The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
311–320 of 636 posts
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data. You need political w…
This is the kind of techno-utopian fantasy that keeps authoritarianism looking respectable. “Just encrypt it and only decrypt with a warrant” sounds lovely on paper, but in practice you’ve still built the infrastructure for a 24/7 panopticon - you’ve just wrapped it in a legal fig leaf. Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate whe…
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#313The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
There is always a danger that the ruling class may not stay in power forever, unless the others are nailed to the ground.
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %. It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (beca…
Rome figured this out I think. It didn’t fall. It silently converted into a church. More reach, less defending walls.
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#315Isn't UK a democracy? Why then have the people not rejected the initiative? Ah, right - they haven't even been asked.
I think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#316Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
>* The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.* Per-capita it’s less than the US.
But with the smaller space for the population, it's nearly total coverage from multiple angles vs the wide distances separating the equivalent number of cameras in the US.
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm thinking it through, and I've arrived at the puzzling conclusion we shouldn't make it too hard for people to break the law.
Isn't that precisely the point. If there are so many laws that are so easily broken, you have a reason to pickup anyone of interest at any time.
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be sure, in the original context of Popper's writing, I believe "intolerant" meant something like "committing violence against others for disagreeing with you", and "tolerate" meant "refrain from intolerance". The full quote is below: "Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those w…
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way t…
However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
#320The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things? From the article: > Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in…