The issue with governments implementing mass warrantless surveillance is not training or standards, NIST or otherwise.
It should be straight-out illegal. Governments do not have "free speech" rights.
As for private citizens doing it: I think there are already sufficient laws about recording people without their consent. You can hire someone to stand on a corner and watch for a specific person to walk by, but a law prohibiting you from recording everyone who walks by is most likely going to withstand a court review. It's a question of scale.
From my understanding, don't many places like big retail stores or malls already use facial recognition with their security systems? Whether it be to deal with flagging banned individuals who come on premises, or for things like tracking where people go in a mall. These kinds of things privately I think are already used a lot.
There's probably a legal distinction, but personally I really don't want, say, my grocery store tracking how long I spent in which aisles to add to my advertising profile.
(Yes, I use rewards cards, but I have the option to not enter my phone number and pay cash if I want to exclude a particular purchase from that dataset.)
I feel like this has the same basic shape as the problem of industrial pollution. Instead of the classic "diffusion of responsibility", there's more a "diffusion of injury". Theoretically, class-action lawsuits are supposed to handle this, but those are basically toothless when a government organ can hide its process for "security" reasons and then have the case dismissed for lack of standing (cf. Jewel v. NSA).
I think it would be a fantastic idea for the government to surveil road infrastructure. We spend a crap ton of our GDP just on healthcare addressing the negative impact of traffic violence. Not to mention everyone knows someone that has been killed or affected by this. Outright saying the government shouldn’t monitor this is in bad taste.
You can argue that the solution is to stop doubling down on our bad investment, bad that is much less feasible than installing a bunch of traffic cameras.
Democratic governments have privileges bestowed on them by their constituences. I don't remember where the US Constitution gives any branch of government "free speech" rights. It definitely has some protections for speech of officials in Congress and in courts.
Authoritarian governments, of course, have all the rights they manage to grab. Look what Russian officials say. I suppose that North Korean officials can say anything their bosses tell them to say, any public opinion notwithstanding.
This is a blanket statement needing substantiation, but then, so was mine and I don't feel like doing research. Maybe some legal scholar will weigh in.
I predict a case about this will reach the Supreme Court in the next few years.
The article mentions NIST standards for face recognition. NIST evaluates face matching systems.[1] They've gotten considerably better in the last decade, as would be expected.
Facial recognition, and the lack of regulating it: a victim of conflating privacy in the sense of limiting government powers and privacy in the sense of whether or not a piece of data is sensitive of embarrassing.
Well not quite. They keep getting money every year, but officially their mandate expired in the 90’s and has never been renewed. As crazy as that is by itself, they certainly don’t have the authority to do anything.
I was appalled to see TSA facial recognition scanners at airports recently, where instead of checking your ID and boarding pass they scan your face. Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out. I’m not sure how the eventual forced violation of biometrics can be stopped when most people don’t care.
I wasn't "appalled" but definitely felt uneasy about it. I am aware I could opt out and read all the discussions about it here on HN. I didn't do anything about it, despite being a very privacy conscious person (using firefox, use max adblocking/anti tracking etc). Why? I don't want to be an asshole, hold the queue and cause trouble for a TSA agent who is just doing the job and likely have no idea what "opt out" means, and with, let's admit it, no practical benefit for myself. (If anything, help myself miss a flight.) The feds and local law enforcement probably already have my face data anyway.
I had a perfectly pleasant experience opting out. The agent simply smiled at me, asked a question to verify that I was the person on the ID I had handed him, and off I went.
It was much easier and less gropey than opting out of the mm wave scans.
I grew up in a post 9-11 world. To me, flying has always been something involving security and federal oversight. I have no problems with the federal government knowing that I have taken flight A123 to Chicago, or something. If I wanted to travel incognito, I'd take a train, or perhaps a greyhound bus.
I wonder if there's a "missing infrastructure opportunity" here. An isolated individual opt-out has the uninspiring cost/risk-vs-benefit/principle tradeoff others have mentioned. But what if that equation could be shifted?
Perhaps "I'll do the scan just now, but also, while it has my motivation and attention, I'll press the easy button to donate $N to some org effectively fighting it". Or "I'll opt out, and press the easy button to encourage others with a somewhat-anonymized "I/someone at airline-or-city-or-region-or-occupation-or... just opted-out! N+1! - Yay future!" tweet/counter"?
