For me, personally, this is the key point. Right now, there ARE way too many things that are illegal–so many, that none of us really know what they all are. And I haven’t seen anything that suggests this is going to change for the better. So, I generally believe that you can pick any human and watch them continuously for a month or so, and you’ll find something you could nail them for.
Which means that the potential for abuse is there. So, I think the central question is how optimistic we are that the system won’t be abused (or how much abuse we’d be willing to tolerate to get the benefits). Personally, I’m just not all that optimistic. I’ve seen too many ways that the existing infrastructure is abused. Heard anything about the way police abuse asset forfeiture laws to convict and impound people’s money?
Pardon me for saying this but this is bordering on conspiracy theory. Do you have a cite for rampant CIA/NSA illegal procedures that have any real impact on American society?
I agree that there is potential for misuse but there is the potential for misuse in many police/security procedures. Right now cops could legally invade your home…if they have a warrant. The Feds can tap your phone any time they want…if they have a warrant. The cops can stop you on the street and search you if they believe they have probable cause. These techniques could be abused (and occasionally are) but largely oversight works and they are important for solving crimes.
The eye in the sky has the potential to be revolutionary in solving crimes. Let’s come up with procedures that will help allay your concerns so we can use it.
Actually, yes. While I am troubled by the data collection as cited by Snowden I have not heard of any instances where the data was actually used against Americans; do you have any cites that say otherwise? If I understand it correctly the data being collected was meta data and not easily tracked to any particular person. The way I see it is that a secret meta collection project that wasn’t actually used against anybody was uncovered which created a fire-storm, leading to at least curtailment if not abandonment. Isn’t this a demonstration of the system working?
I guess we differ on our understanding of “unreasonable”. Cops can invade your home if they get a warrant so our society feels that is reasonable (with a warrant). Given the potential utility of the eye in the sky I think it reasonable with some safe-guards in place, not unlike home invasions.
I’d like to see a short-term pilot program that we could study to determine how effective the eye could be. If it turned out to be ineffective then there’s no point in implementing it.
This is fair, but you have to take in both sides of the “real life” consequences.
Let’s imagine that you’re protesting against the confederate flag in SC, and while you’re out waving your sign, your filmed littering or something, and next thing you know, you’re getting arrested for something that is illegal but usually ignored. Maybe they track back and find a whole list of things you’ve done over the past week (traffic violations, jay walking, whatever) and bust you for all these violations at once. In that case, would you be in favor of constant surveillance, or would you feel like you’ve been violated?
So, the question is not whether it would be good to solve and punish the crimes you’re referring to. The question is whether that good will outweigh the everyday harms that might come with the solution.
I would say that the “good” you’re referring to is very good, but also relatively infrequent in practice; whereas, the “bad” abuses may not be as bad in any single event, but there will be a lot MORE of them.
Well, pretty much every police power gets abused to some extent. I’m not saying that that the slippery slope extends down to an Orwellian Big Brother or Stalin’s purges. I AM saying we have to think how far down the slope we WILL go, and whether that’s an acceptable trade-off.
For me, there’s just such a tremendous potential for abuse here that it’s scary. It’s been pointed out a couple of times, but those “in favor” haven’t really responded: It’s this back-tracking ability that’s really scary. Right now, in big cities, you may be recorded constantly, but it’s hard enough to ID you that they aren’t likely to try to unless you’ve done something big. The ability to easily track you back to your house means that the biggest impediment to abuse (anonymity in the crowd) is eliminated. Unless you’re REALLY good, once they’ve pinpointed you, they can figure out who you are and where you live, without getting out of their chairs.
I think it’s way to easy to understate what a game-changer this ability is in the world of general population surveillance. No one will be as “lost in the crowd” as they used to be.
There’s a big difference between being filmed by a bunch of separate cameras throughout the day in different places, as opposed to being constantly filmed by one camera in the sky with one database that stores all the info. It’s like the difference between seeing a bunch of different people at all the places I go to throughout the day, and one guy following me from place to place everywhere I go.
Right now it would be too much of a hassle for the police to continually observe me. The police could track all my phone records, and find surveillance video from all the stores and businesses I go to or pass by during the day, but it would take a lot of work, and there’s no reason for them to do it to me, or to most anyone who isn’t a major criminal.
But if there’s an Eye of Sauron in the sky, it might not be any trouble at all. If there’s a rally regarding something like Ferguson, it sounds like it wouldn’t be much trouble for the police to see who all was there, and backtrack a few days and see that this person littered, this person did a whole lot of speeding, this other person bought some drugs, and so on. Then the police can go to all those people’s workplaces, arrest them, and take their time booking them, and try to scare off people from holding another rally like that again.
