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China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

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Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#51

Post by DuskStar »

akie wrote: post #46
DuskStar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The University of Tokyo could afford to do that because another nation had taken over responsibility for their defense. Who's going to be that protector for the US?

The US doesn't need a protector, because the US has immensely large natural barriers (the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean) that protect it from any other country in the world, except from Canada and from Mexico. Unless you think one of these two countries is an actual threat to the US, then I think in general you should be safe. Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ the…

> The US doesn't need a protector, because the US has immensely large natural barriers (the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean) that protect it from any other country in the world, except from Canada and from Mexico. Unless you think one of these two countries is an actual threat to the US, then I think in general you should be safe.

And if the US was willing to cut itself off from the rest of the world, this might be relevant.

But I don't think that's the case.

> Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat?

Um. I can think of a ton of reasons? From "they're not a threat now but give them 5 years to retool and they'll be really fucking irritating to deal with" to "they keep providing military and tech support to countries on our borders we want to omnomnom" or even "this will help with domestic political issues".

"Don't bother hurting me, I'm defenceless" works when there's a cop standing over your shoulder. Not so much when you used to be the cop.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#52

Post by pjc50 »

londons_explore wrote: post #50
pgeorgi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common dialectic pattern in law enforcement circles world-wide that data at rest that is never touched is data that doesn't exist. That angle is based on the idea that this data "may as well not exist" but it ignores the many issues with indiscriminate data collection: the data might leak, or management might change and invent undesirable "new" purposes for old data - which, within this theory, then begins to…

I could get behind this idea as a privacy compromise. The government can collect any data it likes on everything, but any data it then looks at must be published to the world. Ie. The government gets no privacy when looking through its big database. The simplest approach would be to livestream every screen owned by any government agency.

That's a far worse privacy violation for those being filmed?

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#53

Post by lnsru »

chrischen wrote: post #36
mrich wrote: post #35

The interesting part is not the story itself, but that they chose to demo it to the BBC. Marketing at its best, they want everyone to be fully aware of their capabilities. Wouldn't be surprised if they were overstated, so as to keep citizens in check. The BBC willingly plays along and does not even question the capabilities either way.

You can bet they only demo things if they are 100% sure it will work (in a very controlled environment not unlike North Korean "tours"), and even then often it will fail because of Soviet-style bureaucratic incompetence.

I also demo only things, I am sure 100% it will work. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Every YouTube technical demo is repeated hundred times until perfect video is made to make an impression, it works 100%. That’s the purpose of demoing something. About bureaucratic incompetence I have no opinion.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#54

Post by PavlovsCat »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #42
nscalf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to note that I am largely against facial recognition tracking to us citizens before I say this post. Being able to track and find individuals, anywhere in the US where there is a camera, will significantly reduce crime. Cameras would cover a larger swath of territory, and we would be able to find potential terrorists, criminal suspects, missing people, human traffic victims, etc. far more effectively. We would…

Anecdotally this is a big factor when I talk with Chinese residents and how they feel about safety in everyday life. When I bought a bike in China and asked about locks, the shop owner showed me, but mentioned that he didn't really see a need, he hadn't heard of a bike being stolen in a while, which he specifically attributed to pervasive surveillance. I bought a lock anyways, but was taken aback by how strong his pe…

To corral, as in "collect or gather", is an euphemism though.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#55

Post by tluyben2 »

pacala wrote: post #25
zaroth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology itself is always amoral. Even splitting the atom can be used to achieve wonderful and horrific outcomes. So of course “facial recognition” per say is not the problem. But in this particular example, we see how facial recognition combined with a couple hundred million surveillance cameras funneled into a massive government data processing pipeline can be extremely effectively used for persistent tracking an…

The situation in China is dire. USA is not far behind. Does your neighbor have a Ring camera? Well, that watches the whole street and it is connected to a massive corporate data processing pipeline that is used for persistent tracking of advertisement subjects. Only need to tweak it a little bit for vastly different purposes. Oh, and we work hard to improve our far-field microphones connected to the same pipeline. To…

> Does your neighbor have a Ring camera? Well, that watches the whole street

I was burgled recently and looking for cameras and alarm systems. I was asking the police who came to check the burglary and they explained that here (Spain) it is illegal to point cameras to anywhere ‘public’, so the situation you describe would be removed and fined here. My feeling at the time was that now I cannot protect my property adequately because I cannot detect people at my gate as that would also cover the street so I would only get to them when they are already in after they disabled the power. But after thinking about it, I do think it is a good thing.