I recently reentered the US after a short vacation (the first time I'd been out of the country for a couple of years) and the CBP now have cameras/face scanners. The agent said hello using my name before I'd even handed over my passport -- in fact I don't think he even looked at it.
I assume they must be face-matching on the passport photo database.
Yes this seems variable based on point of entry. I had (have?) a flagged passport for awhile and I never got the oh shit face from CBP until they scanned my passport.
>Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out.
Given the reputation of groups involved, I expect many people who might have otherwise opted out felt that trying to do so would have revealed there was no efficient opt-out process, just an empty offer of one, or that opting out would have lasting repercussions for their treatment during travel in the future.
While you can opt out, not every document check station has signage to that effect in my experience; the TSA individual only tells you to put your head in the camera frame; and most people have had An Experience with TSA officials becoming belligerent and even aggressive over small things.
Frankly, it's intimidating, and I don't blame people for not opting out even assuming they know that's possible
I flew recently and didn't opt out. If you have a passport or a state ID, any federal agency has you in the system already. What good would avoiding this particular picture do?
Are they basic RGB cameras or do they collect depth as well? Would even know if they decided to change the system to start collecting depth data, even if comparisons are to flat images? Honest questions, as that’s where my concerns are.
Boil the frog. If they start to collect more, it’s not as simple as “they already have my picture.” Should there be a breach, I can’t easily change my face.
I’m generally of the opinion that when it comes to personal data collection we should always say “no, convince me you should” rather than “sure, why not?” Other than an ever-so-slightly faster processing time is there evidence of any real security gain? My initial reaction, uninformed on the specifics but fairly versed in this type of security, is that’s unlikely.
That’s true, but those are also different agencies, so at a minimum you’re spreading the data (and risk surface). My concerns are generally (though not entirely) around data breaches rather than the collector. And sadly we have ample evidence that federal agencies aren’t always great at securing PII.
But more to the point the reason for doing it is there, for better or worse — want a passport? Have a picture taken. In this case I am (at least for now) comparing opting out or not. You can still take your flight without them taking that additional picture. That of course may not stay true.
I'm certainty not advocating for more of this security theater but the genuine and imaginary concerns meld together when we talk about security so I'm more trying to ascertain what's the realistic risk here. I agree that government is awful at storing PII and it is only a matter of time before biometrics get leaked assuming they haven't already.
That’s a reasonable point. And I’ll admit I’m expressing more of an opinion on privacy in general. I don’t know what the real risk is, immediately or over time and it would vary to an extent by individual. I suspect, again uninformed, it’s fairly small for most people.
The signage claims the _image_, i.e. the pixels, is deleted but makes no claims about embeddings, biometric measurements, etc that are generated from the image.
I actually opted in (Delta Airlines Digital ID, default opt out) because I have Global Entry so CBP and TSA all have my information already anyway. Opting in was just me authorizing Delta to also share my flight data with them so they can match my records up.
The result? Faster passage through gate security, significantly faster than TSA Precheck in fact. As a frequent flyer, I like it.
TSA Precheck lines are excessively long now, to say nothing about the normie lines which probably violate some population density laws of the universe. Meanwhile the Digital ID line is (at least for now) practically empty.
So that's an easy 10~20 minutes shaved off. Once I'm ushered through to screening I have the same convenience benefits as TSA Precheck since it's a prerequisite for Digital ID anyway.
Cool. You must be at ATL. I hardly ever run into a line long line at pre check, I am thankful most flyers dont sign up. A line even shorter sounds good, and with global entry and passport, the government has everything it needs to track me down.
The closest major airport I use is SEA (which unfortunately doesn't have Digital ID yet), but I've definitely enjoyed the time savings whenever I fly through ATL or LAX.
The TSA Precheck lines at all three airports are horrifically long. ;_;
You have no right to privacy in public. If you make this illegal private companies will do it instead, and the first amendment makes that impossible to stop.
There are two things wrong with this: first, in the U.S., you do have certain rights to privacy in public. Whether this is a case of those rights being violated is a different question. In any case, I don't like the creeping redefinition of civil rights I infer from that statement, intentional or not. Second, just as civil rights can be eroded, they can also be expanded, and the idea that we should just throw up our hands is not helpful in a free society that depends on people giving a shit.
The fundamental flaw of cynicism is that it invariably opts for the path of least resistance—a facile dismissal rather than a constructive lens for genuine improvement. If an overwhelming majority—say, 80% of the populace—were deeply invested in this issue, they would elect representatives committed to outlawing it, and thus it would indeed become illegal.