The asset forfeiture laws being abused is a perfect example of a reasonable law being abused. I believe John Oliver had a segment on it a while ago if anyone wants to see more about that.
Beyond that I don’t think it’s exactly paranoid to suspect that organizations whose business it is to run clandestine, illicit operations might just be conducting clandestine, illicit operations :p.
Actually, part of the fallout of Snowden’s revelations/people thrown under the bus were a number of intelligence mooks who tapped or otherwise illegally surveyed their girlfriends, neighbours etc…
They didn’t have a warrant to do so, should go without saying.
Let the video feeds and analysis tools be wholly public. That way, no political entity or nefarious actor can use them for shenanigans without fear of retaliation. Worked for nukes, neh ? When everybody watches everybody, nobody watches anybody or something :).
Again, a quick google on “NSA stalk girlfriend” should illuminate. And, once again, those are the people thrown under the bus because their illegal snooping couldn’t possibly fall under national interest.
Do you have any proof that it *was *abandoned or curtailed ? I don’t mean public declarations and PR communiqués of such, I mean positive indication that it is true.
[QUOTE=Sam Lowry]
But if there’s an Eye of Sauron in the sky, it might not be any trouble at all. If there’s a rally regarding something like Ferguson, it sounds like it wouldn’t be much trouble for the police to see who all was there, and backtrack a few days and see that this person littered, this person did a whole lot of speeding, this other person bought some drugs, and so on. Then the police can go to all those people’s workplaces, arrest them, and take their time booking them, and try to scare off people from holding another rally like that again.
As the technology stands, they could identify that *someone * left your place of work, and traveled to your home between 5:07 and 5:39 p.m. They wouldn’t know it was you necessarily. It could be your wife, your kid, or your buddy who is coming over to play Call of Duty.
They’d still have to have a real-live cop identify you as being the person who got out of the car at 5:38, and walked into the house.
That’s why I’m not so worried yet; the nefarious uses are still pretty small, and the positive uses are great- for example it strikes me that using this kind of technology could drastically improve traffic flow in conjunction with those street signs that can be changed with traffic conditions. They’d be able to get a lot better idea of traffic patterns in a sort of holistic way, that wouldn’t be possible by looking at street cameras and drive-over sensors.
Would they need to have a real-live cop identify that it was specifically you? Or could they just ask you to come in for questioning and hope they asked the right person? Or threaten to throw your wife in jail unless you admit to having done the crime. In a perfect world where the cops acted correctly, this wouldn’t be an issue, but we know the cops don’t always act correctly.
Maybe you can tell me what two plus two is. Not a term like four…
Privacy and civil rights are the reasons I’m opposed.
It exposes people to open scrutiny, which, by and large, we avoid today by being “a face in the crowd.” It makes me “Trionpus Debatehammer, 772-00-2222, 1278 Greenglass Lane, Democrat” in the crowd.
It doesn’t prevent me from acting, but it infringes on my liberty. Freedom consists of more than the right to do things; it also consists of the right not to be involved and entailed.
To me, this idea is roughly the same as the idea of the NRA recording the destination of everyone’s phone calls. It intrudes too far into our privacy.
It would definitely have that social advantage. And it’s quite common in the workplace, and I never really saw any down side to it there. But at all times? Dunno. I guess I’m not strongly against it, but would still vote against it.
An idea can be bad without being really really bad.
Never really proven, alas. I believe it happened, but the solid proof was never brought forward. The CIA did a good enough job of covering their tracks…or maybe I’m wrong and it didn’t actually happen. Either way, there was never the necessary “smoking gun” of undeniable evidence.
For the rest of this conversation I’m going to use the term Skyeye out of convenience.
If the cops want to harass you for participating in a protest they don’t need Skyeye to do it. They can just pretend that they saw you littering and bust you for that. They don’t need Skyeye to threaten to throw your wife in jail. If the cops aren’t running rampantly now I don’t see how Skyeye makes a difference.
How about this as a restriction: Skyeye can’t be used as evidence to open a investigation. In your traffic violations example it would be void because there is no other evidence. That, plus a restriction on pixel resolution, would alleviate a lot of your concerns.
