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> Congress must declare a national moratorium on the use of face-recognition technology until legal restrictions limiting its use and scope can be developed. >

> Congress must declare a national moratorium on the use of face-recognition technology until legal restrictions limiting its use and scope can be developed. > America’s future is closer to a Chinese-style surveillance state than we’d like to think. Uh, yeah, whatever. I mean, it's not like I disagree or anything. But it's not like surveillance is only just now becoming a problem, right? Go and roll back the surveillance state revealed by Snowden that would have been a wet dream of the USSR. Roll that back to before Bush II and put a moratorium on that shit. America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. China is a perpetual preview of what will follow in the so-called "free" world in 3-5 years.

umvi 7y ago
> America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. Maybe in cities, but my rural town just barely got stop light cameras, so I highly doubt this is true of rural America. Plus, use of the surveillance is more reactive than proactive. In China it is proactive. Drive around in a car with a taiwanese flag bumper sticker and the secret police will disappear you in the night. In America no one will bother looking at the footage unless a bank robbery happened and your car was the getaway car.
- z3c0 7y ago
  I think the "no one is looking" argument is valid, but can be damaging in the long run. The same line of reasoning was applied to the Snowden Leaks by those who wanted to spin it as a "nothingburger". The reason nobody is looking is because it requires a lot of money to build the systems that can derive facts from data while "no one is looking". As advances continue to be made in ML, then the visual data most people are currently taking for granted will become more easily parsed systematically. A system that pre-processes and stores all the recorded locations of a given list of faces is competely possible by today's standards. A database of mugshots and a continuous stream of CCTV data is all you'd really need to get started.
  - mtgx 7y ago
    Nobody is looking...but our algorithms alert us whenever you might be doing anything "suspicious" and can put you on automatic blacklists. Here is just a hint of what the government might consider suspicious: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guidelines-who-might-be-suspicious-too-nervous-too-calm-blending-standing-out-its-all-suspcious.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guide... Also nobody is looking...but anyone could be looking anytime they want, and without a warrant. With the latest 6-year FISA 702 extension, the FBI is now allowed to look at all mass surveillance data before it has to go to a judge. Alerting the judge about their spying on any specific person is only required when they decide to build a case against that person. You can imagine the thousand ways in which this can and will be abused over the years. I mean, even NSA agents were running a "LOVEINT" program - who knows what kind of self-interest programs the FBI agents are running. And even in the face of that Obama was shameless enough to say "there have been no abuses" - just like he did when he pardoned Bush's torturers from the CIA, but that's a whole other topic for another day.
  - leggomylibro 7y ago
    "no one is looking" quickly becomes "no one was looking" when an individual or group becomes problematic in the eyes of an authority. Recording everything allows a government's executive branch to selectively and successfully prosecute more or less anyone at will, which defeats the purpose of having an independent judiciary. Ideally the legislative process would step in and curb back the excessively restrictive laws and surveillance, but it don't seem to have much incentive to do so. Plus, legislators are subject to the same onerous regulations which everyone breaks all of the time because "no one is looking".
- chachachoney 7y ago
  >> Maybe in cities, but my rural town just barely got stop light cameras, so I highly doubt this is true of rural America. Do you think rural towns in China are any different? >> In America no one will bother looking at the footage unless a bank robbery happened and your car was the getaway car. That might have been true ten years ago, but certainly not today. https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding-surveillance-cameras-in-streetlights/ https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding-surveillan...
