Comment by therobots927
4 months ago
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?
What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.
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.
> As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned.
Is this related to rental companies reporting cars as "stolen" if they are an hour overdue on their scheduled return?
Can you elaborate on why you're not thrilled about Flock being removed?
13 replies →
We also don't know the number of attacks indirectly caused by these tools, by instilling a more fraught social environment.
I don't care. The world is a dangerous place, we make it safer by promoting freedom and education and goodwill and faith in people, not by growing the police state. We do know for a fact however that in the near future anything "think of the children" or "just looking for criminals" ultimately gets turned against all of us as the government grows and grows without limit, our rights will become fewer and fewer with the encroachment. It's not "panic" or "exaggeration" it has happened all through history of nation-states.
> 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.
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/publicatio...
Let’s start with school shootings which only started AFTER the surveillance apparatus went online.
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.
1 reply →
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That includes being recorded on video, or audio.
I disagree and think it is very reasonable and very possible. Don't put up cameras everywhere, don't put up listening devices everywhere, don't allow the government to buy this information from corporations. There should be a clear line drawn between me or you or a bar putting up a camera and the government gaining access to that data. It's not hard, it really isn't. Saying what you're saying it just trite and not looking at what is possible.
It's part of the same first amendment that gives you the right to free speech. Go look it up. There is no such thing as privacy in public, and if you feel like you have a right to privacy in public, then you need to read up on the first amendment. The only thing that requires permission is when the footage is used for commercial purposes, then you need permission to use it.
And FWIW, citizens have a right to get the footage the government records. You can get any camera footage from any government building, and even personal cellphones of government emplpoyees if they happen to film something with their personal cellphone while on the job.
1 reply →
I actually agree with you but I think two things can be true at once.
- There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Any individual with a camera can record you at any time. (Otherwise the entire genre of street photography basically wouldn't exist, and journalists could get arrested for documenting stories in the public interest.)
- We shouldn't have automated cameras recording all the time and feeding that information into a massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.
>massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.
Video (and audio) recording isn't even the best way to track someone, everyone has a cellphone these days, and turning them off doesn't always stop the tracking.
It's not recording in public that is the problem - that is a right - the separate problem is mining that data and making connections where there aren't any.
Some people say "both parties are the same", but I disagree. With the current administration, they are all-in on mass surveillance, they love Anduril and Palantir, and any attempt to protest their overreach will be met with force, and they are using these technologies to track protesters. The Democrats on the other hand will respond to protests, and we can push them in the right direction. I guess I'm trying to say, be careful who you vote for.
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.
(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.
3 replies →
You can hate it all you want, but it's the first amendment that makes it legal to record in public. I'm honestly glad we have the right to record in public, else the government would be able to hide some nefarious shit that the public has been able to record and dissemenate. If we couldn't record in public, then that would be extremely dystopian. Maybe using AI on recorded data is the real problem you're having, and I agree there should be laws against that - it is a separate issue than recording in public, but it's unlikely to ever be regulated with the current administration.
> stochastic terrorism
This is a bugbear for me. The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
>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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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'.