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> It doesn’t matter if you’re driving down the street or visiting a friend, if government or law enforcement has a reason to set up surveillance, there’s great

> It doesn’t matter if you’re driving down the street or visiting a friend, if government or law enforcement has a reason to set up surveillance, there’s great technology out there to do it. I think most people understand this concept at some level. This describes the same fundamental pattern as undercover officers and informants: a suspect is identified and assets allocated to the project of going after that person or organization. The scary thing isn't so much that surveillance tech exists, but rather the prospect of law enforcement (or others who can obtain access to their systems by various means) being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost because of indiscriminate surveillance.

DenisM 8y ago
>being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost Is it a bad thing though? Imagine that everything on all streets is recorded, and when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019". Technology changes the balance of power in different directions. The police used to be able to tap phones, but now whatsapp is pretty much out of reach, this hampers one of the venues. To keep up the police would need new methods, and it does not have to be phone intercept, maybe post-factum external surveillance would suffice.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019" I don’t think these cameras require a warrant prior to “collection”. That’s the problem.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  Maybe, if they actually had to get a warrant. My understanding is that they don't need to do this for street cameras because there's no expectation of privacy in public spaces. But before massive camera deployments there was also an unstated expectation that there was some kind of cost to collect information on any particular person. Still, one of the things to keep in mind about mass surveillance (or mass censorship) is that once the apparatus is built, policy can be changed relatively cheaply. And it's highly unlikely that law enforcement agencies are buying equipment that requires configuration changes to be signed by a court's or legislature's private key.
  - DenisM 8y ago
    We have managed to keep due process alive and well for hundreds of years without cryptographic signatures.
    - AlexCoventry 8y ago
      Due process was looking pretty anemic if you were black or left-wing in the 50s and 60s.
      - jakelazaroff 8y ago
        Due process looks pretty anemic if you're black today.
        cestith 8y ago
        I'd say it looks anemic even if you're a middle class, middle aged white male. It's weaker if you're young, or black, or brown, or female. It's damn near dead if you're a young black male or appear vaguely Arabic.
        int_19h 8y ago
        You can even be rich and politically affluent. I mean, this was "due process", warrants and everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor%27s_residence_drug_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...
        AlexCoventry 8y ago
        True, but if there's anything today on the scale and invasiveness of COINTELPRO, it's not public knowledge.
        wnoise 8y ago
        COINTELPRO wasn't public knowledge at the time, and many massive surveillance systems operating recently and today are known, e.g. PRISM.
- cronix 8y ago
  We just need to have one of these flying over every major metro area. Uses regular cameras found in cell phones. Once you have everybodies location recorded, you can go back in time to solve crimes. I shudder to think how much more advanced this tech is now, since this was 5 years ago. Now, just throw in some AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8
  - pdkl95 8y ago
    > Once you have everybodies location recorded You don't need anything flying to do that. The location of evert cell phone is already tracked both by the phone's telemetry[1] and deduction based on tower usage[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 [2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-is-tracking-people-right-now/634/ http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-i...
    - cronix 8y ago
      Sure, assuming you're carrying a phone on you. As we continue down this path we seem to be racing towards, I'm sure gait detection, facial recognition, etc., will be in full force in combined systems, sharing data, and they won't need phones to track your movements. They just follow you out your front door and wherever you go, passing whatever license plate scanners/facial scanners they have along the way.
- clubm8 8y ago
  >Is it a bad thing though? Imagine that everything on all streets is recorded, and when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019". The laws were written assuming that they wouldn't be perfectly enforced. We'd never have consented to many of them if we knew they'd be 100% enforced. Increasing surveillance is a back-door in democracy that grants the government new powers w/o going through the legislature.
  - DenisM 8y ago
    Hence my proposal to rewrite the law - we grant the police their dragnet video recording, in return they must obtain a warrant or show probable cause to get the footage. The law can raise the bar for obtaining a warrant to an arbitrarily high level to cover minor daily infractions. For example, today police aren't allowed to stop a person for driving without a seatbelt, unless a more serious crime is being committed at the same time.
    - ctrl_freak 8y ago
      I'm surprised you place so much trust in our system of laws. With that proposal, we'd be one small step away (e.g. terrorist attack, etc.) from something truly Orwellian. Look what happened with 9/11 and see how fast our civil liberties can go down the drain.
      - behringer 8y ago
        The government would never use the system to help you either. They're utterly incompetent. They would only use this to imprison you.
