Hawaii State Sen. Glenn Wakai thinks it’s ridiculous to waste Hawaii’s $37 million investment in facial recognition and thermal screening tech after the COVID-19 threat passes. Imagine all the creative uses government can find for these emergency tools.
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21 replies on “Tyranny in Paradise: Turning COVID Facial Recognition & Thermal Screening Tech to “Other” Uses”
Scott nailed it with his quip about your face not being approved. I’m not optimistic about block chain as a work around to prevent people’s accounts from being canceled. If it’s digital it will be hacked. Not that you can use bitcoin at Walmart. Having state governments issue local hard currency may be the only useful weapon against proponents of a cashless society. Personally I’d tie the amount of Texas Tokens that are allowed to exist on some sane multiple of the best available estimate of the number of participants in the Texas workforce. And apply the same logic to the exchange rates for the dollar and any other states that decided to issue currency. Make money that you can stick under the mattress for twenty years and you won’t be able to stop it short of a civil war.
I would say that “the genie is out of the bottle” and will not go back in and that discussing how to prevent this dystopian future is really a waste of time (unfortunately). The surveillance and information synthesis technology is only going to get worse, not better. It will be everywhere, and will fundamentally change society in ways that are irreversible without turning the clock back 60 years through some sort of magic. Frankly, I think that in the end it doesn’t matter whether it is the government or just some hacker in a room somewhere in a far-off country – the tech is here and is not going away. So I would suggest that the real starting place for a valuable discussion is this premise: Soon there will be a pervasive database that every nefarious group can access that has all of your bio-metric data along with a synthesis of every thing you have ever put on an electronic form or into your phone or your home computer. This database will be (is being) analyzed by hugely intelligent AIs that know how to manipulate nearly 100% of the population of the earth (certainly the US) without their knowledge. Also this info could destroy or blackmail a lot of people. Dan Bongino often says that the definition of tyranny is that there is no difference between the public and private self. Well, the private self is under assault and trusting any political figure is certainly naive at this point.
So, given the above truth, the real discussion should be:
Are there any forward thinking people or groups out there that are actually addressing this as an absolutely assured (and soon) future? I believe that this is what we need to be discussing NOW. Talking about electing old-fashioned legislators who will somehow “throw away” this tech is silly. It is not going to happen. (IMHO)
As to government never wanting to scrap something once its initial purpose is fulfilled, back in the days before San Diego lost its soul to the Leftists, there was a referendum on whether the toll on the Coronado Bridge should be renewed after the project was completed. Lots of positive-sounding politicians gave their speeches on why the “New Toll” was needed and how much good it would do. The citizenry rejected their pitch in a referendum vote. Today, I don’t think they would. We left San Diego a few years ago and are now Refugees in the Lone Star State. San Diego was once a fairly conservative town. Not so much any more. They love their government programs.
Big government and big business in a partnership to control the population.
Pretty solid description of actual fascism. Plus they get to play good-cop/bad-cop. Double-bonus.
If all your money is connected to your face, then it’s also connected to anyone who is a dead ringer for you.
Even in the movie The Incredibles the garment designer had face, eye and voice validation. Certainly the government has figured this out.
The scary thing isn’t the tech, it’s the application of the tech. It’s who is applying the tech to what ends that is dangerous.
This tech could be and is being used for positive purposes. Bill pointed out one of them. It’s also being used to spot terrorists at airports and venues where large numbers of people gather. I’m sure we can all agree that we don’t want to die horribly at a football game or in an airliner crash.
As far as “burying” this goes, the more likely result is to drive it underground and into the shadows. It’s not going away. The genie cannot be forced back into the bottle. Pandora’s box is a one way street.
We are all going to have to live with the surveillance society to one degree or another. If there were a way to defeat the surveillance then there would be no surveillance systems because the people who the system operators really want to catch would be using the defeating technology.
It’s a modern conundrum.
Most of the time we’re in the view of a camera while in public. There’s ATMs with cameras, private security cameras at business locations and stuff scattered around all over the place like that. I have a private system on my property with 21 “views” that uses an AI human recognition component to reduce false positives. I’m very scrupulous about where my cameras are pointed but most people are not nearly so conscientious*.
It’s not such a terrible thing and most of the time we don’t even notice, or care. It is a vital and effective crime fighting tool and has other benefits. We’ve gotten used to it and the reason we’re used to it is that it has little or no impact on the lives of honest people.
It’s not the tech and even if it was, it’s not going to vanish no matter what anyone does about it. So we need to get that idea out of our heads if we’re going to deal effectively with this kind of thing.
The problem isn’t really the surveillance systems in use, it’s the software that allows facial recognition being applied to nefarious schemes that is the real concern. You can’t banish software, it’s too easy to copy and distribute. You’ve heard the expression “The internet is forever” applied to stupid things people did or said years and years ago coming back to haunt them today. If you can’t get a picture of a stupid thing you did removed how much success do you think will be had trying to stamp out a valuable and useful software? Let me save you the trouble of figuring that out, the answer is zero.
It might be possible to create a code worm that will hunt down and destroy the software wherever it finds it. Then we have a “cure is worse than the disease situation”.
So what can be done to thwart idiots who think that we should all buy and sell with our faces, or the truly evil that see controlling commerce in that fashion as the ultimate power over the individual that it truly is?
I have some ideas but this post has gotten long enough already. If anyone is interested I’d love to discuss it further.
(*I bring this up because of the fallacious argument “if you’re not doing anything you’ve nothing to worry about”. I am extremely careful of my camera views and angles out of respect for the privacy of my neighbors. That’s a “me” thing. Obviously if my neighbors aren’t doing anything then they have nothing to worry about if my cameras are pointed in their direction. They can be seen when outdoors by eye or by camera. I don’t care, it’s not a matter of if you’re doing anything or not, it’s a matter of what is and is not my business and what you do on your property isn’t my business.)
