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What rights are 'slipping through' fingers here? While digitization of surveillance might make folks uncomfortable, the rights in question are mostly settled, a

What rights are 'slipping through' fingers here? While digitization of surveillance might make folks uncomfortable, the rights in question are mostly settled, and have been for a while. The US long operated on court precedent that one doesn't have a general expectation of privacy for one's image in public places, and next to zero expectation of privacy in airports.

helpfulclippy 4y ago
The right you are losing is privacy, and the fact that there's been a trend of decisions towards further loss does not mean future losses are inevitable, or that prior losses must be taken as permanent. The existence of court precedent does not mean that policymaking over a right is settled, or anything close to settled. Roe v. Wade was a recent dramatic example of this. Even within the framework of "reasonable expectation of privacy," the test outlined in Katz v. US leaves no room for the concept that an expectation will ever truly be "settled." To show a reasonable expectation of privacy, an one must demonstrate an individual, subjective expectation of privacy, and also that this expectation is something society would find reasonable. So gee, does society find it reasonable to expect that you can walk through an airport without having your photo taken and analyzed by the government, and possibly stored in a database where it can be abused by internal or external actors? Viewed in the context of past behavior, perhaps not. Viewed in the context of a government that is suspicious of big tech surveillance even as it collects ever-more data on its citizens, and jurisdictions like the EU passing ever-tighter regulations like GDPR to safeguard privacy, then maybe society's expectations of privacy have shifted compared to where they were in the 2000s/2010s.
- sithadmin 4y ago
  While I agree that the expectation of privacy is somewhat flexible and that future legal precedent in favor of enhanced privacy is definitely achievable (though well-defined statutory protections would, in my opinion be preferable), I don't buy that increased automation actually results in a net loss of privacy relative to the status quo. The US government is acting within well-established legal guardrails if they were to carry out the same tasks in a highly manual fashion. If it carries out the same tasks in an automated manner, the substantial legal issues remain exactly the same: there's a change in efficiency, an increase in data capture, and improved accessibility to authorized parties, but the fundamental act of capturing images, cross referencing them to a database of known persons, and logging movement activities remain basically unchanged. I don't see how you could argue that this harms the notion of privacy in itself any worse than it already was already being harmed, and I don't see how one could construct a sound legal argument that the introduction of automation itself somehow introduces additional damages.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Automation locks in the status quo essentially forever. Human agents can and are expected to use executive judgement when conducting themselves, and are held accountable for abuse. Automated systems just endlessly watch us, with no "person" ever at fault for any transgressions. It's simply a bad faith argument to compare a detective watching a single individual to every single person in a large international airport, because one must have a causal justification for their actions while the second simply performs it's programming, endlessly. If we're going to become endlessly surveilled and tracked, we as a society should at least has the smallest bit of dignity and complain about it. If we all let our privacy be eroded so tacitly, we go down like dogs.
  - helpfulclippy 4y ago
    Automation tremendously increases the danger involved. It is substantially more difficult to audit whether the government is operating within those legal guardrails when software is involved rather than humans. Also, the government's capabilities in abusing this data are greatly increased, which in turn increases their incentive to do so. For instance, we have no way of knowing whether or not that camera is being used to calibrate a system that tracks people's movements using lower-resolution sources like Ring and traffic cameras. This, in turn, represents an obvious and severe danger to other fundamental rights, like free association: a system designed to track terror cells can just as easily be used to identify protest organizers. We also don't really know where the resulting data is stored, or who will have access to it, or which people will abuse this information in the future, whether they are corrupt officials or third-parties who steal the stockpiled data, or what creative applications they will find for that data, or what harm the general public will ultimately suffer. These were good what-if questions on Slashdot in the 90s, but after decades of tech growth and abuse in the public and private sectors, these are now important ethical concerns that must be addressed in order to safely allow government security services to automate more and more of their jobs.
    - sithadmin 4y ago
      >Automation tremendously increases the danger involved. It is substantially more difficult to audit whether the government is operating within those legal guardrails when software is involved rather than humans. How is it more difficult to audit when software is involved? If anything, it makes the possibility of immutable audit logging and rule-based alerts for potential misuse much easier to implement than with manual processes. There's a reason that high levels of automation (and associated software-enable audit capabilities) are strongly preferred in regulated business functions (e.g. financial reporting). Further, the fact that the general public might not know how data is stored or its access is controlled doesn't prove the point that these things aren't being addressed adequately by institutional controls. In any case, that's a matter of governance that has no link the the fundamental legal questions concerning privacy that you've brought up.

