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I had an idea for a responsible mass surveillance system. Say you have cameras all over the city, feeding to the local police station. That's helpful in catch
by fpgaminer 7y ago
I had an idea for a responsible mass surveillance system.
Say you have cameras all over the city, feeding to the local police station. That's helpful in catching criminals, but obviously easy to abuse. Well suppose instead that the DVR in the police station is encrypted and contains a secure enclave. All the camera feeds are E2E encrypted from the camera to the box. The secure enclave in the DVR enforces rules for how the footage can be accessed. It only allows X amount of video footage to leave the box over time. Say watching 4 camera streams continuously or something (in a city of hundreds of cameras).
So a crime occurs; police know the rough time frame and can easily query footage from the box. But mass surveillance, watching all the camera streams, dumping them to an AI cloud for facial recognition tracking of all your movements, etc, isn't possible.
The secure enclave can also enforce logging; anyone viewing the footage submits authentication, creating a permanent paper trail of who viewed what.
There are endless possibilities for the rules we want to establish, but the thrust of my idea is that we can enforce them using that concept of a secure enclave and encrypted footage, so that we can be reasonably sure that the system can't be abused.
Anyway, it's just an interesting idea I had. I'm not really trying to make an argument for or against widespread surveillance like that. Just, if soceity wants it, there are ways to build systems that enforce rules on how those cameras are used. And what Ring offers is kind of in this vein too; allow camera owners to share footage on a case by case basis when requested. I think it'd be even better if Ring footage was encrypted so that Ring actually really couldn't access the footage without your consent.