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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

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
    Because you now have the existence of this massive flow of information that didn’t exist before. The TSA guard is not taking photos of me every time I fly. I don’t have to worry about what happens with those photos if they don’t exist. But if they do exist, then I am now at risk of all sorts of bad things happening, like the aforementioned calibration of mass surveillance, or some other angle. If the government says “we’re not using this checkpoint stuff to spy on you or anything nefarious like that, and we’re definitely not putting together a massive database of the IDs and photos of people going through our checkpoints” I have to take them at their word because national security gets broad carve outs from transparency tools like FOIA. Their word is historically not worth much. Government leaks data all the time. It is actually still not that great at security controls in a practical sense, at least insofar as deterring major breaches of privacy is concerned. That’s why LOVEINT happens. That’s why TSA went and posted a picture of the master key that unlocks all those stupid approved locks on the Internet. That’s why stuff like the OPM breach happen. All of this is stuff that isn’t SUPPOSED to happen, but does, regularly, because in reality government (like everyone else) has little ability to control what will happen to information once it ingests it. And that’s just the dangerous stuff that happens without any intent on the government’s part. Whether they’re misleading Congress about the scope of warrantless wiretapping, wildly understating the implications of metadata analysis, or sabotaging cryptography by purposefully advancing backdoored algorithms, or just plain wiretapping political activists without cause to wage campaigns of legal harassment, the various agencies of the USG have a time-honored history of outright lies where privacy is concerned. So no, unfortunately, even if there exist “institutional controls” that could solve these issues in theory, we can safely say they definitely have not been implemented. These issues are extremely relevant to your right to privacy, because rights are a balance of interests. If the government gets this big new way to abuse people, then they need big new protections against that, or they are going to get abused. Our concept of privacy has to be bigger now than it was when automated surveillance wasn’t a thing, because the stakes went up. By a lot.

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
  Because you now have the existence of this massive flow of information that didn’t exist before. The TSA guard is not taking photos of me every time I fly. I don’t have to worry about what happens with those photos if they don’t exist. But if they do exist, then I am now at risk of all sorts of bad things happening, like the aforementioned calibration of mass surveillance, or some other angle. If the government says “we’re not using this checkpoint stuff to spy on you or anything nefarious like that, and we’re definitely not putting together a massive database of the IDs and photos of people going through our checkpoints” I have to take them at their word because national security gets broad carve outs from transparency tools like FOIA. Their word is historically not worth much. Government leaks data all the time. It is actually still not that great at security controls in a practical sense, at least insofar as deterring major breaches of privacy is concerned. That’s why LOVEINT happens. That’s why TSA went and posted a picture of the master key that unlocks all those stupid approved locks on the Internet. That’s why stuff like the OPM breach happen. All of this is stuff that isn’t SUPPOSED to happen, but does, regularly, because in reality government (like everyone else) has little ability to control what will happen to information once it ingests it. And that’s just the dangerous stuff that happens without any intent on the government’s part. Whether they’re misleading Congress about the scope of warrantless wiretapping, wildly understating the implications of metadata analysis, or sabotaging cryptography by purposefully advancing backdoored algorithms, or just plain wiretapping political activists without cause to wage campaigns of legal harassment, the various agencies of the USG have a time-honored history of outright lies where privacy is concerned. So no, unfortunately, even if there exist “institutional controls” that could solve these issues in theory, we can safely say they definitely have not been implemented. These issues are extremely relevant to your right to privacy, because rights are a balance of interests. If the government gets this big new way to abuse people, then they need big new protections against that, or they are going to get abused. Our concept of privacy has to be bigger now than it was when automated surveillance wasn’t a thing, because the stakes went up. By a lot.