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This is one of those cases where it's largely a matter of degree. For example, as a longstanding matter of American jurisprudence, a police officer doesn't nee
by patio11 12y ago
This is one of those cases where it's largely a matter of degree. For example, as a longstanding matter of American jurisprudence, a police officer doesn't need to do anything at all to justify looking at you in public. This makes sense to our traditional expectations of how a police officer would actually do that, with the Mk 1 Eyeball. He'd probably be physically present somewhere, either coincidentally seeing something legally relevant, or else have particularized suspicions about a particular person/location/etc and do Good Old Fashioned Police Work to see who they talked to / who went in / etc etc.
However, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time.
And that's not the American expectation, and not just for the paranoid set. "Should the cops have access to a database which, for any citizen, would trivially be able to answer the questions a) where they go to church, b) what private residences they entered and at what frequencies, c) what building they were in at 4:30 PM on last Tuesday?" is positively spine-chilling to virtually the entirety of the American polity.
I know privacy debates on HN are frustrating, as they're often carried out in primarily by invective among a sliver of the population who have already staked out the most extreme possible position and are busy trying to vote each other off the island for insufficient extremism. That said, frustration at the HN privacy climate probably shouldn't spill over to "All claims of law enforcement overreach are ludicrous."
- happyscrappy 12y agoSociety may be able to keep data out of the hands of our own government without a warrant but there is virtually no chance of enforcing anything like that on private citizens, companies and other countries with the current rate of technological advance. Privacy, at least in public spaces, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I don't think people even realize that credit card transactions including location are blithely bought and sold everyday.
- Karunamon 12y agoHowever, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time. Serious question - how can you hope to construct a law that addresses this perceived misuse without also stomping on other recognized rights? Long term, the paradigm in law is that whatever happens in the public eye is fair game, and I'm not sure you can put that genie back in the bottle without seriously impacting basic rights like freedom of speech (think photographers and the like). I also don't understand on a moral/legal level how doing a thing suddenly becomes more wrong just because it can be done more accurately, at least beyond a vague feeling of "eww". A cop (or a set thereof) can already sit at an intersection and note every plate that passes by, legally, yet it's somehow wrong just because it became cheap to do? What? I'd like to think we don't make laws based on vague feelings of "eww". I think the data is coming, you can't stop it, any attempts to do so would be ineffective and regressive, and we'd best get ready to live in a post-privacy society, where "privacy" in this case is defined as "the hope that nobody bothered to connect the dots you've been leaving visible the entire time".
- loumf 12y agoIn America, we can make pretty much any law limiting government for any reason we want, or no reason at all. We can get a long way doing that and by definition, limiting government doesn't impact citizen free speech.
- Karunamon 12y agoWhy do I think you're being willfully obtuse, here? What you're proposing would require nothing short of a constitutional convention, and what we end up with on the other side of that process may not actually be the America we grew up in anymore.
- loumf 12y agoHow does a law that limits the government ruin America? Or specifically, how does a law limiting the use of surveillance footage by police ruin America? Why would it require a constitutional amendment? I honestly don't understand your reaction. To be clear, I am only talking about laws that limit the gov't.
- Karunamon 12y agoBecause the process I mentioned is the only feasible way to create "a law that limits the government", especially given the current legislative climate, and that process is incredibly dangerous.