- einpoklum 7y ago
  So, your point is that the US government has not bothered to put up cameras in small towns? Doesn't matter, they still track your location using your mobile and make a copy of all of your phone calls, text messages, emails, corporate-managed voice calls (Skype etc.) and so on. Small town or not.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
computerex 7y ago
What is your evidence? Even according to Snowden's leaks NSA only collected meta-data and not full on conversations and contents. Not cool at all and should have never happened, but it's a far cry from Chinese-style surveillance where there is absolutely no expectation of privacy at all.
- rjf72 7y ago
  Apologies on the formatting here. I think citing everything on this topic is absolutely critical since it's absolutely rife with misinformation. Dealing with formatting for extensive citations, alongside quotations of materials (for those who don't feel like perusing the first party sources) is tough in little more than ASCII and italics! --- The evidence is not too hard to find. This [1] site provides an extensive and ordered collection of most published Snowden related documents. It's also quite nice since it ties the documents to the first press coverage as well, if you'd rather peruse something other than the raw data. There seems to be a curiously large amount of misinformation on this topic, but when you actually look at the evidence - this situation is not in the least bit ambiguous. These [2] slides give a broad overview of what PRISM is: - Slide 3 describes PRISM: "PRISM -Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple". - Slide 5 describes what is collected: "What will you receive in collection (surveillance and stored comms)?" - "in general" : "email, chat - video + voice, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity - logins, etc, online social networking details, SPECIAL REQUESTS (caps added here to represent the bolding in the slide)". This [3] is a document entitled "User's guide for Skype PRISM Collection". It gives some insight into how the program operates from an operative level including screenshots. It details surveillance of skype conversations, including conversations between skype and a landline connection. In skype-skype connections surveillance is available for audio, video, chat, and file transfers. It also mentions another program "DECODEORDAIN" which apparently maps different email addresses to a single person (used when engaging on surveillance on a target with skype registered under multiple email accounts). That document also details that as data goes from Skype's servers, it also goes directly to the NSA. So this leads to situations where their agents can apparently become a bit confused about receiving multiple copies of the same chat log. That might happen, for instance, when a user logs onto a different device and his chat history is resyced so it goes from Skype to him as well as to the NSA. That's all made even more interesting by the fact that this was back from 2011 when Skype was still peer to peer. So while we get hints of how their process worked, the exact mechanisms are still a bit obscured. There's a lot more really interesting stuff as well, but you could spend years going through all of it. Anyhow, suffice to say - no the government isn't just collecting just metadata. Anybody that says that is spreading misinformation either intentionally, or because they themselves have been misinformed and now think they're informing others. ---- [1] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.c... [2-article] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc... [2-slides] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH01f5/323b0a6e.dir/doc.pdf https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/... [3-article] - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-s-war-on-internet-security-a-1010361.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-... [3-document] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASHa2b5.dir/doc.pdf https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...

