Facial Recognition Software Being used by Authorities in England.

From this AP article.

British using factial recognition software to look for rioters

This is a form of software that is advanced enough to recognize a persons face from a picture. It is starting to see widespread use among police and military forces around the world. The U.S. has been using this in conjuctionw ith biometrics to identify and track insurgents, Afghan prison escapees and other applications.

The article notes that the pictures being used are from security cameras, cctv units in public places, police photos, and photos turned over by private citizens. The technology of course has one glaring weakness. It has to see your face. If your face is covered suffeciently it can't identify you.

While I can understand the utility of such a tool. Ie less chance of nabbing the wrong person if the softwares recognition is accurate enough. The other concern is using this obviously target speciific individuals for harassment/suppression.

What are you folks comments or opinions on this? Please try to be rational about this. No screaming/ranting for the murder and desctruction of others please.

I think it's a great idea. I see no reason why all public places aren't camera'd-up. If we get the wrong person, well, innocent until proven guilty, but I definitely see it reducing crime, and since I would only implement it in public areas, it's not like anything is changing. After all, you're in public.

If you want to put it in private areas, however, and you want to do it regardless of general consent, well... then I take issue...

I remain spectacle if only because FRS is shit for anything but DMV photos.

Awesome idea.

I dont know why people get upset over cameras out in public. You have zero privacy when out on the streets.

Thats like having sex in the middle of a busy street, and then complaining when someone uploads the video to the internet.

This poses extremely serious privacy and civil rights concerns: If CCTV cameras are widespread enough (and in many places they are), it essentially allows the government to micromanage and keep most individual people located and monitored at all times. It's 1984-ish.

I'm against mass surveillance on principle: If it was up to me, I'd require a warrant for each and every use of the software, and have no public CCTV cameras at all (except inside public buildings).

edited 11th Aug '11 5:21:27 PM by SavageHeathen

I'm against surveillance normally, but what makes this different is that it's in public. You don't have a right to privacy for what you do in public.

That's not entirely true.

For example, police following a random civvie without reasonable suspicion for any significant length of time might get construed as harassment. Other people can see what you do in public, but that doesn't mean the government has any business knowing where everyone is at all times.

I'm not saying that governments shouldn't investigate people at all: Clearly, those suspected of serious crimes can get monitored. Still, that doesn't make random mass surveillance any less Orwellian.

edited 11th Aug '11 5:35:49 PM by SavageHeathen

They don't know where you are at all times, they know where you are in public. Besides, I'll take less muggings/gang violence/random raping in exchange for simple traffic light cameras. It's not like they need cameras in every nook and cranny...

Bleh, this, implemented properly, isn't even close to Orwellian. The Party would scoff at such dinky surveillance. They had two way TV. They had Thought Police, and all the kids were indoctrinated.

Street light cameras are child's play for Orwell.

edited 11th Aug '11 5:38:46 PM by USAF713

Really? With that system, the government could know where you are at all times. They'd know when you leave your house, when you get to work, which places you go and which people you associate with... They could make an educated guess on whether you're having an affair...

They'd catch all instances of breaking minor rules that everybody ignores... It's quite scary when you actually think of it.

Govt CCTV should, in my humble opinion, go die in a fire.

edited 11th Aug '11 6:02:27 PM by SavageHeathen

Perhaps. I simply disagree that it's not worth it. I think that it would do wonders for the crime rate, which is a pretty damn big benefit...

Savage: I don't think you understand how resource intensive it is to track one person in that fashion. The dedication in hardware, man power, etc needed is pretty high. In reality it is only reasonable to track people that extensively if you have a specific need to do so.

I'm an IT professional, and I know full well these kinda tasks can be automated (although they're a pain in the ass to)... The effort in setting up such an IT system would be Herculean, but people's movements might get automatically logged into a humongous but searchable database without needing too much manpower.

edited 11th Aug '11 6:33:40 PM by SavageHeathen

Well, then it would have to be legislated in such a way to be limited. Say, it only gets checked after there's a crime...? You know, instead of just letting them have free reign. That would be supremely stupid...

That system is open to too much misuse: Judges often grant warrants indiscriminately. It would be good to be able to check alibis perfectly and without error, yes: I'll grant you that... But it opens the door to much more intensive levels of social control that are indesirable.

The encroachment on civil liberties and the reduction in people's privacy outweighs any potential benefits by orders of magnitude, IMO.

edited 11th Aug '11 6:38:39 PM by SavageHeathen

To you. Potential lives saved and crimes averted is more important to me. After all, a crime is an encroachment on another person's liberties, isn't it? At the end of the day, there is a point where your liberties end so someone else can have theirs.