      - DenisM 8y ago
        Machine guns and prison camps are a lot more damaging to personal liberties and have more significant potential for abuse by government, and yet we're managing just fine for the last 100 years, thanks to our system of laws.
    - 8y ago
- IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
  How is that working in the UK right now?
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  It is a very bad thing since it gives power to abuse with selectivity. It is just automated enough to maximize the abuse potential essentially to turn into rule of man. If everyone is doing something 'illegal' than it gives great power to those who can enforce it. Sure everybody smokes a joint after work. But the guy who cut you off in traffic? Check him to see if there is something you can ruin his life for - ah there it is. Bingo. And that is just petty abuse instead of orchestrated ones. If things were fully automated such that it was impartial it wouldn't have those problems. You could be the mayor of New York City and the traffic cameras automatically fined you for going 27mph in a 25mph and an appeal was a process that was absolutely ironclad with no room for judgment (Was the camera accurate? Did you have extenuating circumstance such as fleeing from immediate violence or rushing someone to emergency medical aid? If yes ticket dismissed. If no ticket stands.) that wouldn't be abuseable. It may be contrary to intents and would be a royal pain in the ass and may likely get changed to at least give it a margin of 10 mph over the speed limit but it couldn't be abused.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    > It is a very bad thing since it gives power to abuse with selectivity. That can't be why it's bad. Because all power can be abused selectively.
- int_19h 8y ago
  > The police used to be able to tap phones, but now whatsapp is pretty much out of reach, this hampers one of the venues. And before they were able to tap phones, a lot more conversations were person-to-person, and also out of reach in practice. So it was a venue that technological progress created, and further technological progress later took away. Why should we implicitly assume that its existence was a good thing?
  - llampx 8y ago
    That's a good point. One only has to imagine an alternate reality without technology where every conversation between two people has a cop nearby listening in. If that creeps us out, why not widespread technological surveillance?
    - bb88 8y ago
      > One only has to imagine an alternate reality without technology where every conversation between two people has a cop nearby listening in. Listening devices have long been a staple of the police. The FBI took out many a mobster with a bug in a lampshade, say.
  - DenisM 8y ago
    Good question. 1. No phones, no whatsapp. Criminal talk in person, police eavesdrop in person. Parity. 2. Phones, no whatsapp. Criminals talk on the phone, police eavesdrop on the phone. Parity. 3. No phones, whatsapp. Criminals talk on whatsapp, police eavesdrop in person. Imbalance. Recommended solution to imbalance: counteract technological barrier with a different application of similar technology. E.g. dragnet video recording.
freyir 8y ago
> being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost because of indiscriminate surveillance This seems like a bizarre way of thinking, that crimes should only be punished if the criminal happens to be caught in the act, or if law enforcement follows a trail of breadcrumbs involving unreliable eyewitness accounts and scraps of evidence. How many people have been wrongfully convicted because the police needed to get the crime off the books, or evidence was misleading, or eyewitnesses gave false testimony? You speak as if it's a forgone conclusion that this is the way things should be, but what's the basis?
- pdkl95 8y ago
  Limiting the exercise of power is the goal. The police by design are supposed to meet a high standard of evidence for the use of their power to be justified. The reason for this should be obvious: unrestrained power leads to very bad effects. Before any technology or policy is used, it first needs to be considered as a weapon, because the historical record shows that this is how powerful tools end up being used regardless of how they were intended to be used. Denying law enforcement any evidence that doesn't meet specific standards isn't the way it "should be", it's the least worst way we know of having functional law enforcement without letting it devolve into various types of oppressive police states. > what's the basis? "Innocent until proven guilty."
  - freyir 8y ago
    > "Innocent until proven guilty." Whose innocence being questioned here? The quote is a non-sequitur in this context, unless you consider "being on camera" a punishment reserved for the guilty. I have bad news for you, if you've ever set foot inside a supermarket, drugstore, fast-food restaurant, corporate office, etc.
    - pdkl95 8y ago
      > if you've ever set foot inside a supermarket, drugstore, fast-food restaurant, office, etc. All of which require a warrant before they can be used as evidence against you. You're conflating private recordings that are not generally available to the enforcement power of the state with the state regularly gathering evidence against you without cause. The entire point of "innocent until proven guilty" is that there must be an established due process of law in the application of the power of the state. For supermarket cameras, that's the warrant requirement before police can look at the recording, which creates a legal paper trail documenting their justification for needing to see the recording (which can be challenged later in court), and limits the scope of seized recordings to those at lest theoretically involved with a specific incident.
raincom 8y ago
Many prosecutions are based on "parallel constructions" involving such tools.

