Pre-crime facial recognition surveillance is authoritanism. Post-crime facial recognition of surveillance is investigative process. The cat is out of the bag, the only thing that prevents it's inevitable abuse is strict legal framework for its implementation
There's really no chance of that happening in the USA within a generation. The US federal government has decided that it alone is trustworthy, and that everyone and everything is a potential threat, and that it is entitled to unlimited and unrestricted surveillance of the entire country (and several others), regardless of what is or is not written into law.
Snowden even blew the lid off of it, and nothing changed. That's how you know it's permanent.
When did we decide that this should have a low barrier to entry. Is there any reason to think increased competition between surveillance providers will lead to more ethical surveillance?
This is not a market problem at all, I don't see why you'd use market-brain constructs like monopoly to engage with it.
One provider or thousands, the problem is the social dynamics and the power structures, not a product-consumer relationship.
"When did we decide that this should have a low barrier to entry..."
That's not the argument I took away from that. Poster includes a summation, "it's complex" and is noting that simply adding regulation that only increases costs of compliance may just enable the formation of a tent seeking monopoly and does not necessarily result in a better outcome for citizens. The poster could advocate for a ban (or not advocate for anything) rather than deregulation as implied.
Problem with a strict legal framework for implementation is that it takes 1 person just a few days to get a face recognition system working using generic frameworks for deep learning.
The laws can be as strict as you like, but its like introducing a law saying you cant watch nude cartoons at home. Even if you somehow eliminated all the existing ones, its just a pen and paper away.
Is that really a problem from a legal perspective?
There are plenty of things that are easy to do but have strict legal frameworks around them. Quick examples include copyright laws, use of force/violence and driving rules.
and how well are those laws preventing these actions? Long term there are few things more damaging to a societies justice system than wide spread breaking of laws. Go on long enough, and people stop taking every law seriously, while at the same time political reasons for prosecution starts dominating.
Not really. I don't mind there being a near-monopoly on facial recognition software if it takes a large company to handle the needed guidelines and potential liabilities.
You have presupposed that said monopoly will not have already bought the necessary legislation required to maintain its position through regulatory capture. The current system positively rewards monopolies in most sectors.
If the bureaucratic obstacles for using a technology are so high that only very well funded companies can overcome them, then those companies effectively form a cartel with the state in the use and abuse of those technologies.
If citizens had stronger protections against the application of the third-party doctrine in the US, we might have less to fear. Currently though, the greatest oppressor of personal freedoms through technology is the United States Government. They can and will use "guidelines and potential liabilities" to weaponize new technology while making it next to impossible to counter the threat.
It's also trivially easy to regulate. Mandate that all cameras recording public spaces record to encrypted storage. The key is in possession of the judicial system. It can only be decrypted and examined with a warrant, with probable cause, as you would need for wiretapping or raiding a home or searching someone's computer.
> The key is in possession of the judicial system. It can only be decrypted and examined with a warrant, with probable cause, as you would need for wiretapping
That's how you end up with the NSA and CIA being inside every single camera in the country :)
For practical purposes, yes. The leaks showed how NSA has built a multi-layered data harvesting-archiving-searching machine that works not only through compromised hardware (including cameras), but also big company infrastructures, phone/email/SMS/internet browsing records and content, fiber optic cable tapping, hacking, installing bugs, spying and more.
If the camera itself is not bugged, it likely is harvested at another step at some point and nothing's more clear that if NSA wants to see what a camera sees, they are able to tap it if needed. Sure, untapped cameras exist, but it doesn't really make a practical difference. The NSA will still have your information if it wants, and likely already has most of it.
I don't know how long the records persist, but presumably for things like video surveillance footage the decay period would be quite fast. For full-text contents, less speedy but still fast. I can only truly envision long-term collection and storage of metadata - and even then, it's a big question how much is feasible and reasonable to store indefinitely.
It's likely that for your security camera footage to be accessed you would have to be targeted. It's likely that such targeting would only affect footage in the future or very recent past. But I'd grant that pervasive attackers can probably capture exponentially-decaying single video frames from millions of cameras if they were appropriately motivated, and those single frames could go back quite far.
The real problem here is the existence of such a system creates a kind of panopticon [0], with chilling effects not only on activity and discussion contrarian to the current administration, but also any future administration that may have access to electronic surveillance records. Without knowing how long records are kept, it is quite plausible that a future authoritarian state will misuse past records to target civilians.
The people don't care that they're being watched. That's the main lesson I took from the snowden leaks. I think most people might even like it because they think it means there will be less crime.
Hardly sounds trivial, and how would you ever enforce or manage that?
Also, that is totally counter to the current (US) laws that basically state you can record video (not audio) of any publicly viewable areas freely.
What you propose would require massive changes to essentially any camera that has any part of its view covering an outdoor area, and probably many indoor areas (malls, etc.).
Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much. You'd need to implement something like an HDMI-style encryption to control what devices/processors/whatever can connect to a live video stream from a camera to try and control exactly how the streams are processed.
> Hardly sounds trivial, and how would you ever enforce or manage that?