Ofcourse law enforcement here can do more, however they seem quite limited as well compared to UK/US/CN.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#56

Post by nec4b »

akie wrote: post #46
DuskStar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The University of Tokyo could afford to do that because another nation had taken over responsibility for their defense. Who's going to be that protector for the US?

The US doesn't need a protector, because the US has immensely large natural barriers (the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean) that protect it from any other country in the world, except from Canada and from Mexico. Unless you think one of these two countries is an actual threat to the US, then I think in general you should be safe. Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ the…

History is full of examples when people who weren't a threat to anybody were conquered in subjugated at best.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#57

Post by rebuilder »

pgeorgi wrote: post #32
lysp wrote: post #24

> For ordinary people we will only extract their data when they need our help. > When they don't need help, we won't gather their data and it remains only in our big database. In the same sentence: "We won't gather their data" and "The data that we gather remains in a database".

It's a common dialectic pattern in law enforcement circles world-wide that data at rest that is never touched is data that doesn't exist. That angle is based on the idea that this data "may as well not exist" but it ignores the many issues with indiscriminate data collection: the data might leak, or management might change and invent undesirable "new" purposes for old data - which, within this theory, then begins to…

Or, rather, the automated systems that store and process the data will increasingly do analysis as well, with humans only viewing the data when prompted to by the system. Technically "the police" can be said not to access the data. In reality it's even worse than if they did, because the automated system , if it works as intended, is much more efficient than humans.

IOW: If it's a violation of civil rights for humans to process some data, then leaving that job to software is just automating civil rights violations.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#58

Post by thaumasiotes »

rtpg wrote: post #4

It's not just about this, but given all that is happening in the space of facial recognition, I think it would be really valuable for researchers to start looking at it like they would weapons research. Almost entirely nefarious applications. After WW2 the University of Tokyo banned weapons research from happening in its research labs. I think we can be drawing more lines on research like this and take a stand agains…

> given all that is happening in the space of facial recognition, I think it would be really valuable for researchers to start looking at it like they would weapons research. Almost entirely nefarious applications.

This is an interesting perspective. Facial recognition is routine among people, and generally not considered nefarious. Rather, it's important to know who people are for a large number of good reasons.

The "facial recognition is inherently evil" point of view probably realizes that it's almost always a bad thing for the government to know who you are. But oddly, ID numbers and birth certificates, which are the normal government equivalent of facial recognition, don't seem to draw similar criticism.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#59

Post by rumanator »

lysp wrote: post #24

> For ordinary people we will only extract their data when they need our help. > When they don't need help, we won't gather their data and it remains only in our big database. In the same sentence: "We won't gather their data" and "The data that we gather remains in a database".

I interpreted the statement "we don't gather their data" as meaning that they don't have access to the data if they can't justify it operationally.

I mean, China's communist elites aren't putting together such an Orwellian monitoring system just to blindly hand it's keys to any civil servant for him to leverage it's power against the elite's interests.

Re: China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)

#60

Post by spraak »

lnsru wrote: post #53
chrischen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can bet they only demo things if they are 100% sure it will work (in a very controlled environment not unlike North Korean "tours"), and even then often it will fail because of Soviet-style bureaucratic incompetence.

I also demo only things, I am sure 100% it will work. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Every YouTube technical demo is repeated hundred times until perfect video is made to make an impression, it works 100%. That’s the purpose of demoing something. About bureaucratic incompetence I have no opinion.

You're arguing semantics when the point is that they likely aren't ask sophisticated as they make themselves look.
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