9 ms·

>He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who co

>He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved." ...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah? This blasé attitude about sweeping-up data of innocent people is precisely how you arrive at it eventually being abused. The eroding of rights isn't a flagrantly giant leap but tiny concessions that occur until it's too late to reverse what has essentially become the modus operandi. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186759

coldtea 8y ago
>He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved." "Hmm, this black person was near..."
- coldtea 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter (others, too numerous to mention)
  - MikeAmelung 8y ago
    There are others, too numerous to mention, yet you used someone that was very likely guilty as your second example? Just wanted to bring this up in case anyone reads your comment and thoughtlessly nods in agreement.
- kfwhp 8y ago
  Take your race baiting and shove it.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Ironic choice of examples, because lacking these tools, you've just identified the tool the police tend to fall back on. We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same?
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same? How confident are you that we can build algorithms to do that? You can't just flatten the probability distribution based on race when many of the legitimate factors are correlated with it, any more than you could do so for gender or age or nationality. Unless you want an absurd false positive rate against octogenarian women from Japan. But given that some racial (or gender or age) disparity is expected, how do you know if the amount of disparity in the algorithm's results is legitimate? It could be too high, or too low, and knowing which one would imply possession of an algorithm that gives the "true" amount, which was the original problem to begin with. The answer is to require high standards of proof and conclusive evidence, so that it's impossible to choose a random innocent black man off the street and convict him of anything just because you're a racist or some algorithm decided he fit an aggregate profile. But that's the opposite of the dragnet approach. You need evidence on a specific person, not statistical data from thousands that doesn't give you a better than 5% probability that it was any given one of them. And suppose the actual perpetrator wasn't carrying a phone at the time of the crime, so now you've got a list of "possible suspects" 100% of which are innocent.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      I believe the article clarifies that this system (much like its sibling, DNA database mining) is used to narrow the search space so that traditional (and comparatively more expensive) sleuthing can find the evidence needed for a conviction. The dragnet is, in a sense, more ruling people out than ruling people in.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
iceninenines 8y ago
It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about them can be used to target them for arbitrary or deliberate police or political purposes. Oh and then there's the peer-pressure gaslighting of anyone pushing back on the "nothing to hide" mantra or pantopticon surveillance state. Ask them to live in glass houses or give over their banking details, suddenly they have less "nothing to hide." Lock up anything you value because no one else will. Also a good book: Three Felonies a Day
- jcranberry 8y ago
  This comment is unproductive and ridiculous. 1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel. 2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools". 3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen. This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected officials, so they are eventually bound by the public. If you are to any degree right, you haven't explained how this data could be used to undermine, circumvent, or influence these factors and bring about a 'surveillance state'. At this point you're just fear mongering.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    > This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Sure. But getting tried is extremely expensive, in money and time. And it tends to fuck up your life in numerous ways. Me, I just don't carry a cellphone that's always turned on.
  - salawat 8y ago
    At this point, you're gaslighting. The procedure creates a means that can be exploited for fishing expeditions. The details of exploitability have been well enumerated in previously given literary examples. Every infrastructural/institutional mechanism we implement or allow to be implemented is an undeniable weapon. Just as some people may be nervous when others do something perfectly legal (walking around with a firearm), others get understandably nervous when others clamor in support of instituting new mechanisms to allow our civil institutions to circumvent due process. "Someone was here at a time" is not a justification in and of itself for the casual dismissal of what normatively should be a right: the right to be free of being surveilled. Does the jurisprudence provide for such a protection? No. Would it have an Earth shattering impact on the business world if such a legislation was passed? Absolutely. Should we pass it? in my opinion, yes, absolutely. We've spent decades experimenting and finding out what happens when no one takes a firm stance against these seemingly innocuous forms of data gathering. People build systems with little pieces of innocuous information which in isolation are harmless, but in aggregate allow a terrifying capability to predict and otherwise manipulate or outright harm an individual. Data aggregation protection must happen. We cannot allow the weaponization of data, even sanctioned, against our descendants, or we are as culpable in the erosion of liberty for them as those who came before us. No more. Enough is enough.
nabla9 8y ago
All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate. Police collects data from security cameras, road cameras, credit card purchases, witnesses, and now from mobile service providers. I agree that privacy erosion is real, but you argument was not convincing.
- lugg 8y ago
