Amazon Pitches Facial Recognition to Monitor Immigrants | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Pitches Facial Recognition to Monitor Immigrants

bloomberg.com

239 pointsrayvy272 comments

Sure and while you're at it why not implement cameras all over every roadway to automatically ticket you every time you break the speed limit. Or better yet, why not devise a real time geolocation device to be embedded in cars and then lobby for it to be nationally adopted so people literally can't speed?

The reality is that very few people want to live in that world and even if we do fully adopt technologies like this, it doesn't necessarily make us any safer. A car traveling 30 mph is absolutely as lethal as a car traveling 10 mph faster than that. And I'm much more likely to be killed by a random traffic accident (only time I've been hit on my bike was by a white women driving a Ford) or domestic terrorist/psychopath than an immigrant.

So you're pitching huge lifestyle and diplomatic costs without any obvious benefit... Please count me as a no.

> Sure and while you're at it why not implement cameras all over every roadway to automatically ticket you every time you break the speed limit.

This actually exists in many cities around the world like Dubai. Probably not every roadway, but almost all major ones.

Yeah, I never got that particular argument. Speeding isn't like, my favorite hobby or anything, and it's accounted for when setting the speeding limits, so if the police suddenly became extreme sticklers, they'd also likely raise the limits.

Even if they didn't, it'd probably save lives. Fatalities are so much more common at higher speeds, we could all stand to slow down a bit on the road.

The traffic cameras used in the UAE are pretty tame compared to other countries. The police there are quite open about what new technologies they adopt (it's a form of propaganda to make it look like they are on par with Western countries) so maybe that's why you think it's something new.

London has had ANPR throughout the city for 15 years, and shortly after it went live in London, the system started being rolled out across the country. Now most police cars have real time ANPR systems, and all police forces have access to track cars in real time across the country. [0]

Recently the police have been 'trialing' facial recognition devices in public locations, however given people are more concerned about privacy than they were 10 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a much more active system than they make out. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recog...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/facial-recog...

Canada's largest province Ontario tried to implement it, but it was so unpopular the next government reversed the decision. News stations used to call out the location of hidden photo radar vans in an act of mass civil disobedience.

In France they are testing radars in vans owned by private companies. Imagine what happens when the incentive is openly about making money.

The point being that Dubai is a model for the rest of us? Or, if not them, the UK (London)?

And Chicago and all over Illinois highways where road construction is underway (though I doubt they actually use them on the highways).

Would be interesting if all cars are robotic.

Whenever I talk about self driving cars, there is often somebody in the room who feels they represent a loss of freedom.

I’ve never been able to comprehend their position — Is this what they’re talking about?

I agree in general but I think "A car traveling 30 mph is absolutely as lethal as a car traveling 10 mph faster than that." is a bit weak.

The speed of cars matter, obviously. If you are hit by a car driving 50km/h you will die 8 out of 10 times. If the car is only driving in 30 km/h you will only die 1 out of the 10 times. In other words, it's not a linear scale and the idea that you can drive a bit faster without making yourself substantially more dangerous is incorrect.

You might be factually correct, but you are misunderstanding the point of the parent poster. What makewavesnotwar is saying is simply that making exaggerated arguments for this technology in the name of making us safer is not a sufficient reason to introduce the technology. Perhaps if they had used larger numbers like 50 MPH relative to 60MPH that point would have been made clearer.

I understood the point well and I agreed with the poster. But in my view, if you are going to argue that we don't need more automated monitoring in traffic then claiming that speed has little impact on fatalities seems quite weird.

if you're on a highway, then a car driving 30mph is much more dangerous than one which is 10mph over speed limit.

That's kind of moot, at least where I live. Less than 3% of deaths were caused by this so its not really significant. Pedestrians killed were many times higher for example.

It really depends. In the US pedestrians account ~10% of total number of traffic related deaths.

Do you have a statistic confirming that? Most highway deaths are due to speed, not due to driving slow. Driving slow can provoke people behind to do dangerous things, but it's on them, not on a slow driver.

Maybe most accidents are due to speed because a lot fewer people drive too slowly.

Actually the real problem is differential in speed.

So a car going 80 in a 60 hitting a car going 30 in a 60 is worse than a car going 80 in a 60 hitting a car going 60.

Now I'd rather everyone stay within a narrow limit and not go over the 'limit'.

Differential kills.

Do you have any support for this argument at all? It seems to overlook the reality of the situation. When one car is in a collision with another, regardless of their relative velocities, when they collide, in a serious accident they will both rapidly decelerate to a speed of zero. That's what the danger is. Their absolute speed has dangers above and beyond their relative velocities -- less control of the vehicle and greater kinetic energy wrt the environment.So, a car traveling at 25 hitting a car moving at 5 may have a 20 kph/mph differential, but the danger is minimal compared to a car traveling at 95 hitting a car at 85, where both vehicles quickly go down to zero, rolling and smashing into barriers and other vehicles along the way.