The cynic might retort that such laws are perpetually vulnerable to subversion under the guise of national security. While there's a kernel of truth in that, it's equally undeniable that if 80% of the citizenry truly felt impassioned, any rogue elements within the government would face severe repercussions. Acts of retribution against such actors would not only be tolerated but perhaps even tacitly endorsed by the public.
I'm of the opposite opinion,that recording is a liberty and the right to mass record and identify people is a healthy sign of private free speech rights. I feel banning it would be dystopic. Where I disagree is the use of government at all in many of the capacities taking advantage of this such as TSA, DHS, CBP etc as they are essentially unhinged violent pirates.
Interesting opinion but there is no dystopian literature i know of that worries about banning mass surveillance. Mass surveillance on the other hand features very prominently.
Mass surveillance played out privately means every plated cop car can be tracked, every noted confidential informant and every detective, tax stasi, etc can be traced. This is already becoming the case on networked mapping apps where the road pirates are losing their revenue. It's more of a worry for the state than citizens IMO.
Then you're looking in the wrong section. You don't want the sci-fi section, you want history - Cold War. The investigation of the government by the people was violently suppressed and the the official mouthpieces were jokes - "There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda."
Well, a true cynic would note that if an 80% of a dictatorship all agreed and felt so passionate -- if even 40% did, such a government would easily fall apart or be capable of reform.
If we could reliably attain passion, cooperation, consciousness? And ultimately, a belief in agency?
Then we would hardly even need to protect institutions against such subversion.
I'm reminded of ceausescu. Everyone agreed, up until they suddenly didn't and he and his wife didn't even seem to get it until they were lined up and shot.
I think it takes both agreement and desperation for that kind of thing to happen, though. Comfortable people don't tend to buck the people who can freeze their bank accounts in any serious way at simultaneous scale, even when they're in mass disagreement.
Recording things is generally interpreted as a form of speech. For example, recording police officers in public is speech. If the government can ban private parties from recording people's faces in public, the same could be done to prevent recording the police.
>Recording things is generally interpreted as a form of speech.
Then make it not so, we aren't forced to live with the status quo for eternity.
The law wouldn't be banning people recording faces. It would be much more specific: corporations can't record peoples faces at a mass scale to log them away and sell the data for a profit. If there's any edge cases to this, then let the courts handle it. We let the courts sort out grey areas already, that's their job.
Commercial speech is substantially less protected under First Amendment case law. You can't prohibit random individuals from declaring themselves a citizen journalist and recording people, but I think it would be entirely possible to pass a law saying private companies may not assemble facial recognition databases for sale to third parties.
They don't need to sell the database, just the video that builds the database. Or give it away for free and magically number go up in some bank account in Cyprus or Hong Kong.
Resolving this pathological impasse is straightforward - differentiate between personal activity and commercial activity. Individuals recording the police, other people happenstance, or even spending a considerable amount of their personal time compiling a self-administered facial recognition database of people - fine. Businesses (or really, entire industries) creating surveillance databases that would make a Stasi agent blush, likely by paying the salaries of many people to do this, and likely selling [access to] the databases to pay for it all - not fine. Societally, we've basically been hoodwinked with this temporarily embarassed millionaires fallacy - scale itself creates logical contradictions of our rights and we need to attack this head on.
It seems like an impasse caused by the first amendment, which does not distinguish between "personal" and "commercial" activities. I suppose there could be another amendment to add in these categories, but the freedom of the (commercial) press seems to fall under your "commercial activity" category? I suppose the government could license the commercial press, but that seems problematic, as it's what many totalitarian regimes do to suppress speech, and is exactly what the first amendment was meant to forestall.
On a slightly different note, why is the impasse "pathological"? Are you just throwing in a pejorative term?
The jurisprudence of the first amendment already makes many distinctions that are not there in the text of the amendment itself. This is inevitable - rights conflict with other rights and even with the same right as exercised by someone else.
> why is the impasse "pathological"? Are you just throwing in a pejorative term?
The current jurisprudence is a pathlogical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_case) interpretation that clamps the solution space to maximal commercial/corporate rights at the expense of individual rights.
The example of the press is actually quite poignant. The current legal regime neuters the free speech rights of most of the press. People can be fired for writing articles saying things their employer does not want to be said. They can even be fired for saying things in their own personal time that their employer does not want to be said! The end result is greatly diminished rights for the individuals making up the press, in order to support greatly increased rights for the controlling owners of the press.