DenisM 8y ago

>being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost Is it a bad thing though? Imagine that everything on all streets is recorded, and when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019". Technology changes the balance of power in different directions. The police used to be able to tap phones, but now whatsapp is pretty much out of reach, this hampers one of the venues. To keep up the police would need new methods, and it does not have to be phone intercept, maybe post-factum external surveillance would suffice.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019" I don’t think these cameras require a warrant prior to “collection”. That’s the problem.
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
Maybe, if they actually had to get a warrant. My understanding is that they don't need to do this for street cameras because there's no expectation of privacy in public spaces. But before massive camera deployments there was also an unstated expectation that there was some kind of cost to collect information on any particular person. Still, one of the things to keep in mind about mass surveillance (or mass censorship) is that once the apparatus is built, policy can be changed relatively cheaply. And it's highly unlikely that law enforcement agencies are buying equipment that requires configuration changes to be signed by a court's or legislature's private key.
- DenisM 8y ago
  We have managed to keep due process alive and well for hundreds of years without cryptographic signatures.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    Due process was looking pretty anemic if you were black or left-wing in the 50s and 60s.
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
      Due process looks pretty anemic if you're black today.
      - cestith 8y ago
        I'd say it looks anemic even if you're a middle class, middle aged white male. It's weaker if you're young, or black, or brown, or female. It's damn near dead if you're a young black male or appear vaguely Arabic.
        int_19h 8y ago
        You can even be rich and politically affluent. I mean, this was "due process", warrants and everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor%27s_residence_drug_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...
      - AlexCoventry 8y ago
        True, but if there's anything today on the scale and invasiveness of COINTELPRO, it's not public knowledge.
        wnoise 8y ago
        COINTELPRO wasn't public knowledge at the time, and many massive surveillance systems operating recently and today are known, e.g. PRISM.
cronix 8y ago
We just need to have one of these flying over every major metro area. Uses regular cameras found in cell phones. Once you have everybodies location recorded, you can go back in time to solve crimes. I shudder to think how much more advanced this tech is now, since this was 5 years ago. Now, just throw in some AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8
- pdkl95 8y ago
  > Once you have everybodies location recorded You don't need anything flying to do that. The location of evert cell phone is already tracked both by the phone's telemetry[1] and deduction based on tower usage[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 [2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-is-tracking-people-right-now/634/ http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-i...
  - cronix 8y ago
    Sure, assuming you're carrying a phone on you. As we continue down this path we seem to be racing towards, I'm sure gait detection, facial recognition, etc., will be in full force in combined systems, sharing data, and they won't need phones to track your movements. They just follow you out your front door and wherever you go, passing whatever license plate scanners/facial scanners they have along the way.
clubm8 8y ago
>Is it a bad thing though? Imagine that everything on all streets is recorded, and when an incident happens a cop goes to the judge and asks for a warrant to view the footage for "Pike St, between 1st and 2nd ave, between 13:00 and 13:35, on Jan 3rd 2019". The laws were written assuming that they wouldn't be perfectly enforced. We'd never have consented to many of them if we knew they'd be 100% enforced. Increasing surveillance is a back-door in democracy that grants the government new powers w/o going through the legislature.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Hence my proposal to rewrite the law - we grant the police their dragnet video recording, in return they must obtain a warrant or show probable cause to get the footage. The law can raise the bar for obtaining a warrant to an arbitrarily high level to cover minor daily infractions. For example, today police aren't allowed to stop a person for driving without a seatbelt, unless a more serious crime is being committed at the same time.
  - ctrl_freak 8y ago
    I'm surprised you place so much trust in our system of laws. With that proposal, we'd be one small step away (e.g. terrorist attack, etc.) from something truly Orwellian. Look what happened with 9/11 and see how fast our civil liberties can go down the drain.
    - behringer 8y ago
      The government would never use the system to help you either. They're utterly incompetent. They would only use this to imprison you.
    - DenisM 8y ago
      Machine guns and prison camps are a lot more damaging to personal liberties and have more significant potential for abuse by government, and yet we're managing just fine for the last 100 years, thanks to our system of laws.
  - 8y ago
IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
How is that working in the UK right now?
Nasrudith 8y ago
It is a very bad thing since it gives power to abuse with selectivity. It is just automated enough to maximize the abuse potential essentially to turn into rule of man. If everyone is doing something 'illegal' than it gives great power to those who can enforce it. Sure everybody smokes a joint after work. But the guy who cut you off in traffic? Check him to see if there is something you can ruin his life for - ah there it is. Bingo. And that is just petty abuse instead of orchestrated ones. If things were fully automated such that it was impartial it wouldn't have those problems. You could be the mayor of New York City and the traffic cameras automatically fined you for going 27mph in a 25mph and an appeal was a process that was absolutely ironclad with no room for judgment (Was the camera accurate? Did you have extenuating circumstance such as fleeing from immediate violence or rushing someone to emergency medical aid? If yes ticket dismissed. If no ticket stands.) that wouldn't be abuseable. It may be contrary to intents and would be a royal pain in the ass and may likely get changed to at least give it a margin of 10 mph over the speed limit but it couldn't be abused.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  > It is a very bad thing since it gives power to abuse with selectivity. That can't be why it's bad. Because all power can be abused selectively.
int_19h 8y ago
> The police used to be able to tap phones, but now whatsapp is pretty much out of reach, this hampers one of the venues. And before they were able to tap phones, a lot more conversations were person-to-person, and also out of reach in practice. So it was a venue that technological progress created, and further technological progress later took away. Why should we implicitly assume that its existence was a good thing?
- llampx 8y ago
  That's a good point. One only has to imagine an alternate reality without technology where every conversation between two people has a cop nearby listening in. If that creeps us out, why not widespread technological surveillance?
  - bb88 8y ago
    > One only has to imagine an alternate reality without technology where every conversation between two people has a cop nearby listening in. Listening devices have long been a staple of the police. The FBI took out many a mobster with a bug in a lampshade, say.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Good question. 1. No phones, no whatsapp. Criminal talk in person, police eavesdrop in person. Parity. 2. Phones, no whatsapp. Criminals talk on the phone, police eavesdrop on the phone. Parity. 3. No phones, whatsapp. Criminals talk on whatsapp, police eavesdrop in person. Imbalance. Recommended solution to imbalance: counteract technological barrier with a different application of similar technology. E.g. dragnet video recording.

