No, let's not "forget" about the NSA. Other groups may be doing bad things too, but that doesn't diminish the badness of the bad things done by the NSA (or anyone else).
Some of this is disturbing and some is not. I don't know why the article makes a big deal out of predictive policing and it's roots in counter-insurgency. Putting police officers where crime is likely to happen is just good management. More power to them. I could care less whether the software was developed for Fallujah. Why would you want to put police resources where they're not needed?
Haha, this is funny. I'm one of the co-founders of PredPol, the startup that makes the predictive policing software LA uses. I think it's a stretch to call anything I wrote in my dorm military grade, but I suppose I'll take that as a compliment. For the record, the DoD called us once asking if some of the models we use to predict crime could be used to predict IED locations, but nothing major ever came of it as far as I know. Also, I live in Santa Clara not Fallujah.
P.S. PredPol predicts crime using only the time, place, and type of past crimes using some simple statistical models. All that is public information for municipalities in the US.
this is creepy, while stopping at a gas station I have noticed a camera scanning customers and their cars in a very robotic way - possibility being scanning faces and car plates.
Where does it end, when and how? Is it a felony to destroy devices that spy on me for which I didn't authorize the gathering of intelligence on me?
I am sorry but all this is really gets under my skin.
my 2c.
It doesn't end. Or it "ends" in a police state, with a-level people living in protected communities and b-level people suffering all kinds of abuse.
And if you feel like it's OK now, sitting in some suburban home, wait until the middle class is not longer sustainable and the majority falls on the "black guy on the street" level. You know, Detroit like.
It might be done incrementally (same way as the middle class is shrinking for decades) or it might be boosted after 1-2 jolts. Could be a war, a major financial hit, an ecologic disaster etc.
Historically, the only way to end such things, is with people participating in politics. Like the unions of the past brough the 8-hour work-week, child-labour laws, and the like.
I think the line is usually defined as you have no expectation of privacy in public, at least that was the justification for the CCTV in the UK (and other English Common Law jurisdictions).
I don't think you should destroy anything, there are other ways to go about expressing disdain that don't lead to laws being broken.
It might be cultural but I wouldn't be freaked out by the petrol station camera. If they are scanning faces, then it is only to locate the head of a moving subject, there is no facial DB consisting of every citizen for them to draw from and if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?
For me there is a difference in picking information up (in an automatic fashion) that people throw away willy nilly and getting information that is protected.
I own some restaurants. We have cameras, too. No, they don't scan customers and cars in any way. You're implying those cameras are owned by the police. You're making stuff up.
> LAPD's mild-sounding "predictive policing" technique, introduced by former Chief William Bratton to anticipate where future crime would hit, is actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S. military, based on "insurgent" activity in Iraq and civilian casualty patterns in Afghanistan.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
Seriously, it's time the resistance starts to coalesce a bit, and hackers get to work mitigating the damage that this stuff does. Hack the facial recognition cameras and scramble the data so they don't recognize a damn thing... hack the license plate database and and change every recognized plate number out for a random number.
Better yet, let's develop technological means to counter this crap. Treat it as damage and route around it, to use an analogy. Let's create wearable devices that blur your face out of video feeds, or a license plate frame that can keep your tag from being read, etc.
The political system has failed us and it's now a technological arms race. And while the NSA may hoover up a lot of the best mathematicians, I'd still wager that there are more smart hackers who don't work for the govt. than ones who do.
"Forget the NSA" is taking it a bit far, but I think we should not forget that there are other threats to our privacy. In particular we should not obsess about whether software is "NSA-proof", or imagine that the problem would go away if the NSA's activities were somehow curtailed.
Let's skip 10-20 years ahead, ok? The march of technology cannot be stopped. I've always said that terrorism is a problem of technology. Now we see the surveillance state is as well.
The truth is that vast troves of data on people are any organization's crack, whether that organization is an a corporation, a government agency, or a local law enforcement agency.
Good luck taking the crack away. If you think the war on drugs has been ineffective, wait until you try making organizations quit as others are smoking up.
Look around, Hacker News. Embrace the inexorable march of technology. It is our time to disrupt these products with new ones and turn it for good, but wishing it would all stop is more suited to luddites.
This reminds me (and I apologize for the OT), I know Singapore also relies heavily on camera surveillance, but is it known whether they then process the data in a similar (i.e. harvest as much as they can) way to LAPD? Are there any known incidents of abuse of that system? Again, sorry about the OT, but the city state intrigues me greatly.
How much of this and the NSA are due to the "gee whiz" effect as I call it? These organizations have cool new technology so they want to use it for no other reason than that.
It's like the HTML blink tag it was annoying and pretty much useless but just because it existed people used it.
[+] [-] alcari|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply
Remberer what the FBI has done in the past (under hoover) compared to what the NSA has not done.
[+] [-] LeeHunter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarforgotpwd|12 years ago|reply
P.S. PredPol predicts crime using only the time, place, and type of past crimes using some simple statistical models. All that is public information for municipalities in the US.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] perlpimp|12 years ago|reply
Where does it end, when and how? Is it a felony to destroy devices that spy on me for which I didn't authorize the gathering of intelligence on me?
I am sorry but all this is really gets under my skin. my 2c.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
It doesn't end. Or it "ends" in a police state, with a-level people living in protected communities and b-level people suffering all kinds of abuse.
And if you feel like it's OK now, sitting in some suburban home, wait until the middle class is not longer sustainable and the majority falls on the "black guy on the street" level. You know, Detroit like.
It might be done incrementally (same way as the middle class is shrinking for decades) or it might be boosted after 1-2 jolts. Could be a war, a major financial hit, an ecologic disaster etc.
Historically, the only way to end such things, is with people participating in politics. Like the unions of the past brough the 8-hour work-week, child-labour laws, and the like.
[+] [-] gnerd|12 years ago|reply
I don't think you should destroy anything, there are other ways to go about expressing disdain that don't lead to laws being broken.
It might be cultural but I wouldn't be freaked out by the petrol station camera. If they are scanning faces, then it is only to locate the head of a moving subject, there is no facial DB consisting of every citizen for them to draw from and if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?
For me there is a difference in picking information up (in an automatic fashion) that people throw away willy nilly and getting information that is protected.
[+] [-] icantthinkofone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wellboy|12 years ago|reply
So the capabilities of the NSA are around 1,000 times bigger than the capabilities of the LAPD.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mindcrime|12 years ago|reply
Seriously, it's time the resistance starts to coalesce a bit, and hackers get to work mitigating the damage that this stuff does. Hack the facial recognition cameras and scramble the data so they don't recognize a damn thing... hack the license plate database and and change every recognized plate number out for a random number.
Better yet, let's develop technological means to counter this crap. Treat it as damage and route around it, to use an analogy. Let's create wearable devices that blur your face out of video feeds, or a license plate frame that can keep your tag from being read, etc.
The political system has failed us and it's now a technological arms race. And while the NSA may hoover up a lot of the best mathematicians, I'd still wager that there are more smart hackers who don't work for the govt. than ones who do.
[+] [-] Joeboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|12 years ago|reply
The truth is that vast troves of data on people are any organization's crack, whether that organization is an a corporation, a government agency, or a local law enforcement agency.
Good luck taking the crack away. If you think the war on drugs has been ineffective, wait until you try making organizations quit as others are smoking up.
Look around, Hacker News. Embrace the inexorable march of technology. It is our time to disrupt these products with new ones and turn it for good, but wishing it would all stop is more suited to luddites.
[+] [-] Aoyagi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhughes|12 years ago|reply
It's like the HTML blink tag it was annoying and pretty much useless but just because it existed people used it.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]