[sonnyblarney]

"it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work."

Is it unethical to track down violent activists?

Is it unethical to check for people crossing the border illegally?

And this thing about the tech being used to single out 'people of colour' I think we can dismiss that out of hand - the tech won't be used for that ... though the application of the tech may disproportionately affect some groups (say the cops create a 'watch zone in S. Chicago' but not elsewhere).

But at least in the former scenarios, it's fairly grey thing.

At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable.

Walking down the street in 'wherever USA' tagged for something I can see ethical problems.

It depends on how it's used ... we need some new laws ...

[bigiain]

> At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable.

Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents.

Like you say it's the "walking down the street" problem - for me at least perhaps more accurately described as the "done at many orders of magnitude more scale, in circumstances where you have no option to opt out". If I don't like border control practices, I have the option of not crossing a border (at whatever cost to me that implies, but I have _some_ agency there). When this is deployed on streets, shopping centers, trainstations, and other similar places - I've lost any agency in being able to choose not to be involved/identified.

(Note too, that the USA defines "border areas" where I'm legally able to be stopped and fingerprinted/retina scanned as "anywhere within 100 miles of a border" which includes pretty much all of California and New York, and anywhere within 100 miles of each coast or the north/south borders.)

[remarkEon]

>Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings.

Says you. It could replace the fingerprint and retinal scan for all we know, plus you don't have to actually physically interact with the person crossing. I don't think it will, but it seems perfectly reasonable to deploy this technology at the border. I see no issue with the definition of "border areas" either. Seems reasonable to assume that if someone has recently crossed illegally, that, assuming they haven't gotten picked up by vehicle yet, they are likely to be found within less than 100 miles.

[bigiain]

Sure, I'm speculating out my ass here (it's what everyone does on The Internet, right?)

Seems to me though, the most recent numbers I've heard for commercial state-of-the-art facial recognition are barely capable of 99% accuracy. I don't know the error rates of fingerprint and retinal scans, but I'd put good money of the combination of passport and fingerprint or passport and retinal scan being several orders of magnitude more accurate that face recognition we have available right now.

(And I probably should have left out the "border areas"comment as part of a different argument - my beef with that is not "how many illegal crossers might you find within 100 miles of a border", but "is it worth reducing the rights of everybody, legal as well as illegal, just because they live/work/travel within 100 miles of a border?" that includes everybody in CA west of a line thru Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield.)

[remarkEon]

Why is the accuracy of the technology relevant at all? I think you're assuming that we already have fingerprint and retinal scans of everyone entering, which is quite obviously not true. We might, however, have a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor. I'm fine with this technology being employed in such a manner.

[bigiain]

The accuracy matters (at least it seems to be so to me) because if all you have is "a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor" and you use a technology with a 1% error rate - given that there's probably something like several hundred million airport border crossings a year in the US - _somebody_ is going to have to deal with a million false positives a day, which doesn't seem like a win given I suspect the number of bad actors for which facial features are know but cannot be detected with the in-place passport/fingerprint/retinal crossing system is probably in the single digits per year...

The aggregated individual cost to the 1% false positives - when deployed against a population of several hundred million travellers a year - seems outrageously high to me.

[remarkEon]

Easily solved by simply fingerprinting and retinal scanning the positives and the "unknowns", which is essentially the status quo. Nothing changes except our confidence level that we are actually engaging the right people. The cost, to me, is simply in terms of how expensive implementation would be in terms of dollars.

[sonnyblarney]

" As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents"

Well that's my point - we already do stuff on par with ID recognition - so while it's uncomfortable and debatable, it seems 'within bounds' in our current state of affairs.

And yes, the 'all seeing eye' part is hugely contestable.

My point is that it's grey.

[bigiain]

Sure. I think my (perhaps badly made) point was - There are two existing technologies already in use at borders, each of which have similar or better accuracy than facial recognition, so the additional benefits of deploying it there is likely to be small.

Unless, as pointed out by bdhess in another response to my comment, the aim is to detect people for whom border control do not have any passport/fingerprint/retinal information for, but some reason still consider to be a "person of interest" at a border. Which has it's own set of scary implications...

[bdhess]

> Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents.

I think your argument assumes that the US government has already captured either a fingerprint or retina scan of all of its persons of interest. I don't think that's a safe assumption.

[bigiain]

True, but what's the other assumption?

That the aim is to detect people for whom border control do not have any passport/fingerprint/retinal information for, but some reason still consider to be a "person of interest" at a border?

I'm not sure if that's a valid point, or a scary overreach...

Part of me worries about using a barely 99% accurate face detection technology (perhaps trained on Facebook or YouTube jihadist videos?) on what must be at least several hundred million airport border control crossing a year is inevitably going to result in several million false positives a year - presumably mostly for bearded middle eastern males. The invasiveness of recording and storing facial data on every international traveller with the possible payoff of detecting someone genuinely "interesting" amongst the million per day or so stream of false positives seems like a poor security solution.

Another part of me acknowledges that the US (and, to be fair, every sovereign nation) can invade everybodies privacy at the border _anyway_ and what's the problem with adding just this one tiny straw to the camel's back?

As Wil Wheaton so eloquently pointed out, I'm a middle aged, white, heterosexual, cisgender man - I live life on the lowest difficulty setting. This is unlikely to affect me in any way apart from giving me a great opportunity to rant on internet forums. If you have any 15-30 year old male friends of middle eastern descent, ask them how _they_ feel about an algorithm with a well known 1%+ error rates most likely trained on "terrorist suspects" being pointed at _them_ every time they fly in or out of the US...

[bigiain]

You're right - there's _lots_ of grey area here, and some people's ethics are different from mine (and mine are probably different from yours, at least at the boundaries. _Most_ people agree on basic human rights, they just all define them differently sometimes...)

While I agree we need new laws, I also recognise that laws by necessity change slower than fashions, so there's always a period (often a long period) where laws trail behind what's going on in society. It's during those periods where approaches like "it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work." might help.

[int_19h]

There's a lot of grey area around immigration.

Where it stops being grey is when the authorities start setting up concentration camps for forcibly separated children. At that point, yeah, it's unethical as hell, and so is aiding and abetting it in any way (which may include some of the activities that you've listed). Context matters.