The article indicates many states are beginning to supply federal agencies with biometric data including driver's license photographs. It also states a local police force (the NYPD) was a customer of a facial recognition system.
How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?
I don't think the founders [US-centric post, but I think this applies to most technologically-advanced nations] envisioned this type of surveillance, and thus offered little protection against it. As the technology to employ this type of capability becomes simpler and cheaper, potential resistance in the form of court processes and public opinion will be comparitively slow to form. This will get a lot worse before it gets better.
"How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?"
this is a fine question - the DHS has proposed a project with the City of Oakland to prototype just such a thing, described as a combination of NSA surveillance and stop & frisk, which they call the Domain Awareness Center. Originally targeted at the port post 9/11, it has grown to be a prototype of a citywide surveillance system that ties local and national authorities together closer than ever before.
It's not in place yet, and stopping it in Oakland, where all politics are driven by law enforcement / public safety policy, despite decades of data that show pouring money into the police department has not reduced crime, may be a good way to at least delay this across the country.
While I share your dislike of the program, it's important to look at the overall scope rather just the government one. After all, you could build a pretty good automatic photo identification system on top of Facebook.
>After all, you could build a pretty good automatic photo identification system on top of Facebook.
There's very little utility in identifying people in pictures that were uploaded intentionally by people who knew who the people in the pictures were before they uploaded them.
Slightly off topic, but I am curious and don't understand, why do you care what the founders did or did not envision? You live in a democracy, where you elect people to govern the country in a way that suits the majority of the population.
The way I see it, these issues aren't about what someone 250(?) years ago wanted, but what the people who are alive today want. If their views outweigh those of the electorate today, is it even still a democracy?
Because democracy without an underlying system of values is indistinguishable from a tyranny by the majority (in other words, it cannot be two foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner). That underlying system of values, as I understand, is the constitution. A law can be unconstitutional even if the entirety of congress votes in favor. While specific needs of American society have changed, I don't believe the values espoused by the US founders have changed a great deal over the past two centuries.
Is it not similarly "tyrannical" to be bound by the views of people who lived a few hundred years ago. I believe that the constitution specifically forbade the vote to certain segments of society by race/gender? Which is one example where values have changed significantly.
Not to mention, there have been amendments to the constitution as I understand it - or are those only additions rather than contradictions/supercededants?
American here, what Dalek_Cannes said was correct, but to add to that, we have a system to change the underlying views. These are called Amendments, and that is how we changed the underlying view to allow everyone to vote. The difference between an Amendment and ordinary laws is that Amendments are really, really, really big deals that have the authority to redefine those value systems instead of working within the definition as ordinary laws can.
There are only 27, the first 10 of which was kind of a "Constitution out of beta" thing that all happened at once, so you can kind of consider there to be 17 changes to the underlying values. That way when one occurs it's a BIG DEAL and can't sneak past the people as easily as say, the Patriot act or the NDAA, both of which are pretty easy to make a case against that they go against the core values but were voted on quickly at times no one was looking.
Also we have a separation of powers where Congress creates laws, the President acts as a leader and can also prevent Congress from creating laws in some cases, and the Supreme Court can challenge legality of laws. The idea is that the Supreme Court challenges laws against Constitution + Amendments, so they can strike down a law as being unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court does not have the power to strike down an Amendment as it by definition is the constitution.
If Congress creates bad laws, it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to point it out. However they are only legally allowed to do that when a case is put before them. Imagine being legally restrained from refactoring unless a customer files a bug report. Part of the reason the US is having some trouble with laws as I understand it is Congress + some organizations are working to prevent laws from going to the Supreme Court on technicalities. Such as person X tries to take law Y to the court with evidence Z, but evidence Z is "classified" so they are legally not supposed to know the evidence and cannot legally present it in court.
A similar problem our country is facing is that the lack of refactorization is catching up to us so our legal system has become an insane mess that only highly trained specialists (lawyers) can even attempt to navigate. Then people learn how to abuse the system and can try to attack people on all the un-refactored points of the law. This is how patent trolls work, the addition of the law (patent) is a relatively easy process and the removal of bad laws (bad patents) can only be done by challenging it in court. This causes thousands of bad patents to exist because no one can challenge them until it is used against someone.
Methinks the "killer app" for Google Glass et al is automatic face recognition and dossier summary display (look at someone, and a "bubble" of information is shown above them); unavoidable when its time comes, and will be exploited by those already data-mining all kinds of app usage.
Take a look at this article's analysis on whether or not the 'Founding Fathers' would have been for or against the type of surveillance we are now seeing.
> How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?
How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?
I don't think the founders [US-centric post, but I think this applies to most technologically-advanced nations] envisioned this type of surveillance, and thus offered little protection against it. As the technology to employ this type of capability becomes simpler and cheaper, potential resistance in the form of court processes and public opinion will be comparitively slow to form. This will get a lot worse before it gets better.