4 ms·

It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you be

by mrtksn 1y ago

It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state. Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught). I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it. The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules. The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work. IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way. Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.

burkaman 1y ago
Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level. This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations. The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading. What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
  - simmerup 1y ago
    Musk didnt try the hyperloop to be altruistic He did it to kill any chance of the state improving the train/tram network so that Tesla cars would have less competition for public transport
    - burkaman 1y ago
      Source: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/photo/2 https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/photo/2
      - fao_ 1y ago
        Archived here: https://archive.is/iBAJr https://archive.is/iBAJr
    - projectazorian 1y ago
      Yep. My city did a deal with Hyperloop to build an express airport train instead of contracting with a European or Japanese company. Hyperloop pulled out and now there is no train, what a surprise. You might ask "why don't they just re-bid the contract?" Answer: The new 'progressive' city government is opposed to building a train for 'rich people' since there's already a non-express metro that goes through some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Of course no businesspeople use it and they all take Ubers (many of which are Teslas)
      - burkaman 1y ago
        Are you talking about Chicago? An express train sounds great, they should absolutely build one, but I think you're being a little harsh on the existing train. By America's (very low) standards it is quite convenient. It is already much faster and cheaper than driving, I have never even considered taking an Uber and I'm not sure it would be worth paying much more for an express train.
        projectazorian 1y ago
- varenc 1y ago
  > the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
  - voltaireodactyl 1y ago
    If the US government requests such access, do you see a world in which Waymo says no, given the current landscape?
    - laughing_man 1y ago
      Furthermore, if a National Security Letter came along with that request, Waymo wouldn't be able to let anyone know about it.
  - burkaman 1y ago
    It is definitely different. I do think they could put in a request like "give me all footage between these hours in this area", and then do the facial recognition themselves. It's conceptually pretty similar to cell tower dumps, where they ask for all data from a cell tower during a particular time frame. This was recently ruled unconstitutional (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-cell-tower-data-unconstitutional https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...), but they used it for like 15 years before that (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-dumps-caught-the-high-country-bandits-and-why-it-matters/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-d...). I can imagine blanket car footage dumps working for a similar amount of time.
jameslk 1y ago
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
- nullc 1y ago
  > or be monitored like you would be in a large city. Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras. It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
- ethersteeds 1y ago
  Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City. I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too. Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
  - jameslk 1y ago
    There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter > Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar. OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US

by mrtksn 1y ago

burkaman 1y ago

Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.

mrtksn 1y ago
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level. This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations. The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading. What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
- simmerup 1y ago
  Musk didnt try the hyperloop to be altruistic He did it to kill any chance of the state improving the train/tram network so that Tesla cars would have less competition for public transport
  - burkaman 1y ago
    Source: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/photo/2 https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/photo/2
    - fao_ 1y ago
      Archived here: https://archive.is/iBAJr https://archive.is/iBAJr
  - projectazorian 1y ago
    Yep. My city did a deal with Hyperloop to build an express airport train instead of contracting with a European or Japanese company. Hyperloop pulled out and now there is no train, what a surprise. You might ask "why don't they just re-bid the contract?" Answer: The new 'progressive' city government is opposed to building a train for 'rich people' since there's already a non-express metro that goes through some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Of course no businesspeople use it and they all take Ubers (many of which are Teslas)
    - burkaman 1y ago
      Are you talking about Chicago? An express train sounds great, they should absolutely build one, but I think you're being a little harsh on the existing train. By America's (very low) standards it is quite convenient. It is already much faster and cheaper than driving, I have never even considered taking an Uber and I'm not sure it would be worth paying much more for an express train.
      - projectazorian 1y ago
varenc 1y ago
> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
- voltaireodactyl 1y ago
  If the US government requests such access, do you see a world in which Waymo says no, given the current landscape?
  - laughing_man 1y ago
    Furthermore, if a National Security Letter came along with that request, Waymo wouldn't be able to let anyone know about it.
- burkaman 1y ago
  It is definitely different. I do think they could put in a request like "give me all footage between these hours in this area", and then do the facial recognition themselves. It's conceptually pretty similar to cell tower dumps, where they ask for all data from a cell tower during a particular time frame. This was recently ruled unconstitutional (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-cell-tower-data-unconstitutional https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...), but they used it for like 15 years before that (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-dumps-caught-the-high-country-bandits-and-why-it-matters/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-d...). I can imagine blanket car footage dumps working for a similar amount of time.

jameslk 1y ago

This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there

nullc 1y ago
> or be monitored like you would be in a large city. Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras. It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
ethersteeds 1y ago
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City. I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too. Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
- jameslk 1y ago
  There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter > Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar. OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US