[crdoconnor]

>So when people worry about the surveillance state I just smirk. None of it actually works in any useful way, it's all security theatre.

This was what I always suspected pre-Snowden: that the government simply wasn't capable of creating a system to effectively monitor all internet traffic because they didn't have the technical chops. Which, in, say, 2001, might have been true.

Turned out all they needed was time and money and they had both and then once it was revealed that they could do it and actually do it rather well it came as a shock (to me, at least).

Two years ago was a long time in camera and facial recognition technology.

[DanBC]

> When it does happen, you'll barely notice it either. You'll wake up one day, read the news and discover that somebody was caught using facial recognition technology that the police has been using for a year and it only came out because some court docket had to be made public.

The police is pretty open about the legal powers they have and the technology they use.

And people have already been caught by facial recognition - the submitted article talks about it.

[crdoconnor]

Yeah, I just realized it was about more than human recognizers. The future arrived a little early. Hence the edit.