  Your response illuminates the exact boiling frog / slippery slope problem AP was referring to. None of what you mentioned should have been granted to the police but because of similar apathetic non argument whataboutism tactics like yours it was. The only one I see there that even holds water as an acceptable invasion of privacy is witnesses but that's only because people still have a right to tell the police to get lost provided they're not a damn fool [1]. The rest are just as bad if not worse invasions of privacy. None of which have valid arguments for existing themselves. Their current use doesn't really give much more of an argument for allowing this new encroachment. If anything they give a reason to push back even more. 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
  - bicubic 8y ago
    I upvoted the gp post just so it and your reply can be kept visible. This dismissive attitude towards the slow but steady incremental erosion of privacy and authoritarian creep terrifies me. It's like people have completely forgotten about not-so-distant history, and are not just tolerating, but welcoming the mechanisms of oppression rolling out once again. In the name of catching a dozen or so criminals - just like every other time in the recorded history of oppressive regimes. This has all happened before. For centuries. The same dismissive arguments have been used to defend the Gestapo and KGB. If there's a crime, why wouldn't you interrogate the family of everyone who was reported to be near the scene? Why wouldn't you force a confession and tick off the case if none of the leads are working out? It takes only a few minutes of empirical thought to realize that not every crime must be solved, especially when that doctrine creates an incentive to 'solve' crimes with easy targets rather than the real perpetrator. You hit diminishing returns really hard really fast by investing extra resources into solving crimes with statistically negligible incidence rates. The only entity that stands to benefit is the proto authoritarian regime and its ability to target arbitrary population segments and continue expanding. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin knew better.
IIAOPSWmobile 8y ago
oh come on. we're not talking about mass survaliance here. this is a clear cut case of a warrant, deacribing the place or thing to be searched and or the persons to be siezed, issued by a judge presented with probable cause.im weary of state overreach too but this isnt it.
- mtgx 8y ago
  The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this. In fact the FBI has often hid the scope of Stingray operations from judges for precisely this reason.
  - treis 8y ago
    >The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this. Only one person was affected by it. The initial request was for anonymized data and the subsequent request for actual data was made for only one specific person.
- jasonjayr 8y ago
  Remember that protest @ the beginning of Trumps presidency? Or any protest that has elements that go bad? When they were seeking images of people they could recognize in order to detain/question/harass because they were in the vicinity of some mischief? It is already known that agent provocateurs are used to incite peaceful mobs. It would be no great difficulty to use a agent provocateur to give a probable cause to pull the lever that dumps the complete list of people in that mob with little effort. Technology affords law enforcement great powers. But simply handing these powers over without judicial oversight and control can turn very dangerous.
  - IIAOPSW 8y ago
    I'll go back even further. Remember when police used honey pot wifi access points at the DAPL protests? Remember the hippie's getting beat at occupy? You don't need to lecture me. I'm with you. In fact, I participated in the Restore the 4th protests just after the Snowden leaks. What I'm saying is let's not cry wolf here. Yes surveillance technology can be used to set up a system of oppression. So can many other state apparatuses. If the state had such desire it could skip the middle man of surveillance and skip straight to martial law. That is why we have a system of courts and warrants and checks and balances etc. A warrant for data highly limited in terms of scope in time and place isn't a threat to civil liberties. A blank check for a Nation State Actor to get any data it wants, anytime, without giving any cause is a threat to civil liberties. We make ourselves look bad when we confuse the two.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fixermark 8y ago
The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Given that alternatives the police have include "picking up anyone who just looks like they might be a perpetrator" (which all too often translates to racist policing), is there value to communities (especially communities with past racial policing concerns) of tools that tell the cops it's probably not any of the people the system doesn't identify (or identifies as affirmatively not in the area of interest)?
- mcv 8y ago
  > The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Do you mean a miss? Misses are unavoidable. If the perpetrator didn't have their phone on them, this is not going to help a bit. However invasive your investigative powers are, there will always remain a chance of misses. The question is how much privacy and freedom of innocents you want to sacrifice for a small further decrease of miss chance.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I don't mean a miss, I mean "This phone breezes through the dragnet but is clearly moving the wrong way to be associated with the crime in question, so we can discard this suspect." That'll be great news for the suspect in question if it's the black guy the cops picked up using "traditional" policing methods because he looks like he was in the wrong neighborhood.
GuB-42 8y ago
> ...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah? Yes, wrongful arrest and conviction happen all the times. And I definitely don't want it to happen to me because my phone was near a crime scene. However, I don't believe that the risk of wrongful accusation is a good argument against surveillance. That's because while surveillance can make you a suspect, it can just as easily clear you. Imagine that there are two suspects for a crime, you and someone else. Turns out they detected the other guy cell phone close to the crime scene, arrested him, and found him guilty. Surveillance saved you from a wrongful accusation, even if you aren't aware of it. There is a bias here, a bit like with vaccines. A vaccine is much more likely to save you from a deadly infection than to kill you because of some nasty side effect. But you only see the side effects, you can't see the sickness that didn't happen. Note that I am not saying mass surveillance is a good thing (vaccines certainly are). Just that the "wrongful accusation" argument is more in favor of mass surveillance than going against it.