Spitballing. Enforcement: make distribution of CCTV video undisclosed via court order criminal offense.
> Also, that is totally counter to the current (US) laws that basically state you can record video (not audio) of any publicly viewable areas freely.
This is irrelevant, because scale changes nature of things. Single photo of your person is just that. 24 photos per second for every second of your life is a total surveillance. Law was clearly about recording usage that does not amount to surveillance.
> Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much.
Encrypt the stream on the camera itself. Storage is cheap.
And how does one view the feed from the camera if it's encrypted? That's the whole point of the camera itself.
Anywho, sounds like we're jumping through hoops without really understanding the requirements. Like, what is really bad about recording people in public? What is really bad about performing facial recognition?
But I'd go a step further, what is it that we're trying to prevent from happening by making facial recognition illegal? This is the juicy part and the one where the "problem" becomes wishy-washy. We get reasons like: "Prevent stalking by government officials", or "stop widespread surveillance from...[something]". All present their own challenges and implied slippery-slopes, but all have different ways of being solved without necessarily making public recording and facial recognition blanketly illegal.
>Spitballing. Enforcement: make distribution of CCTV video undisclosed via court order criminal offense.
The same way gun ownership laws have curbed the illegal gun ownership/use problem? Or, do we just keep stacking laws endlessly hoping one of them actually works?
>24 photos per second for every second of your life is a total surveillance.
Sure but we're nowhere near that point, or likely to be at that point. Also, almost nothing records at 24fps, 15fps is more common.
>Encrypt the stream on the camera itself. Storage is cheap.
In most cases and camera and recording/viewing software come from different companies, so you'd still need some kind of key management system.
The same way gun ownership laws have curbed the illegal gun ownership/use problem? Or, do we just keep stacking laws endlessly hoping one of them actually works?
There are legit arguments to be had about personal freedom here, but it’s plainly untrue regulation intrinsically can’t work. It works for many, many things - and works for gun ownership in basically every other developed nation in the world.
Where I am the law is very strict although somewhat arbitrary. I can shoot a video of a public place. I can publish the material (although commercial use requires sign off naturally).
But here is the interesting bit: I can’t set up a fixed camera to record a public space without permission. And I won’t get that permission. Meaning basically that recording in public spaces is only done by humans, limiting the scope of how widespread it can be. I like this.
It also means, that it’s not allowed to put up a camera on my porch that covers the street in front of my house. I suspect a lot of ring/nest users are in violation.
Sounds like Japan. But most countries that is not the case. People want to protect their property. Also with hidden cameras it would be trivial to do so and not be detected so in your country those who want to record are already doing it just quietly. So again it is a law that only effects non criminals.
Which part of the law? That I can’t set up a camera on my house to film a street crossing?
That’s almost impossible to get permission for. A private citizen can not get permission to film a Street corner. The difficulty in getting permission obviously isn’t written in the legal text, but individuals don’t get permission and businesses only very rarely do.
Of course it is. You can’t put up a camera on your porch and shoot your driveway and part of the street. To follow the law you have to point it so it’s only covering your driveway or lawn and no public space. It’s pretty simple restrict the field of view with a screen in front or bit of tape over the camera if needed.
Does everyone do that? Probably not. But that doesn’t change how the law is written.
If someone throws a rock through a window, why shouldn't it be legal to run the surveillance through facial recognition? A crime was committed, we have a pic of the perpetrator.
Facial recognition should never be considered evidence. It is a clue. A way to sift through tens of thousands of possible entries and narrow it down to 5 for a human to review. We need the legal framework to ensure its not used as evidence by itself, but the investigatory tool is very useful.
So is eyewitness testimony. That's why we have trials. The problem in the case of a crime committed like that is not that the technology is used, it's when people assume the technology is infallible, when there's plenty of evidence to the contrary (just like there's not plenty of evidence that eyewitness testimony is not infallible and often subject to a bunch of problems).
If facial recognition is perceived as low accuracy, but can yield some leads for investigators that can be independently corroborated, that seems like a fine use of the technology. If we're worried about the public assuming it's more accurate than it is if used as evidence in trials, we can either pass some laws about its use as trial evidence (which is not the same as using it as a lead), or train defense attorneys and the public (often done through TV...) that it's use in the role of proving guilt is extremely limited because of it's false positive rate.
Everything is flawed and leads to false accusations, even something ridiculously black and white like electronic bank records. Witnesses, intoxication, bias, outright lying, guilt, etc. All evidence has flaws and potential bias. One need only look at all the false imprisonments that have happened over the years due to various bits of "evidence" to see that.
Instead, we should take the opposite approach: Invest heavily in this tech, and lightly-regulate glaringly bad aspects of it. E.g. For facial recognition, we can put down laws that punish unfair punishment of suspects. Or if we find employers that misappropriate facial recognition developed to record hours worked on the factory floor to punish them for chatting or going to the bathroom too many times, and we don't like that, then we regulate that.
We really went down the wrong path here somewhere, applying a black and white approach to things instead of just riding the in-between strategically and fairly. That's how we move forward as a society instead of legislating ourselves into irrelevance.