I don't see how you can differentiate between humans and corporations. They are both fundamentally the same. They are born... and oh wait, yeah. But still under the 14th ammendment's equal protection clause the Supreme court determined they were in 1886 (some argue 1819).
Maybe we shouldn't treat corporate speech the same as human speech under the 1st amendment, but that would allow regulation of corporations giving money to political organizations? Ok, well that's beyond the pale. That's obviously originally the founders intent in writing the bill of rights. I'm sure it's in the Federalist Papers somewhere.
We treat corporate speech as an extension of human speech because corporations are made up of humans, and there is no way of abridging the speech of corporations without also abridging the speech of the humans within that corporation.
Also, abridging corporate speech creates a precedent for abridging the speech of all human collective entities like religions, political parties, advocacy groups and the press, because there is no particular reason why corporations as an abstract entity created by humans to express collective human will should be unique in this regard.
You can't simply nullify rights when people exercise them in aggregate. That isn't how free societies are supposed to work, and it's too easy to undermine.
The issue with governments implementing mass warrantless surveillance is not training or standards, NIST or otherwise.
It should be straight-out illegal. Governments do not have "free speech" rights.
As for private citizens doing it: I think there are already sufficient laws about recording people without their consent. You can hire someone to stand on a corner and watch for a specific person to walk by, but a law prohibiting you from recording everyone who walks by is most likely going to withstand a court review. It's a question of scale.
From my understanding, don't many places like big retail stores or malls already use facial recognition with their security systems? Whether it be to deal with flagging banned individuals who come on premises, or for things like tracking where people go in a mall. These kinds of things privately I think are already used a lot.
There's a difference between recording everyone entering your space, and recording everyone in a public space.
There's probably a legal distinction, but personally I really don't want, say, my grocery store tracking how long I spent in which aisles to add to my advertising profile.
(Yes, I use rewards cards, but I have the option to not enter my phone number and pay cash if I want to exclude a particular purchase from that dataset.)
I feel like this has the same basic shape as the problem of industrial pollution. Instead of the classic "diffusion of responsibility", there's more a "diffusion of injury". Theoretically, class-action lawsuits are supposed to handle this, but those are basically toothless when a government organ can hide its process for "security" reasons and then have the case dismissed for lack of standing (cf. Jewel v. NSA).
> a law prohibiting [private citizens] from recording everyone who walks by is most likely going to withstand a court review
I'll take the other side of that bet.
> sufficient laws about recording people without their consent
Such as?
It should be illegal for the government to monitor what is, in most cases, public property (airports and border crossings)?
I think it would be a fantastic idea for the government to surveil road infrastructure. We spend a crap ton of our GDP just on healthcare addressing the negative impact of traffic violence. Not to mention everyone knows someone that has been killed or affected by this. Outright saying the government shouldn’t monitor this is in bad taste.
You can argue that the solution is to stop doubling down on our bad investment, bad that is much less feasible than installing a bunch of traffic cameras.
Meta: I welcome the dog pile that will ensue.
Governments do have free speech rights. Those rights may be limited compared to the rights of private citizens, but they do exist.
Democratic governments have privileges bestowed on them by their constituences. I don't remember where the US Constitution gives any branch of government "free speech" rights. It definitely has some protections for speech of officials in Congress and in courts.
Authoritarian governments, of course, have all the rights they manage to grab. Look what Russian officials say. I suppose that North Korean officials can say anything their bosses tell them to say, any public opinion notwithstanding.
This is a blanket statement needing substantiation, but then, so was mine and I don't feel like doing research. Maybe some legal scholar will weigh in.
I predict a case about this will reach the Supreme Court in the next few years.
The article mentions NIST standards for face recognition. NIST evaluates face matching systems.[1] They've gotten considerably better in the last decade, as would be expected.
[1] https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt11.html
Facial recognition, and the lack of regulating it: a victim of conflating privacy in the sense of limiting government powers and privacy in the sense of whether or not a piece of data is sensitive of embarrassing.
> Civil rights watchdog
Well not quite. They keep getting money every year, but officially their mandate expired in the 90’s and has never been renewed. As crazy as that is by itself, they certainly don’t have the authority to do anything.
Honest question: what else can they do but warn people?
