Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
191–200 of 226 posts
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#192My local county is currently in a dispute with the local bar association because they want to upgrade the courthouse security cameras and the sheriff wants to add audio capabilities. This includes to parts of the building just outside the courtroom that counsel will frequently use for brief asides with their clients (due to lack of other private rooms). The county seems to favor adding the microphones and pinky swear…
There should be no safety reason to require audio. The only reason for audio is later use for prosecution. It's not just that they don't want to piss off the lawyers. If they don't provide a private location, then they may be forced to take continuances and recesses so those conversations can happen elsewhere as a condition of not infringing on the constitutional right to effective counsel.
Might be quicker to detect disturbances using audio too rather than video only, think of ShotSpotter. Sounds made up though and probably either a way to spy or chill speech.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting aside that judges can make exceptions when circumstances warrant, one would think that this function (providing live captioning of the proceedings) would be a reasonable accommodation that courts should be able to provide. Especially now that every courtroom is (or can be) equipped for sound and video to support remote operation, it shouldn't be too difficult to support a display with the captioning via the c…
There's already a stenographer recording the proceeding, right? I'd think you could project what they're recording onto a display somewhere.
You'd have to translate what the stenographer wrote, whichever system they used, into plaintext first. A layperson won't be able to understand that.
I'd imagine already if not soon we'll have small speech-to-text models that can run in realtime.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't sound like a good compromise at all. First practically speaking, you can't just leave the court building to discuss with your client if they're in chains, and it's super inconvenient based on the layout of many courts. Second, this becomes the excuse for adding audio and video surveillance everywhere , with the excuse that you know about it, so it's okay. Third, considering audio can pick up things like…
> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. -- Structured to Cardinal Richelieu
* s/Structured/Attributed/ , not sure how that swipe-typo happened.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's already impossible to stop someone from recording if they are really determined. Pen cameras, button cameras and all sorts of miniature devices exist and can be snuck through very easily. You enforce the restriction by prosecuting people who upload the footage.
> You enforce the restriction by prosecuting people who upload the footage. but this is impossible to guarantee as well
It sure changes the incentives though. It’s much less attractive to leak recordings as a PR move—or realize any benefit that cranky humorless judges can trace back to the recording—if that, in and of itself, constitutes a whole new crime (and effectively confessing to it too).
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#196The vibe around smart glasses is so weird: Governments and businesses can record in public, which is right and proper, but if an individual person records what they see, that's wrong and creepy.
The original assumption behind CCTV was that it's recorded but realistically never seen, or maybe seen by one person staring at a bunch of screens at once. That's what made it acceptable. Of course this has changed drastically, but CCTV basically got grandfathered in in most people's minds.
CCTV also writes over itself over time.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
The important part of the article: > From then on, any eyewear with video and audio recording capability will be forbidden in all of the First Judicial District buildings, courthouses, or offices, even for people who have a prescription. Other devices with recording capabilities like cell phones and laptops continue to be allowed inside courtrooms but must be powered off and stowed away. It's defined as having record…
That's actually not too bad - it leaves space for devices that do have cameras or microphones for other reasons, as long as they don't persist the output. So you could do real time recognition for assistive devices etc.
What about facial recognition? Even without persistence that’s a big deal for juries.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a compromise where defendants also have the same access to the camera feeds and pinky swear not to use the audio.
Still asymmetric as the police have the resources to comb the feeds and individuals do not
I am confident a gofundme would provide enough tokens for this work.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO much of the "no reasonable expectation" stuff is simply wrong, or treats things as an unreasonable binary. For example, there's no reasonable expectation that singing to myself in public won't be recorded. But almost everyone in public does reasonably-assume that their every step isn't being permanently logged by a stalking drone swarm.
That genie's out of the bottle, couple cheap cameras with cheap AI recognition and tracking, and every network getting pwned by somebody the result is, public spaces become obscenely public. The worst is private spaces, like when a technician or tradesman comes to one's house to do work wearing smart glasses. If they're Rx, what do you do? Refuse service? live with the broken pipe/modem? No opinion on the decision fr…
> That genie's out of the bottle [...] public spaces become obscenely public
A bit "meta" here, but this was never about surrendering to advancing capability, humans have been capable of eavesdropping ever since eaves were invented, people could bring hidden microphones and cameras in "private" spaces for decades, etc.
The "reasonable expectation" doesn't come from our fears of the worst, or else it would be meaninglessly permissive. Rather, it's an attempt to judge individual situations based on some kind of collective agreement about normality. Just because we can't preemptively block something doesn't mean it cannot be a crime.
In other words, we (should) have a lot more power to decide what they become than that. Supposing--and I'm not endorsing this--anyone caught recording in public typically gets their stuff smashed by an angry mob, then the "reasonable expectation" is that you're not being recorded.
Re: Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
#200The problem is when people wear "smart" aka dumb privacy glasses in public restrooms. Should be banned or geofenced