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The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker. I want proponents of this tech to expl

The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker. I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?

bckr 1y ago
> stochastic terrorism This is a bugbear for me. The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  Stochastic terrorism usually refers to incitement, afaict. Edit: it's got a Wikipedia article, which says it's a particular kind of incitement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
- mystraline 1y ago
  Terrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public. For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all. Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    They did fail to prove terrorism in court in that case - I think generally there needs to be some attempt to use the terror to achieve a political aim or change public opinion? Just making people afraid is a different thing.
- panarchy 1y ago
  The stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Right, it's the inverse of saying a "random dice roll" isn't happening because there isn't a random human throwing a random selection of polyhedra. Different aspects. That said, even "random" has so many different interpretations that "random targets" it can still be a misleading shorthand. What happens is something closer to "unpredictably unjust and disproportionate"... but of course nobody wants to keep saying a mouthful like that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  The Stochastic part is that the proponents of terrorism don't know where it will manifest, they just incite and hope someone's listening. In contrast a terrorist act like 9-11 was carefully planned and had approval up Al Qaeda's 'chain of command'.
- leptons 1y ago
  >The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence. That's absolutely incorrect. Terrorism is violence used to achieve political goals. >"Terrorism is the calculated use of violence or threat of violence against civilians and property to intimidate or coerce a population or government to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals" - a simple google search It's not random at all. Random acts of violence are not meant to achieve any goal - they spur-of-the-moment, unplanned, etc. Terrorists have a goal, they typically have a target in mind to achieve a goal, it isn't very random at all. Sure random people might get hurt in the incident, but the incident itself isn't typically random. Terrorists usually prepare for it, for months or years. Was flying two planes into the twin towers random? No, it was not. Was blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City random? No, it was not. These were very carefully selected targets.
stri8ed 1y ago
What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.
- tptacek 1y ago
  For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime. We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc). Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers. We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors. Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on why you're not thrilled about Flock being removed?
    - tptacek 1y ago
      The metro area is blanketed in ALPRs and we were the only ones actually writing real policy about them. Now we don't have any ALPRs and can't build policy or shop it to any of our neighbors. We had harm reduction for the cameras and a plausible strategy for reducing their harm throughout the area, and instead we did something performative.
Wowfunhappy 1y ago
> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? …is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.
- therobots927 1y ago
  Let’s start with school shootings which only started AFTER the surveillance apparatus went online.
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    You're making the same mistake that lots of people do, looking at the big events that make the news instead of actual crime stats. The former doesn't really tell you anything about crime rates. This is a big problem that leads to things like these surveillance measures, because people think crime is really high even when it's the lowest it has ever been, because of the media environment.
    - equinox_nl 1y ago
      I'm not American so please educate me if I'm wrong but haven't y'all had school shootings every single day for at least a decade or something?
- lm28469 1y ago
  Violent crimes stats look the same pretty much everywhere in the west, there are way more variables than "surveillance on/off", probably a lot of socio economic variables if I had to guess, as it turns out most people who are well fed, have a good life and look forward to a brighter future don't just walk around and commit violent crimes. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirta-Gordon/publication/280793445/figure/fig3/AS:669446100242440@1536619796316/Crime-rates-in-USA-and-in-France-data-from-INSEE-Institut-National-de-la-Statistique-et.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirta-Gordon/publicatio...
leptons 1y ago
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That includes being recorded on video, or audio.
- Bud 1y ago
  There's no reasonable expectation of pervasive video/audio capture, permanent recording, and complete AI analysis of all actions in public by all citizens forever, either. But that's the direction in which we're rapidly heading.
  - neilv 1y ago
    (Vouched for this comment, which was somehow already dead at 2 minutes old.) Someone will always say "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public", for whatever reason. So someone always has to respond to that, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know that not everyone agrees with that dismissive assertion.
    - leptons 1y ago
      >Someone will always say "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public", for whatever reason. It isn't "for whatever reason", it is part of the first amendment. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it hasn't been the law for a very long time.
      - neilv 1y ago
        Everyone has heard the phrase. It doesn't necessarily mean what the person saying it thinks it means. For example, you can't legally photograph people in certain ways in public in some US jurisdictions. (Because "no expectation of privacy" perverts There are also restrictions on secret audio recording without consent under circumstances that some people would try to claim are public. For another example, there are restrictions on how you use that "no expectation of privacy", US-wide (e.g., commercial use of photographs, or cyberbullying). And that's before we get into common decency, or arguable conflicting laws or principles. But of course, every single time there is an opportunity for some new person to dismiss a good point with "no reasonable expectation of privacy!" such a new person materialize. And so someone else has to spend their time responding.