I was appalled to see TSA facial recognition scanners at airports recently, where instead of checking your ID and boarding pass they scan your face. Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out. I’m not sure how the eventual forced violation of biometrics can be stopped when most people don’t care.
I wasn't "appalled" but definitely felt uneasy about it. I am aware I could opt out and read all the discussions about it here on HN. I didn't do anything about it, despite being a very privacy conscious person (using firefox, use max adblocking/anti tracking etc). Why? I don't want to be an asshole, hold the queue and cause trouble for a TSA agent who is just doing the job and likely have no idea what "opt out" means, and with, let's admit it, no practical benefit for myself. (If anything, help myself miss a flight.) The feds and local law enforcement probably already have my face data anyway.
I had a perfectly pleasant experience opting out. The agent simply smiled at me, asked a question to verify that I was the person on the ID I had handed him, and off I went.
It was much easier and less gropey than opting out of the mm wave scans.
If you have a passport, they already do. If you have a driver's license or state ID, they most likely do.
Was gonna meave the same comment almost verbatim.
I grew up in a post 9-11 world. To me, flying has always been something involving security and federal oversight. I have no problems with the federal government knowing that I have taken flight A123 to Chicago, or something. If I wanted to travel incognito, I'd take a train, or perhaps a greyhound bus.
They don't understand and also they despair - both in part because the people who should help them (people like us) also buy into despair.
I wonder if there's a "missing infrastructure opportunity" here. An isolated individual opt-out has the uninspiring cost/risk-vs-benefit/principle tradeoff others have mentioned. But what if that equation could be shifted?
Perhaps "I'll do the scan just now, but also, while it has my motivation and attention, I'll press the easy button to donate $N to some org effectively fighting it". Or "I'll opt out, and press the easy button to encourage others with a somewhat-anonymized "I/someone at airline-or-city-or-region-or-occupation-or... just opted-out! N+1! - Yay future!" tweet/counter"?
I recently reentered the US after a short vacation (the first time I'd been out of the country for a couple of years) and the CBP now have cameras/face scanners. The agent said hello using my name before I'd even handed over my passport -- in fact I don't think he even looked at it.
I assume they must be face-matching on the passport photo database.
Yes, passport photos have been used for facial recognition for a long time now.
Interesting, the camera is usually a bit behind the officer, perpendicular to the lane. Did you walk past the station or was it pointed towards you?
I walked up to the window (into the view of the camera) he said "Welcome home $NAME" as put my passport on the counter!
The camera was right by the counter, not behind the officer.
Yes this seems variable based on point of entry. I had (have?) a flagged passport for awhile and I never got the oh shit face from CBP until they scanned my passport.
>Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out.
Given the reputation of groups involved, I expect many people who might have otherwise opted out felt that trying to do so would have revealed there was no efficient opt-out process, just an empty offer of one, or that opting out would have lasting repercussions for their treatment during travel in the future.
While you can opt out, not every document check station has signage to that effect in my experience; the TSA individual only tells you to put your head in the camera frame; and most people have had An Experience with TSA officials becoming belligerent and even aggressive over small things.
Frankly, it's intimidating, and I don't blame people for not opting out even assuming they know that's possible
The only way to stop these things is to legislate them out of existence.
I flew recently and didn't opt out. If you have a passport or a state ID, any federal agency has you in the system already. What good would avoiding this particular picture do?
Are they basic RGB cameras or do they collect depth as well? Would even know if they decided to change the system to start collecting depth data, even if comparisons are to flat images? Honest questions, as that’s where my concerns are.
Boil the frog. If they start to collect more, it’s not as simple as “they already have my picture.” Should there be a breach, I can’t easily change my face.
I’m generally of the opinion that when it comes to personal data collection we should always say “no, convince me you should” rather than “sure, why not?” Other than an ever-so-slightly faster processing time is there evidence of any real security gain? My initial reaction, uninformed on the specifics but fairly versed in this type of security, is that’s unlikely.
I have no idea and don't know the difference but I could say the same thing of the camera they used to take my passport photo or my state ID.
That’s true, but those are also different agencies, so at a minimum you’re spreading the data (and risk surface). My concerns are generally (though not entirely) around data breaches rather than the collector. And sadly we have ample evidence that federal agencies aren’t always great at securing PII.
But more to the point the reason for doing it is there, for better or worse — want a passport? Have a picture taken. In this case I am (at least for now) comparing opting out or not. You can still take your flight without them taking that additional picture. That of course may not stay true.