helpfulclippy 4y ago

The right you are losing is privacy, and the fact that there's been a trend of decisions towards further loss does not mean future losses are inevitable, or that prior losses must be taken as permanent. The existence of court precedent does not mean that policymaking over a right is settled, or anything close to settled. Roe v. Wade was a recent dramatic example of this. Even within the framework of "reasonable expectation of privacy," the test outlined in Katz v. US leaves no room for the concept that an expectation will ever truly be "settled." To show a reasonable expectation of privacy, an one must demonstrate an individual, subjective expectation of privacy, and also that this expectation is something society would find reasonable. So gee, does society find it reasonable to expect that you can walk through an airport without having your photo taken and analyzed by the government, and possibly stored in a database where it can be abused by internal or external actors? Viewed in the context of past behavior, perhaps not. Viewed in the context of a government that is suspicious of big tech surveillance even as it collects ever-more data on its citizens, and jurisdictions like the EU passing ever-tighter regulations like GDPR to safeguard privacy, then maybe society's expectations of privacy have shifted compared to where they were in the 2000s/2010s.

sithadmin 4y ago
While I agree that the expectation of privacy is somewhat flexible and that future legal precedent in favor of enhanced privacy is definitely achievable (though well-defined statutory protections would, in my opinion be preferable), I don't buy that increased automation actually results in a net loss of privacy relative to the status quo. The US government is acting within well-established legal guardrails if they were to carry out the same tasks in a highly manual fashion. If it carries out the same tasks in an automated manner, the substantial legal issues remain exactly the same: there's a change in efficiency, an increase in data capture, and improved accessibility to authorized parties, but the fundamental act of capturing images, cross referencing them to a database of known persons, and logging movement activities remain basically unchanged. I don't see how you could argue that this harms the notion of privacy in itself any worse than it already was already being harmed, and I don't see how one could construct a sound legal argument that the introduction of automation itself somehow introduces additional damages.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Automation locks in the status quo essentially forever. Human agents can and are expected to use executive judgement when conducting themselves, and are held accountable for abuse. Automated systems just endlessly watch us, with no "person" ever at fault for any transgressions. It's simply a bad faith argument to compare a detective watching a single individual to every single person in a large international airport, because one must have a causal justification for their actions while the second simply performs it's programming, endlessly. If we're going to become endlessly surveilled and tracked, we as a society should at least has the smallest bit of dignity and complain about it. If we all let our privacy be eroded so tacitly, we go down like dogs.
- helpfulclippy 4y ago
  Automation tremendously increases the danger involved. It is substantially more difficult to audit whether the government is operating within those legal guardrails when software is involved rather than humans. Also, the government's capabilities in abusing this data are greatly increased, which in turn increases their incentive to do so. For instance, we have no way of knowing whether or not that camera is being used to calibrate a system that tracks people's movements using lower-resolution sources like Ring and traffic cameras. This, in turn, represents an obvious and severe danger to other fundamental rights, like free association: a system designed to track terror cells can just as easily be used to identify protest organizers. We also don't really know where the resulting data is stored, or who will have access to it, or which people will abuse this information in the future, whether they are corrupt officials or third-parties who steal the stockpiled data, or what creative applications they will find for that data, or what harm the general public will ultimately suffer. These were good what-if questions on Slashdot in the 90s, but after decades of tech growth and abuse in the public and private sectors, these are now important ethical concerns that must be addressed in order to safely allow government security services to automate more and more of their jobs.
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    >Automation tremendously increases the danger involved. It is substantially more difficult to audit whether the government is operating within those legal guardrails when software is involved rather than humans. How is it more difficult to audit when software is involved? If anything, it makes the possibility of immutable audit logging and rule-based alerts for potential misuse much easier to implement than with manual processes. There's a reason that high levels of automation (and associated software-enable audit capabilities) are strongly preferred in regulated business functions (e.g. financial reporting). Further, the fact that the general public might not know how data is stored or its access is controlled doesn't prove the point that these things aren't being addressed adequately by institutional controls. In any case, that's a matter of governance that has no link the the fundamental legal questions concerning privacy that you've brought up.