bckr 1y ago

> stochastic terrorism This is a bugbear for me. The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
Stochastic terrorism usually refers to incitement, afaict. Edit: it's got a Wikipedia article, which says it's a particular kind of incitement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
mystraline 1y ago
Terrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public. For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all. Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  They did fail to prove terrorism in court in that case - I think generally there needs to be some attempt to use the terror to achieve a political aim or change public opinion? Just making people afraid is a different thing.
panarchy 1y ago
The stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Right, it's the inverse of saying a "random dice roll" isn't happening because there isn't a random human throwing a random selection of polyhedra. Different aspects. That said, even "random" has so many different interpretations that "random targets" it can still be a misleading shorthand. What happens is something closer to "unpredictably unjust and disproportionate"... but of course nobody wants to keep saying a mouthful like that.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 1y ago
The Stochastic part is that the proponents of terrorism don't know where it will manifest, they just incite and hope someone's listening. In contrast a terrorist act like 9-11 was carefully planned and had approval up Al Qaeda's 'chain of command'.
leptons 1y ago
>The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence. That's absolutely incorrect. Terrorism is violence used to achieve political goals. >"Terrorism is the calculated use of violence or threat of violence against civilians and property to intimidate or coerce a population or government to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals" - a simple google search It's not random at all. Random acts of violence are not meant to achieve any goal - they spur-of-the-moment, unplanned, etc. Terrorists have a goal, they typically have a target in mind to achieve a goal, it isn't very random at all. Sure random people might get hurt in the incident, but the incident itself isn't typically random. Terrorists usually prepare for it, for months or years. Was flying two planes into the twin towers random? No, it was not. Was blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City random? No, it was not. These were very carefully selected targets.

stri8ed 1y ago

What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.

tptacek 1y ago
For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime. We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc). Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers. We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors. Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.
- squigz 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on why you're not thrilled about Flock being removed?
  - tptacek 1y ago
    The metro area is blanketed in ALPRs and we were the only ones actually writing real policy about them. Now we don't have any ALPRs and can't build policy or shop it to any of our neighbors. We had harm reduction for the cameras and a plausible strategy for reducing their harm throughout the area, and instead we did something performative.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago

> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? …is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.

therobots927 1y ago
Let’s start with school shootings which only started AFTER the surveillance apparatus went online.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  You're making the same mistake that lots of people do, looking at the big events that make the news instead of actual crime stats. The former doesn't really tell you anything about crime rates. This is a big problem that leads to things like these surveillance measures, because people think crime is really high even when it's the lowest it has ever been, because of the media environment.
  - equinox_nl 1y ago
    I'm not American so please educate me if I'm wrong but haven't y'all had school shootings every single day for at least a decade or something?
lm28469 1y ago
Violent crimes stats look the same pretty much everywhere in the west, there are way more variables than "surveillance on/off", probably a lot of socio economic variables if I had to guess, as it turns out most people who are well fed, have a good life and look forward to a brighter future don't just walk around and commit violent crimes. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirta-Gordon/publication/280793445/figure/fig3/AS:669446100242440@1536619796316/Crime-rates-in-USA-and-in-France-data-from-INSEE-Institut-National-de-la-Statistique-et.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirta-Gordon/publicatio...

leptons 1y ago

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That includes being recorded on video, or audio.

Bud 1y ago
There's no reasonable expectation of pervasive video/audio capture, permanent recording, and complete AI analysis of all actions in public by all citizens forever, either. But that's the direction in which we're rapidly heading.
- neilv 1y ago
  (Vouched for this comment, which was somehow already dead at 2 minutes old.) Someone will always say "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public", for whatever reason. So someone always has to respond to that, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know that not everyone agrees with that dismissive assertion.
  - leptons 1y ago
    >Someone will always say "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public", for whatever reason. It isn't "for whatever reason", it is part of the first amendment. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it hasn't been the law for a very long time.
    - neilv 1y ago
      Everyone has heard the phrase. It doesn't necessarily mean what the person saying it thinks it means. For example, you can't legally photograph people in certain ways in public in some US jurisdictions. (Because "no expectation of privacy" perverts There are also restrictions on secret audio recording without consent under circumstances that some people would try to claim are public. For another example, there are restrictions on how you use that "no expectation of privacy", US-wide (e.g., commercial use of photographs, or cyberbullying). And that's before we get into common decency, or arguable conflicting laws or principles. But of course, every single time there is an opportunity for some new person to dismiss a good point with "no reasonable expectation of privacy!" such a new person materialize. And so someone else has to spend their time responding.