This!
My wife likes true crime shows (dateline and the like). When I watch with her I am astounded that for the more recent crimes, there invariably seems to be some video recording that is useful. And if not video, then cell tower info.
I saw a video just this week where a young woman got grabbed on a screen corner, and a guy walking by intervened and took down the would be robber. held him until police arrived. Also nicely caught on camera on a random street corner. The framing made the cynical part of me think it was all staged, but it turned out it wasn’t.
Those are the good uses of camera surveillance and I’m all for that. Obviously, because I have a fairly good camera system of my own I don’t have any real aversion to cameras.
If you could see my system you’d notice that members of my family and I are the most prevalent captures. We ignore the camera system and just go about doing whatever we need to do. I don’t sit and stare at the camera feed either, If something happens I can go back and see what occurred. Or if I want to know who that was that rang the doorbell etc.
Earlier today the Amazon driver dropped off a package at my shop. I can see him coming and going and I can see the package where he delivered it. My Jobe’s Tomato Spikes are safe from porch pirates 🙂
(I’d have bought them at a local store but when I was there they didn’t have any.)
It’s more the misuse of imaging technology that concerns me. I don’t misuse mine because I respect the privacy of my neighbors. The camera that looks down the driveway from the attached garage is aimed so that it does not “see” the road going by my house, or the neighbors front yard on the other side of the road. I don’t want it wasting disk space on every car that goes by and I don’t want to capture video of my neighbors while they’re going about their lives in their yard. I own a camera system, they do not. They should not be having their pictures taken all unawares.
A lot of the problem with this kind of tech is a matter of simple, basic morality. The problem with that is simple, basic morality isn’t something being instilled in people as a rule. That doesn’t mean I can ignore it too, but I do feel a little put out that I have to be basically moral for idiots like the one from Hawaii featured in this Right Angle.
More importantly, it’s not the Internet’s business. So many home surveillance systems are connected, and it is too easy for unwanted eyes gaining access to what is generally-irrelevant. Too often those undesirable observers incorrectly interpret context of recorded event.
True but … The accessibility of home security cameras to the larger internet is a matter of technical incompetence and indifference.
There just is no way to solve the problem of where a camera is pointed with technological controls if the camera operator doesn’t care enough to exercise respect for the privacy of others.
That said, there certainly is a way to use technological tools to prevent camera views from being accessible to unauthorized users on the internet. My cameras are “connected” in an oblique manner but they cannot be accessed by anyone not authorized.
I solve the problem fairly simply by just not allowing my cameras to access a working DNS provider and instead run all my cameras with local access only, plus authorized access over the internet via the software program I use to operate all the cameras. You have to know the DNS name of my camera server, the non-standard port I use and have a valid login to the server.
(To clarify, I use a camera server software called “Blue Iris”. All the cameras feed to Blue Iris only and access to cameras is restricted to authorization of the Blue Iris program. Blue Iris is very secure and has the added benefit of allowing me to buy almost any camera. So I can buy the cheapest cameras and Blue Iris works with all of them if you know how to set that up correctly.)
Thus unauthorized access is a fairly easy problem to solve but disregard for the privacy of others is not.
The question then is how do we require camera operators to secure their cameras and how do we enforce or at least encourage people to respect the right of privacy for others?
Once we get those questions addressed there’s still the matter of facial recognition software and how it is used. Like any tool, it’s the hand that wields it which is important.
I. E. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. A gun is used around a million times a year in the U.S. in self defense. A gun is used around a million times in the US to commit a crime during the same year. (Both more-or-less figures averaged over several years and admittedly the statistics are incomplete.) The former is a laudable and good thing, the latter is a horrible and bad thing. It’s not the gun, it’s the hand the gun is held by that makes the difference.
This issue of facial recognition software and the uses it is put to is very much like a lot of similar problems. Does it make sense to outlaw the inanimate or to punish the criminal misuse?
I could use a three-D printer to make a mask of another so that I could be more efficiently “cashless” in the new world order. Love technology. Nothing to see here, move along.
Those who would attempt to shame me by asking an absurd question like, “You don’t want this new technology that can be used to control or influence behaviors? So, do you want people to die?”
My default response is, “Not generally. Just you.”
The fallacy of Techno-optimists “Come on, technology’s always a good thing, what are you, Amish? MOAR TECHNOLOGY!”
Biometrics in itself is a very insecure mechanism for identifying people — paricularly where security is required. This is why palm readers have been eliminated where I work. It is not beyond the realm of possibility to spoof facial recognition.
The stage is being set, technologically, to enable Antichrist to impose his inevitable (and inevitably temporary) tyranny.
This also concerns me. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can to prevent abuse or deny the abusers free rein to do whatever they like, or do what will lead to that tyranny. It may be in God’s Hands in the end but that doesn’t absolve good people from responsible action.
Yes, this tech needs to be buried. As you guys pointed out, the definition of immortality is a government agency. That should be the next great cause for us Normals once we’ve saved America from The Radical Left, namely getting laws and govt. agencies that have become redundant or outlived their usefulness out of existence. Doesn’t Kansas already have an Office of the Repealer for old laws?
I would use facial recognition software in a heartbeat to remember names of people I see who I’ve met before. Not being able to remember names has been a thorn in my side even when I was young
Rand Paul is the only elected official that seems to really talk about this. Well, there was this guy, too.
Great quote.
I’ve also heard it para-phrased as “The closest thing to eternal life is a tempoary government program”.