freyir 8y ago

> being able to select targets after-the-fact at little additional cost because of indiscriminate surveillance This seems like a bizarre way of thinking, that crimes should only be punished if the criminal happens to be caught in the act, or if law enforcement follows a trail of breadcrumbs involving unreliable eyewitness accounts and scraps of evidence. How many people have been wrongfully convicted because the police needed to get the crime off the books, or evidence was misleading, or eyewitnesses gave false testimony? You speak as if it's a forgone conclusion that this is the way things should be, but what's the basis?

pdkl95 8y ago
Limiting the exercise of power is the goal. The police by design are supposed to meet a high standard of evidence for the use of their power to be justified. The reason for this should be obvious: unrestrained power leads to very bad effects. Before any technology or policy is used, it first needs to be considered as a weapon, because the historical record shows that this is how powerful tools end up being used regardless of how they were intended to be used. Denying law enforcement any evidence that doesn't meet specific standards isn't the way it "should be", it's the least worst way we know of having functional law enforcement without letting it devolve into various types of oppressive police states. > what's the basis? "Innocent until proven guilty."
- freyir 8y ago
  > "Innocent until proven guilty." Whose innocence being questioned here? The quote is a non-sequitur in this context, unless you consider "being on camera" a punishment reserved for the guilty. I have bad news for you, if you've ever set foot inside a supermarket, drugstore, fast-food restaurant, corporate office, etc.
  - pdkl95 8y ago
    > if you've ever set foot inside a supermarket, drugstore, fast-food restaurant, office, etc. All of which require a warrant before they can be used as evidence against you. You're conflating private recordings that are not generally available to the enforcement power of the state with the state regularly gathering evidence against you without cause. The entire point of "innocent until proven guilty" is that there must be an established due process of law in the application of the power of the state. For supermarket cameras, that's the warrant requirement before police can look at the recording, which creates a legal paper trail documenting their justification for needing to see the recording (which can be challenged later in court), and limits the scope of seized recordings to those at lest theoretically involved with a specific incident.

raincom 8y ago

Many prosecutions are based on "parallel constructions" involving such tools.