under' as fairly large numbers (integer percentage of the population) of people are forced to avoid known camera locations. All of a sudden someone's kid can't take the bus to work/school because they have a failure to appear warrant stemming from apprehension in a flashmob or participation in a sideshow or some other 'lifestyle' crime associated with certain ethicities, which inevitably adds to the political spice level. Essentially everyone in certain areas will start wearing shiesties/masks, which is unlikely to ease tensions. Involvement with the criminal justice system will now carry even more of a 'weight' as being flagged by the system can happen anywhere, not just in traffic stops.
You'll have massive complaints when accountability comes crashing down on the significant population of Americans who are frequent fliers with the criminal justice system. This will be true even if cameras only alert on known faces in preloaded databases (e.g. active warrants), something that's going to be pretty hard to argue against with most of the standard arguments used against license plate readers — hard to argue a violation of privacy if it only alerts on known bad guys and doesn't keep any history.
And in terms of sousveillance, plenty of people would happily stand up and claim credit for a system that alerts only on known 'bad guys,' so deanonymizing them won't work. Further, it's really hard for politicians argue against it when the counterargument is "you literally want to protect known murderers, kidnappers, and child molesters from being apprehended."
When Yugoslavia disintegrated, and old ethnic hatreds flared up, neighbors for decades, would suddenly rat out or attack their neighbors. Same with Rwanda.
And there's the separation between public and private conversation too. Where do we draw that line?
I had a post removed the other day. The moderator's identity (or psuedoidentity) remained hidden. Mine didn't of course. The conversation over his motive and actions remained hidden from public view too.
And that seems bad to me.
So ya, that line.
This world being us closer to the solution: build ecosystems where data is stored in s way that is owned by the community rather than a company.
I tell my kids this isn't normal, this isn't what the US used to be like, but they don't know any different, so to them giving up just a little bit of this (like we did with the Patriot Act) isn't a big deal.
That's why books like "1984" used to be required reading in grade-school Literature class (fully supported policy by the History and Civics class teachers), and the "messier" bits of our nation's history were taught openly as "mistakes to be learned from so that we never repeat them" way back when I was a kid and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth...
The idea was (as one teacher explained to me) that we would learn the dangers to watch out for, and as good little patriots, we'd always be ready to defend the freedoms of our great nation whether threatened from without or within.
- Robert J. Oppenheimer