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Realistically as the price of this technology goes down and as crime continues to exist, the only actual safeguards against ubiquitous surveillance will be laws

Realistically as the price of this technology goes down and as crime continues to exist, the only actual safeguards against ubiquitous surveillance will be laws. There's no reason you couldn't have the system proposed and have extremely strong laws around the use and retention of the acquired video, e.g. the captured video can only be used in cases against the people who triggered the initial activation. Inconvenient but there's literally no other way for this to go. Laws are our only hope -- technology will continue on its march.

ender341341 3y ago
I had this conversation with someone recently around ubiquitous traffic cameras to help enforce speed limits (in Washington the police seem to have basically stopped enforcing speed laws it seems and people are getting kinda crazy so we were discussing alternative options like tracking when you get on the freeway and off and calculating average speed as an option), the problem is it's easy to write the law today in a pretty acceptable way "Data can only be stored for x-hours unless speeding is detected then it's recorded as part of the record for the ticket", but the problem is once the system is deployed it's much easier for law makers to then slowly roll back those protections, and some of them aren't even that ridiculous, like tying it to amber/silver alerts, most wouldn't object there, but eventually they'll try for "we want to keep records around so we can get a list of who was driving in the area of a crime", and that'll start with a warrant but we've seen how willing prosecutors are to completely ignore violations of that. Somewhat rant-y I know, but just kinda a cautionary around the "well we can trust the government to keep laws as initially written and not remove all the parts that are there to protect are rights".
- Sai_ 3y ago
  Put such protections and limitations in the constitution and make it harder to subvert. “The right of a citizen to use public spaces without causing the creation of a long term, indexable, searchable, hashable record of their presence shall not be curtailed.” Side note - I’m not even an American citizen but can evoke the style of the second amendment without much trouble. That’s soft power!
  - doubleg72 3y ago
    I mean, it is pretty cut and dry..
  - ender341341 3y ago
    (as someone who strongly believes the founding fathers would be appalled at our lack of continuing to amend the constitution) I think we're less and less likely to get more amendments passed, at least for a good while, things are just so crazily divided right now.
deleted 3y ago
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ender341341 3y ago

I had this conversation with someone recently around ubiquitous traffic cameras to help enforce speed limits (in Washington the police seem to have basically stopped enforcing speed laws it seems and people are getting kinda crazy so we were discussing alternative options like tracking when you get on the freeway and off and calculating average speed as an option), the problem is it's easy to write the law today in a pretty acceptable way "Data can only be stored for x-hours unless speeding is detected then it's recorded as part of the record for the ticket", but the problem is once the system is deployed it's much easier for law makers to then slowly roll back those protections, and some of them aren't even that ridiculous, like tying it to amber/silver alerts, most wouldn't object there, but eventually they'll try for "we want to keep records around so we can get a list of who was driving in the area of a crime", and that'll start with a warrant but we've seen how willing prosecutors are to completely ignore violations of that. Somewhat rant-y I know, but just kinda a cautionary around the "well we can trust the government to keep laws as initially written and not remove all the parts that are there to protect are rights".

Sai_ 3y ago
Put such protections and limitations in the constitution and make it harder to subvert. “The right of a citizen to use public spaces without causing the creation of a long term, indexable, searchable, hashable record of their presence shall not be curtailed.” Side note - I’m not even an American citizen but can evoke the style of the second amendment without much trouble. That’s soft power!
- doubleg72 3y ago
  I mean, it is pretty cut and dry..
- ender341341 3y ago
  (as someone who strongly believes the founding fathers would be appalled at our lack of continuing to amend the constitution) I think we're less and less likely to get more amendments passed, at least for a good while, things are just so crazily divided right now.

deleted 3y ago

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