I'm certainty not advocating for more of this security theater but the genuine and imaginary concerns meld together when we talk about security so I'm more trying to ascertain what's the realistic risk here. I agree that government is awful at storing PII and it is only a matter of time before biometrics get leaked assuming they haven't already.
That’s a reasonable point. And I’ll admit I’m expressing more of an opinion on privacy in general. I don’t know what the real risk is, immediately or over time and it would vary to an extent by individual. I suspect, again uninformed, it’s fairly small for most people.
the ones i’ve seen claim they aren’t storing the data after verifying the identity
The signage claims the _image_, i.e. the pixels, is deleted but makes no claims about embeddings, biometric measurements, etc that are generated from the image.
Not wanting to contribute more to my palantir profile and accidentally becoming a person of interest due to some shitty algorithm.
> when most people don’t care.
Some people care a lot. But take great care not to be noticed.
For some people the concentrated attention of the state is too be feared. So that is why they say "yes sir, no sir".
It is a matter of survival
I actually opted in (Delta Airlines Digital ID, default opt out) because I have Global Entry so CBP and TSA all have my information already anyway. Opting in was just me authorizing Delta to also share my flight data with them so they can match my records up.
The result? Faster passage through gate security, significantly faster than TSA Precheck in fact. As a frequent flyer, I like it.
In what way is it faster? Do you skip xray for carry ons?
TSA Precheck lines are excessively long now, to say nothing about the normie lines which probably violate some population density laws of the universe. Meanwhile the Digital ID line is (at least for now) practically empty.
So that's an easy 10~20 minutes shaved off. Once I'm ushered through to screening I have the same convenience benefits as TSA Precheck since it's a prerequisite for Digital ID anyway.
Cool. You must be at ATL. I hardly ever run into a line long line at pre check, I am thankful most flyers dont sign up. A line even shorter sounds good, and with global entry and passport, the government has everything it needs to track me down.
The closest major airport I use is SEA (which unfortunately doesn't have Digital ID yet), but I've definitely enjoyed the time savings whenever I fly through ATL or LAX.
The TSA Precheck lines at all three airports are horrifically long. ;_;
ah yes the watchdog alarm aka the nothing will be done but now we feel like someone other than us is working on it alarm (manufactured consent alarm?)
You have no right to privacy in public. If you make this illegal private companies will do it instead, and the first amendment makes that impossible to stop.
There are two things wrong with this: first, in the U.S., you do have certain rights to privacy in public. Whether this is a case of those rights being violated is a different question. In any case, I don't like the creeping redefinition of civil rights I infer from that statement, intentional or not. Second, just as civil rights can be eroded, they can also be expanded, and the idea that we should just throw up our hands is not helpful in a free society that depends on people giving a shit.
The fundamental flaw of cynicism is that it invariably opts for the path of least resistance—a facile dismissal rather than a constructive lens for genuine improvement. If an overwhelming majority—say, 80% of the populace—were deeply invested in this issue, they would elect representatives committed to outlawing it, and thus it would indeed become illegal.
The cynic might retort that such laws are perpetually vulnerable to subversion under the guise of national security. While there's a kernel of truth in that, it's equally undeniable that if 80% of the citizenry truly felt impassioned, any rogue elements within the government would face severe repercussions. Acts of retribution against such actors would not only be tolerated but perhaps even tacitly endorsed by the public.
I'm of the opposite opinion,that recording is a liberty and the right to mass record and identify people is a healthy sign of private free speech rights. I feel banning it would be dystopic. Where I disagree is the use of government at all in many of the capacities taking advantage of this such as TSA, DHS, CBP etc as they are essentially unhinged violent pirates.
Interesting opinion but there is no dystopian literature i know of that worries about banning mass surveillance. Mass surveillance on the other hand features very prominently.
Mass surveillance played out privately means every plated cop car can be tracked, every noted confidential informant and every detective, tax stasi, etc can be traced. This is already becoming the case on networked mapping apps where the road pirates are losing their revenue. It's more of a worry for the state than citizens IMO.
There's still information a.
A? Asymmetry?
Then you're looking in the wrong section. You don't want the sci-fi section, you want history - Cold War. The investigation of the government by the people was violently suppressed and the the official mouthpieces were jokes - "There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda."
