[jmward01]

I might be good with legal guarantees, meaning jail time for those involved, that the only place images on these devices went was local to the municipality collecting them and that they were only accessed for very well defined reasons by very specific people.

The core issues are that aggregation and exfiltration of this data means that privacy is dead and the AI world allows analysis for almost no cost. We need an idea in our laws that puts back the limited scope that technology has removed. If the police have to expend one person's worth of time to listen to a wiretap then it really isn't possible to get out of control. We need that level of cost associated with ALPR and all surveillance so that the abuse of these systems doesn't get out of control. Make it appropriately hard and it won't be a problem.

[sneak]

Then the feds come in with a national security law and bypass all those state/local protections and slurp it all up into an AI-powered Palantir database, the very existence of which is classified. Suddenly you’re the victim of parallel construction and don’t even know it.

The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that?

Collect the data and it WILL be misused, eventually, with 100% certainty. Has nobody read Snowden’s book? They even have a name for intel agents casually spying on their partners/crushes.

The law does not apply to everyone equally. The intelligence agencies get to break any laws they want without consequences, by longstanding tradition (remember 007’s “license to kill” or the CIA’s famous heart attack gun?). There are NO legal safeguards that can prevent abuse, no matter how you word them, because there will always be some animals who are “more equal than others” to whom they do not apply (“national security carve-out”, “LEO exception”, etc).

Sadly, those to whom they do not apply are now coordinating with the new wannabe SturmAbteilung in what are called “fusion centers”.

[bsder]

> The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that?

You have to point out the Jews in Amsterdam. They had nothing to hide--until they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_...

Or Martin Niemoller: a good Protestant German pastor who viewed the anti-theist attitudes of the Socialists and Communists as more threatening than Nazis. And then the Nazis put him in a concentration camp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

[throwawayqqq11]

There is another looming threat of modern day surveilance: previously hidden correlations.

The data you found benign sharing in the past might allow unpleasant conclusions in the future and might not even come from you personally. Think about what toys you bought for your kids, or in what college milieu your worldview developed.

[Terr_]

"Using metadata to find Paul Revere", a what-if of the American revolution.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

[sidewndr46]

This is a myth that continues to be propagated. Using previously unobservable correlations is a bedrock concept in Federal investigations in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

[xethos]

And making it easier, better, faster, and more common isn't going to be a good thing. Reminding us that this already happens in smaller scale isn't really adding anything helpful considering the entire goal is to prevent it happening more in the future.