umvi 7y ago

> America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. Maybe in cities, but my rural town just barely got stop light cameras, so I highly doubt this is true of rural America. Plus, use of the surveillance is more reactive than proactive. In China it is proactive. Drive around in a car with a taiwanese flag bumper sticker and the secret police will disappear you in the night. In America no one will bother looking at the footage unless a bank robbery happened and your car was the getaway car.

z3c0 7y ago
I think the "no one is looking" argument is valid, but can be damaging in the long run. The same line of reasoning was applied to the Snowden Leaks by those who wanted to spin it as a "nothingburger". The reason nobody is looking is because it requires a lot of money to build the systems that can derive facts from data while "no one is looking". As advances continue to be made in ML, then the visual data most people are currently taking for granted will become more easily parsed systematically. A system that pre-processes and stores all the recorded locations of a given list of faces is competely possible by today's standards. A database of mugshots and a continuous stream of CCTV data is all you'd really need to get started.
- mtgx 7y ago
  Nobody is looking...but our algorithms alert us whenever you might be doing anything "suspicious" and can put you on automatic blacklists. Here is just a hint of what the government might consider suspicious: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guidelines-who-might-be-suspicious-too-nervous-too-calm-blending-standing-out-its-all-suspcious.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guide... Also nobody is looking...but anyone could be looking anytime they want, and without a warrant. With the latest 6-year FISA 702 extension, the FBI is now allowed to look at all mass surveillance data before it has to go to a judge. Alerting the judge about their spying on any specific person is only required when they decide to build a case against that person. You can imagine the thousand ways in which this can and will be abused over the years. I mean, even NSA agents were running a "LOVEINT" program - who knows what kind of self-interest programs the FBI agents are running. And even in the face of that Obama was shameless enough to say "there have been no abuses" - just like he did when he pardoned Bush's torturers from the CIA, but that's a whole other topic for another day.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  "no one is looking" quickly becomes "no one was looking" when an individual or group becomes problematic in the eyes of an authority. Recording everything allows a government's executive branch to selectively and successfully prosecute more or less anyone at will, which defeats the purpose of having an independent judiciary. Ideally the legislative process would step in and curb back the excessively restrictive laws and surveillance, but it don't seem to have much incentive to do so. Plus, legislators are subject to the same onerous regulations which everyone breaks all of the time because "no one is looking".
chachachoney 7y ago
>> Maybe in cities, but my rural town just barely got stop light cameras, so I highly doubt this is true of rural America. Do you think rural towns in China are any different? >> In America no one will bother looking at the footage unless a bank robbery happened and your car was the getaway car. That might have been true ten years ago, but certainly not today. https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding-surveillance-cameras-in-streetlights/ https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding-surveillan...
einpoklum 7y ago
So, your point is that the US government has not bothered to put up cameras in small towns? Doesn't matter, they still track your location using your mobile and make a copy of all of your phone calls, text messages, emails, corporate-managed voice calls (Skype etc.) and so on. Small town or not.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

computerex 7y ago

What is your evidence? Even according to Snowden's leaks NSA only collected meta-data and not full on conversations and contents. Not cool at all and should have never happened, but it's a far cry from Chinese-style surveillance where there is absolutely no expectation of privacy at all.

rjf72 7y ago
Apologies on the formatting here. I think citing everything on this topic is absolutely critical since it's absolutely rife with misinformation. Dealing with formatting for extensive citations, alongside quotations of materials (for those who don't feel like perusing the first party sources) is tough in little more than ASCII and italics! --- The evidence is not too hard to find. This [1] site provides an extensive and ordered collection of most published Snowden related documents. It's also quite nice since it ties the documents to the first press coverage as well, if you'd rather peruse something other than the raw data. There seems to be a curiously large amount of misinformation on this topic, but when you actually look at the evidence - this situation is not in the least bit ambiguous. These [2] slides give a broad overview of what PRISM is: - Slide 3 describes PRISM: "PRISM -Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple". - Slide 5 describes what is collected: "What will you receive in collection (surveillance and stored comms)?" - "in general" : "email, chat - video + voice, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity - logins, etc, online social networking details, SPECIAL REQUESTS (caps added here to represent the bolding in the slide)". This [3] is a document entitled "User's guide for Skype PRISM Collection". It gives some insight into how the program operates from an operative level including screenshots. It details surveillance of skype conversations, including conversations between skype and a landline connection. In skype-skype connections surveillance is available for audio, video, chat, and file transfers. It also mentions another program "DECODEORDAIN" which apparently maps different email addresses to a single person (used when engaging on surveillance on a target with skype registered under multiple email accounts). That document also details that as data goes from Skype's servers, it also goes directly to the NSA. So this leads to situations where their agents can apparently become a bit confused about receiving multiple copies of the same chat log. That might happen, for instance, when a user logs onto a different device and his chat history is resyced so it goes from Skype to him as well as to the NSA. That's all made even more interesting by the fact that this was back from 2011 when Skype was still peer to peer. So while we get hints of how their process worked, the exact mechanisms are still a bit obscured. There's a lot more really interesting stuff as well, but you could spend years going through all of it. Anyhow, suffice to say - no the government isn't just collecting just metadata. Anybody that says that is spreading misinformation either intentionally, or because they themselves have been misinformed and now think they're informing others. ---- [1] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.c... [2-article] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc... [2-slides] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH01f5/323b0a6e.dir/doc.pdf https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/... [3-article] - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-s-war-on-internet-security-a-1010361.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-... [3-document] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASHa2b5.dir/doc.pdf https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...