Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

aclu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 95 posts

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#61

Post by noarchy »

tekromancr wrote: post #21
cromwellian wrote: post #7

I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle. ARGUS uses mobile phone sensors. Cameras are becoming almost "too cheap to meter", and too small to notice. Billions of people now walk around with mobile phone cameras, so chances are you're going to be recorded by someone in public, especially as cameras continue to evolve. It may be some small consolation that consumer cameras are ground level, and decentralized, where as…

What if we went the completely opposite way? Forgo ALL privacy? Everyone has access to everyone else's data and metrics. If the genie is all ready out of the bottle, this might be the best outcome.

By "everyone" do you include the government? This always seems to be the big exception. We've moved in the direction of secretive government that wants to know everything about you, which is the opposite of what I'd prefer to see: open, transparent government that respects basic liberties.

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#62

Post by shoki »

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi talked about this sort of fear a few years ago in his boot Bursts[1]. He figured Google would be the one to do it. Even with dropouts occurring when someone goes into a bus, people's movements tend to have low entropy[2]. Since most people's movements follow pretty predictable routines, over time the system can learn to predict most people's positions given noisy data.

It might not work well for criminals trying to avoid being seen by arial cameras during the day, hiding out away from their usual haunts and obscuring their faces. It will probably be a big win for marketing data analytics firms.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Patterns-Everything-mail-Crusad...

[2] http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201002...

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#63

Post by Symmetry »

tekromancr wrote: post #21
cromwellian wrote: post #7

I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle. ARGUS uses mobile phone sensors. Cameras are becoming almost "too cheap to meter", and too small to notice. Billions of people now walk around with mobile phone cameras, so chances are you're going to be recorded by someone in public, especially as cameras continue to evolve. It may be some small consolation that consumer cameras are ground level, and decentralized, where as…

What if we went the completely opposite way? Forgo ALL privacy? Everyone has access to everyone else's data and metrics. If the genie is all ready out of the bottle, this might be the best outcome.

I think there's a difference between forgoing privacy when in public and forgoing privacy when in private. Having anybody be able to see me when I'm on a city street is one thing, having anybody be able to see into my bedroom is another.

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#65

Post by smackay »

maxerickson wrote: post #57
smackay wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the simple reason that not everyone you deal with is altruistic and has your best interests at heart. "anything [said] can and will be used against [the defendant] in the court of public opinion". Release of all information, without the required changes in human behaviour can only lead to self-censorship on a grand scale as people try and cover all the flaws an blemishes that might result in them not getting prom…

You are committing something like the "perfect candidate fallacy". For a bank, making your future more predictable would likely just result in a different rate on the loan (either higher or lower, but they are interested in writing any loan that they think they can price sufficiently well). For the job, the candidates with better measurements would likely get promoted faster, but over time, the companies with more me…

I was not thinking of perfect candidates but rather having a lot of information that was previously inaccessible to those without means and money offers considerable scope for mischief. Even the most innocuous of habits can be used by those with a grudge or who you are in some way competing with to sow seeds of doubt and cause peers or superiors to question your motives, veracity or trustworthiness.

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#66

Post by yk »

confluence wrote: post #24
yk wrote: post #15

A 1.8 Gpixel sensor has at 24 frames/s and 24 bit/pixel a data rate of nearly a TBit/s. So I would actually like to see, how they are handling such a data rate (inside of the drone). And how they actually get the data out of the drone. And to look a bit more into this numbers ( and using the numbers from Backblaze [1]) it seems that the uncompressed video of a single drone over a year would cost $1.5e9, of course div…

The vast majority of the image doesn't change too much between frames. I'm no image compressing genius but calculating only the deltas between frames and transmitting only those pixels that actually change by an order of magnitude (with some type of filter) should dramatically reduce bandwidth and storage size and cost by an order of magnitude. Kind of like a large number of small git commits for slowly changing data…

It would of course be compressed, but I have the least confidence in the estimate in the compression ratio which is achievable in such a setting. So I did only add it in a handwaving way in the end.

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#67

Post by yk »

brigade wrote: post #30
yk wrote: post #15

A 1.8 Gpixel sensor has at 24 frames/s and 24 bit/pixel a data rate of nearly a TBit/s. So I would actually like to see, how they are handling such a data rate (inside of the drone). And how they actually get the data out of the drone. And to look a bit more into this numbers ( and using the numbers from Backblaze [1]) it seems that the uncompressed video of a single drone over a year would cost $1.5e9, of course div…

1.8 Gpixel sensors don't exist, due to physics. It's combining 368 sensors. No one stores or transmits uncompressed video outside of RAM. 15Mbps is decent for 1080p24, so 1.8 Gpixel 24fps would be decent at 15Gbps. Assuming say 14 hours of daylight (drones can't stay up indefinitely and night vision has different requirements), that's no more than ~100 TB per mission or day. As for getting the data out, I'd assume th…

    1.8 Gpixel sensors don't exist, due to physics.
Why don't they exist? ( I imagine it is just a matter of making the chip large enough, to accommodate enough pixels.)

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#69

Post by znowi »

cromwellian wrote: post #7

I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle. ARGUS uses mobile phone sensors. Cameras are becoming almost "too cheap to meter", and too small to notice. Billions of people now walk around with mobile phone cameras, so chances are you're going to be recorded by someone in public, especially as cameras continue to evolve. It may be some small consolation that consumer cameras are ground level, and decentralized, where as…

Two thoughts on this:

1. I think the course to a mass surveillance society is set and inevitable. The culture shift in relation to privacy is evident. Both on the net and offline people gradually get used to the idea of being tracked, observed, analyzed, etc. The virtue of tomorrow is I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide.

2. Google Glass poses an interesting dilemma. I expect it to be as prevalent as smartphones in the next 5 years. Now in this situation how do you frame a question of privacy when virtually everyone is able to live stream and record as they go without anyone knowing about it? Everyone's an agent and when you're out you will be keenly aware of it. It'll be fun to watch how this plays out :)

Re: Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

#70

Post by brownbat »

Just listened to the last two episodes of This American Life, about a school in Chicago where there have been 29 kids shot over the last year.[1]

On seeing this, immediately wondered if you could combine drones with gunshot detection systems.[2]

The drone could hone in on gunshots and follow any vehicle in a drive by in real time without a dangerous car chase.[3]

By implication, the drone "nightmare" scenario probably kicks in in full when we all put license plates on roofs.

On the upside, no more drive-bys. We stop raising whole classes of kids with PTSD.

On the downside, the returns are probably greater for police who use drones to monitor traffic offenses. So we're probably immediately fined $700 for any rolling stop. Worse case, drones network with traffic signals to turn lights red right before we pass through.[4]

I'm conflicted. I know there's a famous quote about people who trade privacy for security, and how they're all Nazis. But I'm really on board with helping those kids.

I know that before Miranda and some similar cases, there was an epidemic of rubber hose interrogations in police station backrooms. I know there's still a lot of improvement to be made, but some simple changes in the courtroom made sweeping changes to the ways law enforcement interacted with suspects. Maybe some legal scholar can come up with a few guidelines that help the police to use these sorts of technologies to do some good, while still restricting their ability to abuse them.

1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_(countermeasure)

3. Chase related crashes from just the last few months:

http://theadvocate.com/news/police/4714718-123/police-chase-...

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=...

http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/police-4-cars-...

http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/breaking/chi-suspects-car-...

4. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/red_light_cams_red_light_...

Post reply on HN