Savage, bro I think you VASTLY overestimate our government. Hell look at the clusterfuck that is Congress; our government ain't that organized on any level.

As for cameras in public spaces, hell it's public. If the city, county, or state wants to put them up on THEIR LAND, it's their prerogative.

The current system's single redeeming virtue is being Fascist, but Inefficient: There's a lot of stupid rules on what people can or can't do. Many of that crap is enforced haphazardly, if at all. Your system would make most of these laws actually enforceable. I could only get behind such a mass surveillance scheme if victimless crimes were abolished first. That'd suck.

When those that aren't doing any seriously vile shit have nothing to fear when they're watched, I won't give a damn on who gets watched... But not before.

edited 11th Aug '11 6:45:19 PM by SavageHeathen

Like what kind of laws? Also, yeah, Mark has a point, Scientologists infiltrated our government. There are more dangerous things in the world than government, now... *cough*.

If I bring up my list of complaints against the State again, I might get the zot. So let's make it brief: laws against vice and consensual crimes in general. And lots of Fed, State and local ordnances, like you can't skate there, you can't jaywalk there, you can't smoke here, you can't drink here, you can't go over (insert ridiculously low speed limit here), you can't...

You get the deal. These kinda stuff would get easier to enforce if people were more closely monitored. That's why I oppose surveillance in a nutshell.

I know the government is not that organized or competent... But they'd have access to much more information on people's lives, and that information might fall in the wrong hands (a vindictive ex, a personal enemy, a busybody, or even a cultist that's infiltrated government). I'd rather not have that kind of information on people logged anywhere.

edited 11th Aug '11 6:54:17 PM by SavageHeathen

Bleh, speed limits and jaywalking are debatable. We can always decriminalize them. Drug laws are massive Your Mileage May Vary... a couple weeks ago, I'd have said fuck it, leave them illegal, but at this point I'd rather legalize them and tax them to death. Prostitution needs unions...

See, the laws you don't like aren't universally hated. That's your problem. There is a fair amount of people who are perfectly fine with those laws staying where they are. It's not like society needs any more problems (drugs) to deal with, although prostitution is just prudishness.

In other words, this argument isn't very convincing, in relation to the cameras...

That's beside the point. If there is stuff banned that shouldn't be (and we all agree there is banned stuff that should be legal, even if we disagree on what those things are), we shouldn't make that stuff any easier to enforce.

And we shouldn't give government tools it could misuse to oppress certain sections of the populace: What if a government chooses to monitor (and presumably harass) political dissidents, minorities, students, youth, union leaders, or that sort of thing?

edited 11th Aug '11 6:59:23 PM by SavageHeathen

Then reform the laws. All I hear is "the laws are bad." I hear no plan for legalizing prostitution that would make it easy on the populace and safe for the people doing it. I hear no plan for legalizing drugs that will involve getting people off them, eliminating hard drugs, and minimize the (significant) negative impact on society.

We attack these things because they are currently not implemented in a good way, and the side that wants them legalized doesn't want to do it in a way that would work. This is more for drugs than for prostitution, though.

Don't use circular logic, fix the problem and then this goes from mediocre idea to good idea.

I'm against it, not so much on some deep philosophical level, so much as I don't like it when people know where I am when I don't want them to.

I don't want the government to have the ability to track all my movements, regardless of if they actually decide to or not.

We're derailing the thread from surveillance to liberalization. We shouldn't.

My argument was that this mass surveillance scheme would enable government to do stuff it shouldn't be doing. Let's agree to disagree on this one.

Barkey's argument is cool, too.

edited 11th Aug '11 7:03:56 PM by SavageHeathen

Savage you may be IT but I work directly with programs that track people. The sheer amount of crap even needed to track one person in a singular building is both costly and requires a lot of dedicated tech to make it even remotely work. You have to know who you are tracking and roughly where they have been or where they might go to make it work.

You can track a single persons movements with some degree of accuracy yes. More then one person. Not reallly. The more tracking data pieces you add the less and less accurate the system becomes and the more powerful a set up is needed to offset the increase in inaccuracy. That is with a large degree of automation.

The sheer number of cameras needed to track people on that level as well as confirm their identity and location would require a lot of expensive equipment and perssonel. Want to automate that. Even more and you still need a man in the loop in multiple areas. Even with facial recognition software it is not nearly as easy as you seem to think it is.