Well, a true cynic would note that if an 80% of a dictatorship all agreed and felt so passionate -- if even 40% did, such a government would easily fall apart or be capable of reform.
If we could reliably attain passion, cooperation, consciousness? And ultimately, a belief in agency?
Then we would hardly even need to protect institutions against such subversion.
I'm reminded of ceausescu. Everyone agreed, up until they suddenly didn't and he and his wife didn't even seem to get it until they were lined up and shot.
I think it takes both agreement and desperation for that kind of thing to happen, though. Comfortable people don't tend to buck the people who can freeze their bank accounts in any serious way at simultaneous scale, even when they're in mass disagreement.
> first amendment makes that impossible to stop.
How so?
Preventing facial recognition misuse (or use even). How is that impinging on the freedoms guaranteed in the First Ammendment?
Recording things is generally interpreted as a form of speech. For example, recording police officers in public is speech. If the government can ban private parties from recording people's faces in public, the same could be done to prevent recording the police.
>Recording things is generally interpreted as a form of speech.
Then make it not so, we aren't forced to live with the status quo for eternity.
The law wouldn't be banning people recording faces. It would be much more specific: corporations can't record peoples faces at a mass scale to log them away and sell the data for a profit. If there's any edge cases to this, then let the courts handle it. We let the courts sort out grey areas already, that's their job.
And a valid news/press activity protected by the first amendment
Commercial speech is substantially less protected under First Amendment case law. You can't prohibit random individuals from declaring themselves a citizen journalist and recording people, but I think it would be entirely possible to pass a law saying private companies may not assemble facial recognition databases for sale to third parties.
They don't need to sell the database, just the video that builds the database. Or give it away for free and magically number go up in some bank account in Cyprus or Hong Kong.
Resolving this pathological impasse is straightforward - differentiate between personal activity and commercial activity. Individuals recording the police, other people happenstance, or even spending a considerable amount of their personal time compiling a self-administered facial recognition database of people - fine. Businesses (or really, entire industries) creating surveillance databases that would make a Stasi agent blush, likely by paying the salaries of many people to do this, and likely selling [access to] the databases to pay for it all - not fine. Societally, we've basically been hoodwinked with this temporarily embarassed millionaires fallacy - scale itself creates logical contradictions of our rights and we need to attack this head on.
It seems like an impasse caused by the first amendment, which does not distinguish between "personal" and "commercial" activities. I suppose there could be another amendment to add in these categories, but the freedom of the (commercial) press seems to fall under your "commercial activity" category? I suppose the government could license the commercial press, but that seems problematic, as it's what many totalitarian regimes do to suppress speech, and is exactly what the first amendment was meant to forestall.
On a slightly different note, why is the impasse "pathological"? Are you just throwing in a pejorative term?
The jurisprudence of the first amendment already makes many distinctions that are not there in the text of the amendment itself. This is inevitable - rights conflict with other rights and even with the same right as exercised by someone else.
> why is the impasse "pathological"? Are you just throwing in a pejorative term?
The current jurisprudence is a pathlogical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_case) interpretation that clamps the solution space to maximal commercial/corporate rights at the expense of individual rights.
The example of the press is actually quite poignant. The current legal regime neuters the free speech rights of most of the press. People can be fired for writing articles saying things their employer does not want to be said. They can even be fired for saying things in their own personal time that their employer does not want to be said! The end result is greatly diminished rights for the individuals making up the press, in order to support greatly increased rights for the controlling owners of the press.
I don't see how you can differentiate between humans and corporations. They are both fundamentally the same. They are born... and oh wait, yeah. But still under the 14th ammendment's equal protection clause the Supreme court determined they were in 1886 (some argue 1819).
Maybe we shouldn't treat corporate speech the same as human speech under the 1st amendment, but that would allow regulation of corporations giving money to political organizations? Ok, well that's beyond the pale. That's obviously originally the founders intent in writing the bill of rights. I'm sure it's in the Federalist Papers somewhere.
We treat corporate speech as an extension of human speech because corporations are made up of humans, and there is no way of abridging the speech of corporations without also abridging the speech of the humans within that corporation.
Also, abridging corporate speech creates a precedent for abridging the speech of all human collective entities like religions, political parties, advocacy groups and the press, because there is no particular reason why corporations as an abstract entity created by humans to express collective human will should be unique in this regard.
You can't simply nullify rights when people exercise them in aggregate. That isn't how free societies are supposed to work, and it's too easy to undermine.