I look at it completely different: any additional abuse provided by Skyeye (over current ways that law enforcement could abuse you) is trivial compared to the way it could be used to fight crime. The Dayton example from the podcast was amazing: they were able to catch the thief in almost real-time (with all the evidence) which prevented a potentially lengthy, fruitless investigation.
Another point: keep in mind that Skyeye would keep tabs on the cops as well. For example, would it have made a difference in the Ferguson case?
And now we’ve crossed over into CT. Too bad we didn’t have Skyeye for the JFK assassination. That might have shut people up about the grassy knoll.
Litterers are the some of the worst people on the planet and you should be fined for it.
You do realize that these are crimes that are illegal even if no one notices you doing them? Maybe you should learn how to drive, and cross the road at a crosswalk.
So far the harms you have listed is you getting caught for breaking laws that you feel don’t apply to you.
You pay the police to do their jobs. If one cop can solve 10X crimes by video surveillance vs a single cop walking around only solving X, then that is a good thing.
Again, your concerns seem to be that you can’t break laws without someone seeing you do it.
You mean arrest them for breaking actual laws. Isn’t that their job? And it is very likely that a cop watching riot videos will be tracking people he sees throwing rocks, breaking windows, looting stores, etc., back to where they came from and while doing so making a list of all the laws that person broke coming and going from the protest. As he should be. He’d also not be looking at every single person at the protest because most of them are protesting peacefully and he doesn’t have infinite time in the day to do so.
I agree that asset forfeiture is just a scam to get more money by the government. Change it rather than whinge about it. At the same time, using the same video they are collecting could help you prove your innocence.
Your right not to be involved stops when you break the law. It just sounds like a lot of people want to be able to break the law with impunity.
So if the government recorded every phone call and email, and therefore could solve 100x crimes, you’d support that, right? Only those with something to hide would have anything to fear.
You’re failing to acknowledge a rather obvious distinction that’s being made here, which is whether the law is being enforced in an even-handed way. The fact is most people break laws, and we don’t even pretend we’re trying to catch every violator. If the people who DO get caught and punished are the ones who pissed off the wrong cop, this is a problem. To mischaracterize that discussion as “I want to get away with stuff” is to construct a pretty epic straw man.
To be clear, it’s not that your point has no merit, it’s that you’re deliberately ignoring mine.
This is like the argument some make to the cops when pulled over for speeding, “Why didn’t you pull over that guy, he’s going faster than me!?”. In your scenario, are the charges manufactured or are they things that he’d be charged for if caught normally? If the latter then sucks to be him. Don’t speed, beat your wife, etc.
I don’t see how it is a straw man when no one has said why they object to this other than to say they don’t want to get a fine for littering or jaywalking. Some nebulous statement like it violates my rights should have some demonstrated argument or proof on how it does so.
Do they need a warrant to monitor your private communications now? Do they need a warrant to watch you walk down the street now?
If they had a database of all communications and world wide video (and I’d like to see the datacenter that could house that) that was only accessible when a specific crime was being investigated or data mined using algorithms to spot criminal activity that was then flagged for further investigation (still requiring a warrant for humans to view), then I’d have little problem with it.
But the cops usually don’t know who participated in a mass protest - plenty of faces in the crowd, plenty of masks/hats/shades to go around too.
With Skyeye they can identify exactly who it was waving this banner around and know where they live, where they work, where they go to church and who each of their friends are.
That’s a lot of quasi-instantaneous information about a face in the crowd.
How would one enforce a restriction on pixel resolution, exactly ? The hardware’s not really complicated - it’s basically just a camera on a rotodrone. The really gnarly stuff is the analysis software. On the hardware side of things, it seems pretty easy to switch the camera/tele-objective for a better one. If and when evidence caught by the camera has to be provided (e.g. in court, subpoena etc…) it’s just as easy to blur up a pixel-perfect image to within any official, legal bounds.
I agree, it’s an extremely powerful tool. Which makes the potential for abuse all the more worrysome - and likely.
:rolleyes:. Iran-Contra is not a conspiracy theory. It was an *actual *conspiracy.
That’s barely a restriction. The investigation will simply have been opened thanks to a tip by prized informant “Fuzzy Dunlop”, which provided probable cause to look at the Skyeye footage.
Isn’t that poetic flourish a bit of well poisoning? After all, Sauron was the dark lord who wished to enslave all of Middle Earth. The government is a benevolent benefactor looking out for its citizens and from time to time a network of private interests, who also share a mutual philanthropic mission.
Seems like looking into backyards and windows would be super illegal, but there’s probably some legal gymnastics one can do to make it kosher.