coldtea 8y ago

>He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved." "Hmm, this black person was near..."

coldtea 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter (others, too numerous to mention)
- MikeAmelung 8y ago
  There are others, too numerous to mention, yet you used someone that was very likely guilty as your second example? Just wanted to bring this up in case anyone reads your comment and thoughtlessly nods in agreement.
kfwhp 8y ago
Take your race baiting and shove it.
fixermark 8y ago
Ironic choice of examples, because lacking these tools, you've just identified the tool the police tend to fall back on. We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same?
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same? How confident are you that we can build algorithms to do that? You can't just flatten the probability distribution based on race when many of the legitimate factors are correlated with it, any more than you could do so for gender or age or nationality. Unless you want an absurd false positive rate against octogenarian women from Japan. But given that some racial (or gender or age) disparity is expected, how do you know if the amount of disparity in the algorithm's results is legitimate? It could be too high, or too low, and knowing which one would imply possession of an algorithm that gives the "true" amount, which was the original problem to begin with. The answer is to require high standards of proof and conclusive evidence, so that it's impossible to choose a random innocent black man off the street and convict him of anything just because you're a racist or some algorithm decided he fit an aggregate profile. But that's the opposite of the dragnet approach. You need evidence on a specific person, not statistical data from thousands that doesn't give you a better than 5% probability that it was any given one of them. And suppose the actual perpetrator wasn't carrying a phone at the time of the crime, so now you've got a list of "possible suspects" 100% of which are innocent.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I believe the article clarifies that this system (much like its sibling, DNA database mining) is used to narrow the search space so that traditional (and comparatively more expensive) sleuthing can find the evidence needed for a conviction. The dragnet is, in a sense, more ruling people out than ruling people in.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago

iceninenines 8y ago

It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about them can be used to target them for arbitrary or deliberate police or political purposes. Oh and then there's the peer-pressure gaslighting of anyone pushing back on the "nothing to hide" mantra or pantopticon surveillance state. Ask them to live in glass houses or give over their banking details, suddenly they have less "nothing to hide." Lock up anything you value because no one else will. Also a good book: Three Felonies a Day

jcranberry 8y ago
This comment is unproductive and ridiculous. 1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel. 2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools". 3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen. This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected officials, so they are eventually bound by the public. If you are to any degree right, you haven't explained how this data could be used to undermine, circumvent, or influence these factors and bring about a 'surveillance state'. At this point you're just fear mongering.
- mirimir 8y ago
  > This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Sure. But getting tried is extremely expensive, in money and time. And it tends to fuck up your life in numerous ways. Me, I just don't carry a cellphone that's always turned on.
- salawat 8y ago
  At this point, you're gaslighting. The procedure creates a means that can be exploited for fishing expeditions. The details of exploitability have been well enumerated in previously given literary examples. Every infrastructural/institutional mechanism we implement or allow to be implemented is an undeniable weapon. Just as some people may be nervous when others do something perfectly legal (walking around with a firearm), others get understandably nervous when others clamor in support of instituting new mechanisms to allow our civil institutions to circumvent due process. "Someone was here at a time" is not a justification in and of itself for the casual dismissal of what normatively should be a right: the right to be free of being surveilled. Does the jurisprudence provide for such a protection? No. Would it have an Earth shattering impact on the business world if such a legislation was passed? Absolutely. Should we pass it? in my opinion, yes, absolutely. We've spent decades experimenting and finding out what happens when no one takes a firm stance against these seemingly innocuous forms of data gathering. People build systems with little pieces of innocuous information which in isolation are harmless, but in aggregate allow a terrifying capability to predict and otherwise manipulate or outright harm an individual. Data aggregation protection must happen. We cannot allow the weaponization of data, even sanctioned, against our descendants, or we are as culpable in the erosion of liberty for them as those who came before us. No more. Enough is enough.

nabla9 8y ago

All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate. Police collects data from security cameras, road cameras, credit card purchases, witnesses, and now from mobile service providers. I agree that privacy erosion is real, but you argument was not convincing.

