There was a time when police were banned from putting a tracker on people's cars without a court order.
The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.
In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.
Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.
Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.
In general I agree, but thinking of counter-arguments -- criminals are not playing by the same rules and use every manpower-reducing technologies. So if police to keep to their traditional methods, then criminals will have upper hand, and more so with technological advances.
If "criminals" are now are the mass population then we need to think about how we're defining "criminal."
Police were always allowed to bug a vehicle with a court order. They weren't allowed to just casually bug random people's cars because that's mass-surveillance. Now mass-surveillance is completely normalized. Every citizen is treated as a potential criminal and surveilled into a database.
You could say the same thing about all those pesky rules police have to follow around probable cause, evidence collection, letting people have lawyers, etc. Criminals don’t have to do any of that.
A good friend of mine who also works on tech is utterly disconnected from current events. Whenever I offer a discussion or say “hey did you hear about X?” his response is always skepticism that such a thing could occur. He has a newborn and now he’s even more disconnected (somewhat more understandable given the child).
It seems like a lot of people in tech are like that, or increasingly like that. I have a diverse stable of publications, journalists, subject matter current events podcasters, and other sources in my feed readers and my circle. Sitting between these things, it seems like there is a widening gulf.
by that logic it is perfectly legal for AMZN to openly publish the whole vast-vast trove of Ring videos. I do think it is legal, just wondering what would government do it if AMZN actually does it. I also think the governments at all levels should publish all the license plate readers data because it was collected/bought on the public dime and thus a public property.
lets suppose you collect those feeds and do image recognition and integration of data across those multiple feeds, add cross-referencing with other public data of photos, names, addresses, etc. - would it be legal? would it be legal to publish the results in the open?
There was a time when police were banned from putting a tracker on people's cars without a court order.
The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.
In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.
Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.
Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.
In general I agree, but thinking of counter-arguments -- criminals are not playing by the same rules and use every manpower-reducing technologies. So if police to keep to their traditional methods, then criminals will have upper hand, and more so with technological advances.
If "criminals" are now are the mass population then we need to think about how we're defining "criminal."
Police were always allowed to bug a vehicle with a court order. They weren't allowed to just casually bug random people's cars because that's mass-surveillance. Now mass-surveillance is completely normalized. Every citizen is treated as a potential criminal and surveilled into a database.
You could say the same thing about all those pesky rules police have to follow around probable cause, evidence collection, letting people have lawyers, etc. Criminals don’t have to do any of that.
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I'm about 1000x more concerned with gangs of armed thugs kidnapping & murdering my neighbors than I am about criminals.
I can fight back against criminals. I cannot fight back against cops. I'd rather be surrounded by criminals.
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ICE doesn't have any shortage of blatantly illegal behavior to point to. I don't think many people realize how far gone the rule of law is already.
I am endlessly frustrated about that.
A good friend of mine who also works on tech is utterly disconnected from current events. Whenever I offer a discussion or say “hey did you hear about X?” his response is always skepticism that such a thing could occur. He has a newborn and now he’s even more disconnected (somewhat more understandable given the child).
It seems like a lot of people in tech are like that, or increasingly like that. I have a diverse stable of publications, journalists, subject matter current events podcasters, and other sources in my feed readers and my circle. Sitting between these things, it seems like there is a widening gulf.
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They murdered someone today. They did not follow their training.
they just murdered some one today
by that logic it is perfectly legal for AMZN to openly publish the whole vast-vast trove of Ring videos. I do think it is legal, just wondering what would government do it if AMZN actually does it. I also think the governments at all levels should publish all the license plate readers data because it was collected/bought on the public dime and thus a public property.
there are plenty of sites at least in the USA where you have live cameras of public areas, hosted by the governments themselves.
lets suppose you collect those feeds and do image recognition and integration of data across those multiple feeds, add cross-referencing with other public data of photos, names, addresses, etc. - would it be legal? would it be legal to publish the results in the open?
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