Well this is terrifying…
“And that’s why we, the benevolent and peaceful police, need to track all your movements at all hours of the day. For the children. You don’t want to be anti-children do you? Skynet told us where you live.”
Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?!
I would like to propose a toast to the end of the war on drugs, thanks to this technology which will surely be decisive in convincing people not to want drugs. Once we’ve dealt with all these pesky low level dealers the cartels will pack it all in and give up the chance of huge profits.
Kicking the same can down the road. Incredibly depressing and dumb. Stop voting for these idiots and join the likes of Portugal by legalising drugs and treating addiction as a health issue.
Also don’t defund the program like Portugal did. The conservatives there didn’t like that decriminalizing drug possession for personal use actually works, so they immediately worked to cut funding to the program by like 80% and surprise surprise the program stopped being as effective as it was at the start. Essentially every piece of data we have on Tough on Crime™ politics shows that the approach doesn’t work. If you want people to stop using drugs, make it easy for them to do so without fear of being arrested/imprisoned.
And for that, they also processed the data on thousands of innocent people, too. Without any legal basis or permission, probably.
I’m less concerned about that if its purely public data. If a police officer sat in a helicopter looking for drivers driving erratically, then notified a trooper on the ground to check on the car, and perform a field sobriety test if there is cause to do so I think that would fall within the confines of the law, even though thousands of cars could have been in their field of view and considered for potential DUI.
I am of the opinion that if the data is not either directly in public view, or the user can opt out of persisting it and it is available to the general public, even if for a fee, then its fine to use the data. I think any kind of AI algorithm’s suggestions on its own should not be considered probable cause, you can use it to narrow down suspects, but you need actual evidence for a warrant or arrest.
I think the issue I have with this situation is collecting and storing such a vast amount of travel data on individuals without their consent. If leaked, that data could be used to track down victims of stalking and abuse, or political dissidents.
We be slippin’ into black mirror world slowly.
Slipping?!? Actively sprinting towards several black mirror episodes.
Just rewatched the robot dogs episode…
I believe the problem is that agencies have been collecting all this data, they just have no way to sift through it all the data.
I see the route forward where you have no privacy outside your home.
So, they tracked his plate as he crossed the state line multiple times.
I wonder how many false positives they stopped on the road before getting one successful case to boast about it.
Want to see a really fucked up case? Check this one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/15/predictive-policing-algorithms-fail/
Unexplainable results should never be probable cause because you can’t determine that the decisions were not made using protected traits either directly or inferred.
Can’t. WP paywalls suck dick.
It’s OK. Ordinary people will have no trouble at all making sure they use a different vehicle every time they drive their kid to college or collect an elderly relative for the holidays. This will only inconvenience serious criminals.
Indeed it is terrifying. I definitely don’t think drugs should illegal to begin with. I am so anti-drug war it’s not even funny.
I’m anti-drug war myself, but I’m also sitting here thinking today, it’s drug traffickers. What is it tomorrow?
Yes, the question of current purpose is nearly irrelevant. It’s the question of possible purpose that’s concerning because once it’s A) available & B) left to human subjectivity then privacy & ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is no longer guaranteed.
This is the first time I will be on this other side of this argument, but let me disagree. The technology behind it isn’t inherently bad, it’s the people running the system having access to it that scares us. Take Snowden for example; when he exposed what the NSA was doing with US citizens data (with the help of big companies), do you think he meant that the internet or security cameras are the threat? They sure as hell are a good vector, but you don’t trash nor blame your pc for being the mean though which that is achieved. The problem is who we put in power and how we held them accountable for misusing it.
Right, but the moment you’re relying on who is in charge then the process is already broken. You have to assume the process is usable no matter who is in charge. I know it’s absolute, but it’s the only way.
The process is broken if the people you rely on suck. It is inevitable that someone, in a form or another, will be representative of the group of people you are part of (may it be a dictator, an influential priest, or an elected representative); we have the luxury of living in (somewhat?) democratic countries. The way out of surveillance misuse is making (or forcing) our politicians pass laws that restrict what companies or agencies can do with our data, or how they can use them. I think spreading awareness about this topic is the most effective way to push these kind of rules in effect.
While individualistic “guerrilla privacy” might be effective for yourself, it’s like a band-aid on a broken bone. If 99% of the people around you don’t care about it, or simply are unaware (family, neighbours, friends), you will join the surveillance system no matter what: from a family member uploading your details to meta, to a stranger taking a picture with you in it and posting it, to your neighbors ring camera, to your friend’s iPhone constantly scanning the surroundings to report nearby devices (your phone, for instance) to “improve location data”.
If there is no laws that prevent evil actors from misusing this power, really little changes in the bigger picture by you using signal or protonmail (while you should do it, don’t get me wrong).
EDIT: i know this will be controversial, but to me this is a good metaphor for it: the world is slowly getting hotter due to companies just caring about profits and politicians passing no laws to reverse the process, while instead actually taking bribes from those companies to not do anything about it (look, look, it’s the same duo again) and your solution is… You dig an underground bunker to survive the next heatwave/hurricane.
I guess this is where I’d love to have this discussion in person over a drink of your choice because my point, albeit unclear, was that these systems that, on the face of it, “solve crime” shouldn’t exist no matter how much ‘good’ they offer. They have no control &/or limitation to their powers except by the person who decides to use them. I don’t see that as manageable. Ultimate power breeds ultimate corruption, if you will. It seems we’re at an ‘agree to disagree’ point & I’m OK w/ that result. Have a good day/week/month & please continue your efforts to healthy debate!
Is there any actual analysis this went down as written? This sets off two eyebrow alarms for me: 1. AI doing something revolutionary without serious issues and 2. clean cut police work, which never happens (at least not anymore).
Honestly I’d put money down the police caught him by chance and went backwards to find a good explanation for how. I’d also be highly skeptical of an AI system that actually catching drug dealers without also catching like everyone else.
It’s the new excuse for parallel construction.
Where the heck are they getting training data for traffic patterns of drug dealers?
In my area there are these so called traffic cameras all over the place. Maybe those.
the problem is the driver’s life outside of the car being part of the equation. Imagine a headline like AI learns the driving patterns of anime fans. How is the traffic camera gonna know which cars are being driven by anime fans in the first place? Of course drug dealers are gonna be much less likely to have drug dealer bumper stickers that might tip the cameras off.
Correlation after the fact could work. Arrest a few hundred drug traffickers over the course of several years, then feed their plate numbers and the past decade of everyone’s traffic data to the AI.