lugg 8y ago
Your response illuminates the exact boiling frog / slippery slope problem AP was referring to. None of what you mentioned should have been granted to the police but because of similar apathetic non argument whataboutism tactics like yours it was. The only one I see there that even holds water as an acceptable invasion of privacy is witnesses but that's only because people still have a right to tell the police to get lost provided they're not a damn fool [1]. The rest are just as bad if not worse invasions of privacy. None of which have valid arguments for existing themselves. Their current use doesn't really give much more of an argument for allowing this new encroachment. If anything they give a reason to push back even more. 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
- bicubic 8y ago
  I upvoted the gp post just so it and your reply can be kept visible. This dismissive attitude towards the slow but steady incremental erosion of privacy and authoritarian creep terrifies me. It's like people have completely forgotten about not-so-distant history, and are not just tolerating, but welcoming the mechanisms of oppression rolling out once again. In the name of catching a dozen or so criminals - just like every other time in the recorded history of oppressive regimes. This has all happened before. For centuries. The same dismissive arguments have been used to defend the Gestapo and KGB. If there's a crime, why wouldn't you interrogate the family of everyone who was reported to be near the scene? Why wouldn't you force a confession and tick off the case if none of the leads are working out? It takes only a few minutes of empirical thought to realize that not every crime must be solved, especially when that doctrine creates an incentive to 'solve' crimes with easy targets rather than the real perpetrator. You hit diminishing returns really hard really fast by investing extra resources into solving crimes with statistically negligible incidence rates. The only entity that stands to benefit is the proto authoritarian regime and its ability to target arbitrary population segments and continue expanding. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin knew better.

IIAOPSWmobile 8y ago

oh come on. we're not talking about mass survaliance here. this is a clear cut case of a warrant, deacribing the place or thing to be searched and or the persons to be siezed, issued by a judge presented with probable cause.im weary of state overreach too but this isnt it.

mtgx 8y ago
The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this. In fact the FBI has often hid the scope of Stingray operations from judges for precisely this reason.
- treis 8y ago
  >The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this. Only one person was affected by it. The initial request was for anonymized data and the subsequent request for actual data was made for only one specific person.
jasonjayr 8y ago
Remember that protest @ the beginning of Trumps presidency? Or any protest that has elements that go bad? When they were seeking images of people they could recognize in order to detain/question/harass because they were in the vicinity of some mischief? It is already known that agent provocateurs are used to incite peaceful mobs. It would be no great difficulty to use a agent provocateur to give a probable cause to pull the lever that dumps the complete list of people in that mob with little effort. Technology affords law enforcement great powers. But simply handing these powers over without judicial oversight and control can turn very dangerous.
- IIAOPSW 8y ago
  I'll go back even further. Remember when police used honey pot wifi access points at the DAPL protests? Remember the hippie's getting beat at occupy? You don't need to lecture me. I'm with you. In fact, I participated in the Restore the 4th protests just after the Snowden leaks. What I'm saying is let's not cry wolf here. Yes surveillance technology can be used to set up a system of oppression. So can many other state apparatuses. If the state had such desire it could skip the middle man of surveillance and skip straight to martial law. That is why we have a system of courts and warrants and checks and balances etc. A warrant for data highly limited in terms of scope in time and place isn't a threat to civil liberties. A blank check for a Nation State Actor to get any data it wants, anytime, without giving any cause is a threat to civil liberties. We make ourselves look bad when we confuse the two.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

fixermark 8y ago

The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Given that alternatives the police have include "picking up anyone who just looks like they might be a perpetrator" (which all too often translates to racist policing), is there value to communities (especially communities with past racial policing concerns) of tools that tell the cops it's probably not any of the people the system doesn't identify (or identifies as affirmatively not in the area of interest)?

mcv 8y ago
> The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Do you mean a miss? Misses are unavoidable. If the perpetrator didn't have their phone on them, this is not going to help a bit. However invasive your investigative powers are, there will always remain a chance of misses. The question is how much privacy and freedom of innocents you want to sacrifice for a small further decrease of miss chance.
- fixermark 8y ago
  I don't mean a miss, I mean "This phone breezes through the dragnet but is clearly moving the wrong way to be associated with the crime in question, so we can discard this suspect." That'll be great news for the suspect in question if it's the black guy the cops picked up using "traditional" policing methods because he looks like he was in the wrong neighborhood.

GuB-42 8y ago

> ...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah? Yes, wrongful arrest and conviction happen all the times. And I definitely don't want it to happen to me because my phone was near a crime scene. However, I don't believe that the risk of wrongful accusation is a good argument against surveillance. That's because while surveillance can make you a suspect, it can just as easily clear you. Imagine that there are two suspects for a crime, you and someone else. Turns out they detected the other guy cell phone close to the crime scene, arrested him, and found him guilty. Surveillance saved you from a wrongful accusation, even if you aren't aware of it. There is a bias here, a bit like with vaccines. A vaccine is much more likely to save you from a deadly infection than to kill you because of some nasty side effect. But you only see the side effects, you can't see the sickness that didn't happen. Note that I am not saying mass surveillance is a good thing (vaccines certainly are). Just that the "wrongful accusation" argument is more in favor of mass surveillance than going against it.