[JohnBooty]

I've marched in support of BLM. Protest is necessary, and for it to be effective it generally has to make folks uncomfortable on some level and that may include a level of civil disobedience. It's not supposed to be all fun and sunshine, particularly if you are the adversary of those protesting.

I'm diametrically opposed to Trump and his supporters on a lot of issues, but I recognize that a functional society needs to accept their right to protest as well. They should be able to have their marches just like we have ours.

However, the stated goals and actions of many of those in last week's march and rioting are explicitly violent and seditious. Many of the protestors were heavily armed. They killed a policeman.

    Do you really want a bunch of very angry people to
    effectively be pushed into a corner, demonized by
    society and so on?

I understand what you're saying: by pushing individuals into a corner, we may make them more desperate and feed into the overall "persecution" complex that motivates their movement as a whole. I think that's true.

On the other side of things, if we do nothing we legitimize their extremist views? Those extremist views become the new normal, or at least most the goalposts for the range of views considered normal.

Admittedly, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't situation."

But this isn't about denying their views or their right to protest. It's about targeting specific criminal actions that we don't want my side, their side, or any side to do.

[rkagerer]

Not sure why your comment was at the bottom of the page; it seems like one of the more thoughtful responses.

I have to admit my gut feeling on governments using facial recognition at scale to round up its citizens feels like something you'd find under an authoritarian regime, reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643433

I think it's important to try to frame an opinion on tech like this from a well-informed viewpoint, striving to lend appropriate weight to the latest incidents while avoiding the temptation for tunnel vision to fixate on immediate goals to the exclusion of broader, long-term consequences.

I agree acts that crossed too far past the line of civil disobedience ought to be held to account.

I just hope our collective response doesn't erode the willingness of people of good conscience to take a stand when they see their institutions behave in a legitimately unsanctionable manner.

[JohnBooty]

I think some of the same (100% valid and necessary) questions might have been raised in the past about identification cards, fingerprints, handwriting analysis, etc.

I think the bottom line is how the tech is employed.

Are we tracking ordinary citizens en masse, for some potential future use? Are we tracking folks just because they're dissenting/protesting? We would probably all agree those uses are bad. Very bad.

I'm not terribly worried about using them to identify specific criminal targets. Put another way, how absurd would it be for us to have perfectly clear video of people committing specific criminal acts, and not use the available technology to identify them?

On a related note, the (lack of) opsec displayed by the Capitol rioters is... really something. These people were happily mugging for the cameras, sans masks. I'm not sure if it was stupidity or entitlement. The easy and snarky answer would be "stupidity" but there were clearly intelligent folk among them or at least people that should know to cover their tracks better: lawyers, military and police officers.

I think there was a rather stunning sense of entitlement there: a lot of these folks honestly cannot believe they're being charged with crimes. As if they expected to be greeted as liberators!

God help us if and when they sharpen up their tactics. The sickening feeling in my stomach tells me that this was a hell of a practice run.