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Ok -- I'm following your argument now. I'm surprised that you think 100% blanket surveillance is not ok, but partial surveillance -- limited only by its expensi

Ok -- I'm following your argument now. I'm surprised that you think 100% blanket surveillance is not ok, but partial surveillance -- limited only by its expensiveness -- is OK. Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group. Yes, by limiting robot police & robot cameras you make this difficult for police by limiting their memory, but mass-surveillance is still happening! This, myself & the other commenter (I believe) find this unacceptable. I'm arguing that police shouldn't be mass surveilling at all -- with robots, helmet cams that track license plates or by individual human officers selecting a zone to surveil. Or that if this surveillance happens -- it becomes public knowledge. Let every citizen view the live feeds around them, perform their own tracking if they wish, to keep the playing field open. The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could? I think we have a difference of opinion here so I'm curious -- what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil?

simoncion 11y ago
> Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group. That has nothing to do with police surveillance. That has everything to do with crooked cops. It's a problem that's worth talking about, but it's completely unrelated to a conversation about limiting the damage that can be done with tireless, incredibly cheap robot police officers. > ...but mass-surveillance is still happening! What I'm describing as the ideal situation isn't mass surveillance. If you declare all surveillance that gets fed back into a filing cabinet (computerized or otherwise) to be mass surveillance, you make it impossible to distinguish between a single guy on a stakeout and an organization that records and stores for the rest of eternity every single phone call in a nation, the exterior of every single piece of snail mail in a nation, and the movement of every single automobile in every major and most minor metropolitan areas in that nation. Please don't do that. > The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could? If you could get it for free, it would be nice. It's a hard problem that requires some very serious tradeoffs. There is no way around those tradeoffs. Tor -as is- is very useful. If it protected against a passive adversary that controlled most of the nodes in the network, nearly noone would use it because it would be too slow. > ...what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil? I mean, the obvious stuff? * As part of a routine crime-prevention patrol. (E.g. an officer walking a regular beat.) * As part of an ongoing investigation into one or more people who are -at a minimum- suspected of being involved in illegal activity. Let's skip the conversation about what should or shouldn't be illegal. While that's a useful conversation to have, it's not in-scope for a conversation about limiting the damage done by robot policing.

simoncion 11y ago

> Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group. That has nothing to do with police surveillance. That has everything to do with crooked cops. It's a problem that's worth talking about, but it's completely unrelated to a conversation about limiting the damage that can be done with tireless, incredibly cheap robot police officers. > ...but mass-surveillance is still happening! What I'm describing as the ideal situation isn't mass surveillance. If you declare all surveillance that gets fed back into a filing cabinet (computerized or otherwise) to be mass surveillance, you make it impossible to distinguish between a single guy on a stakeout and an organization that records and stores for the rest of eternity every single phone call in a nation, the exterior of every single piece of snail mail in a nation, and the movement of every single automobile in every major and most minor metropolitan areas in that nation. Please don't do that. > The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could? If you could get it for free, it would be nice. It's a hard problem that requires some very serious tradeoffs. There is no way around those tradeoffs. Tor -as is- is very useful. If it protected against a passive adversary that controlled most of the nodes in the network, nearly noone would use it because it would be too slow. > ...what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil? I mean, the obvious stuff? * As part of a routine crime-prevention patrol. (E.g. an officer walking a regular beat.) * As part of an ongoing investigation into one or more people who are -at a minimum- suspected of being involved in illegal activity. Let's skip the conversation about what should or shouldn't be illegal. While that's a useful conversation to have, it's not in-scope for a conversation about limiting the damage done by robot policing.