4 ms·

Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipmen

by jbob2000 8y ago

Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in. Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).

new_guy 8y ago
When the price of getting caught spray painting cameras is you and your family getting executed, or being sent to a 're-education camp', would you still do it? No matter how 'incredibly fragile' you perceive the system to be? This is already a daily reality for certain minorities in some countries already. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-app-no-encryption-china-force-install-urumqi-xinjiang https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  If that's the price for spray painting cameras, the marginal additional punishment for getting caught murdering those who are arresting the spray-painters is no longer sufficient to deter me from attempting it. Once you go full family execution, that's pretty much the limit of escalation against an individual. If you're willing and able to destroy everything and everyone I care about, there is no longer any bound you can control on what I might be willing to do to prevent that, or avenge it, and you are now relying entirely on my own ethical reticence and my resource limitations to avoid me engaging in acts of terrorism against your nation-state and its loyalists. And that's the practical argument for proportional punishments, if your government is so dysfunctional that there is no moral argument for them. If you lock up all the Uighurs just for existing, for example, you may find that the ones who escape your pogrom are more willing to fight, and to fight dirty. Realistically, we should probably be talking about vandalism of surveillance equipment in terms of how many cameras or camera-equivalents you could be compelled by force to replace whenever you are caught destroying one. And that is balanced by how likely you are to be caught when destroying one. Which depends somewhat on how many cameras/snitches in the area are fully operational. There's probably an optimal camera-destroying algorithm to be discovered in there somewhere.
  - eponeponepon 8y ago
    > you may find that the ones who > your pogrom are more willing to > fight, and to fight dirty. ...neatly justifying your continuing oppression of them and others and investment in your security machine. This stuff is frequently by design.
rebuilder 8y ago
I think fighting this will be much more like trying to stop Facebook shadow profiling you. You won't know where the surveillance devices will be, or rather, everything will be one.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested. You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    Same thing applies to cutting cables. You'll be seen and tracked. Jammers are both trackable and illegal in most places. Believe me, I wish it was that easy.
    - eiaoa 8y ago
      I think it would be harder to keep every inch of cable in view of a camera than keep every camera in view of another. Jammers are trackable, but if you use them judiciously, I think they could be used to cover other attacks: activate jammer, attack camera infrastructure, deactivate jammer, and flee.
joe_the_user 8y ago
There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues. Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of random people - just like purges in the many repressive regimes around the world. The main win for repression here is they no longer need a system like, say, East Germany where 25% of population spied on their neighbors. I suppose you might count it a win that in this coming future, your car isn't going to start when you act staggering drunk rather than when you objectively are staggering drunk. But I can't see the win here.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc. But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong!. Come on. Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install them) let me tell you something: the cameras are shit, the quality they produce is shit, clients are cheap as fuck and don't want to repair them, they break constantly, the software is terrible to use... I could go on. We are a very long way away from the dystopia you are describing. People will gladly unintentionally fuck this up long before it becomes what you're fearing it will be.
  - mentat 8y ago
    People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      The second thing you mention seems largely unrelated to the first. Deepfakes (especially live deepfakes) require extensive learning on extensive data sets. Sure, you could do facial recognition that way, but useful facial recognition would learn from a single still photo.

new_guy 8y ago

When the price of getting caught spray painting cameras is you and your family getting executed, or being sent to a 're-education camp', would you still do it? No matter how 'incredibly fragile' you perceive the system to be? This is already a daily reality for certain minorities in some countries already. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-app-no-encryption-china-force-install-urumqi-xinjiang https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...

logfromblammo 8y ago
If that's the price for spray painting cameras, the marginal additional punishment for getting caught murdering those who are arresting the spray-painters is no longer sufficient to deter me from attempting it. Once you go full family execution, that's pretty much the limit of escalation against an individual. If you're willing and able to destroy everything and everyone I care about, there is no longer any bound you can control on what I might be willing to do to prevent that, or avenge it, and you are now relying entirely on my own ethical reticence and my resource limitations to avoid me engaging in acts of terrorism against your nation-state and its loyalists. And that's the practical argument for proportional punishments, if your government is so dysfunctional that there is no moral argument for them. If you lock up all the Uighurs just for existing, for example, you may find that the ones who escape your pogrom are more willing to fight, and to fight dirty. Realistically, we should probably be talking about vandalism of surveillance equipment in terms of how many cameras or camera-equivalents you could be compelled by force to replace whenever you are caught destroying one. And that is balanced by how likely you are to be caught when destroying one. Which depends somewhat on how many cameras/snitches in the area are fully operational. There's probably an optimal camera-destroying algorithm to be discovered in there somewhere.
- eponeponepon 8y ago
  > you may find that the ones who > your pogrom are more willing to > fight, and to fight dirty. ...neatly justifying your continuing oppression of them and others and investment in your security machine. This stuff is frequently by design.

rebuilder 8y ago

I think fighting this will be much more like trying to stop Facebook shadow profiling you. You won't know where the surveillance devices will be, or rather, everything will be one.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.

eiaoa 8y ago
> Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested. You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  Same thing applies to cutting cables. You'll be seen and tracked. Jammers are both trackable and illegal in most places. Believe me, I wish it was that easy.
  - eiaoa 8y ago
    I think it would be harder to keep every inch of cable in view of a camera than keep every camera in view of another. Jammers are trackable, but if you use them judiciously, I think they could be used to cover other attacks: activate jammer, attack camera infrastructure, deactivate jammer, and flee.

joe_the_user 8y ago

There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues. Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of random people - just like purges in the many repressive regimes around the world. The main win for repression here is they no longer need a system like, say, East Germany where 25% of population spied on their neighbors. I suppose you might count it a win that in this coming future, your car isn't going to start when you act staggering drunk rather than when you objectively are staggering drunk. But I can't see the win here.

jbob2000 8y ago
I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc. But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong!. Come on. Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install them) let me tell you something: the cameras are shit, the quality they produce is shit, clients are cheap as fuck and don't want to repair them, they break constantly, the software is terrible to use... I could go on. We are a very long way away from the dystopia you are describing. People will gladly unintentionally fuck this up long before it becomes what you're fearing it will be.
- mentat 8y ago
  People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    The second thing you mention seems largely unrelated to the first. Deepfakes (especially live deepfakes) require extensive learning on extensive data sets. Sure, you could do facial recognition that way, but useful facial recognition would learn from a single still photo.