Right - a head-on collision between objects of equal mass and velocity is equivalent to one hitting a brick wall (or immovable object) - it loses all its kinetic energy on the spot, turning it into heat and mechanical work (e.g. crushing the car and driver). Objects of slightly different mass or velocity means the work done on each is shifted, the heavier or faster one 'winning' a bit but still. The absolute values of the velocities are hugely important.

Agreed regarding absolute value, my usage of differential is not comparing different scenarios but focused on one.

So 25 mph + 40 mph in a 25 mph is dangerous.

80 mph + 55 mph in a 55 mph is dangerous.

Obviously the former has much less energy, but within itself, the differential is what creates the most accidents and danger.

I'm not saying that differential is all that matters. A car doing zero and one doing 20 in an accident is much better than the 80 vs. 70 example.

What I'm saying is apples to apples.

Speed limit is 60, car doing 50 + car doing 80 is a lot more dangerous than two cars doing 60. In both an accident and in actually causing one to begin with.

I agree with most of what you're saying.

Prime example

Quebec woman who stopped on highway for ducks, causing fatal crash, loses appeal

As a pedestrian and cycling advocate, more regulation of cars seems like a good idea for me. That said, the analogy is just that, an analogy so I don't think it's fair to nitpick it.

> A car traveling 30 mph is absolutely as lethal as a car traveling 10 mph faster than that.

What was this an analogy for? I missed it.

As in makewavesnotwar point about surveillance of the general population and not just immigrants.

Of course on a web-site for nerds, commentaters are going to focus on an irrelevant technical detail and miss the larger point.

I don't see how it's an irrelevant detail. If enforcing the speed limit does indeed save lives then I'm more inclined to accept some loss of privacy.

Of course on a web site for nerds, commentators are going to claim that a massive loss of life due to what they consider to be some irrelevant factor is just a technical detail which can be ignored.

Plus your chance of being hit at all is much lower at 30km/h because the driver has more time to react.

Yeah. The most perilous stretch I have on my bike is through a neighborhood of million dollar homes with asshole clueless Porsche SUV drivers buzzing around.

It’s the Audi SUV drivers that give me those most problems on a bike

As an Audi driver, I couldn’t agree with you more. Almost all of them are super aggressive, because “the car can handle it”. Sigh.

Red light cameras are all over, and apps I can voluntarily install like Waze let me know if I'm going over the speed limit.

> why not implement cameras all over every roadway to automatically ticket you every time you break the speed limit

The recent front-page story about the new bridge connecting to Hong Kong said that, based on camera footage, software identifies people who have yawned three times (or something similar to that) and alerts authorities.

This was something that came up shortly after the Snowden documents were released. I don't remember who made the point (maybe Moxie Marlinspike), but they pointed out how important it is to be able to break the law. That breaking the law is an vital means of effecting change in the US: kids smoke pot illegally and grow up to be adults that push to legalize it. Gay people are more and more open and successfully push for gay marriage. Etc.

So if you take away people's means of breaking the law (such as auto speed-limited cars), it's actually striking at something really fundamental in the ability of the citizens to push for change or to protest. Almost like we want to have just the right amount of law breaking, although I can't imagine anyone associated with public policy ever adopting this stance.

Indeed it was Moxie: https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

That does not work in states like the PRC or Russia. Indeed, in order to live and go on day-to-day, you must break the law. And people do. But, then when the state wants you, they will selectively enforce the law. That's how it works. Let people break the law, who cares, but when we need to arrest them, lo and behold, look, they've broken several laws!

"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." (If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.) [1] Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu though authenticity is disputed.

Anyway, dystopian films containing mass surveillance (such as Fahrenheit 451) also cover the very same practice.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu

Is there a word for this specific legal entrapment?

Injustice?

Future.

It's called selective enforcement.

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

I am so grateful for this link! I have been searching for this term on-and-off for years!

Right; it's based on the assumption (which I share) that laws aren't perfect, and that the prime way of finding out whether they are is by people breaking them.

The other requirement is the ability to change laws, otherwise this would indeed only enable selective (i.e. seemingly random) enforcement.

I believe the idea goes "law is created by man, and man is imperfect", or something like that.

And what kind of right would breaking the speed limit push that citizens could possible want to have changed?

I am all for hardcoded speed limits. Why sell cars that can go faster than $MaxSpeedInYourCountry ???

Other than that I think you made a good point.

I'm personally for speed limits and adherence to them, but not capping speeds at the speed limits (and I'm not talking about 150 MPH caps that you find in UK/EU) has edge cases that could be argued like overtaking.

  Why sell cars that can go faster
  than $MaxSpeedInYourCountry ???

Politicians today have three choices:

(1) Set and enforce low speed limits, large numbers of drivers make low-impact complaints.

(2) Set and enforce high speed limits, small numbers of parents of dead children make high-impact complaints.

(3) Set low speed limits but don't enforce them. Anti-speed campaigners and road users are both satisfied.

In my country, politicians tend to go for (3). A switch to (1) would not be without its costs.

In response to aggressive use of traffic cameras, people in a number of cities and states have passed propositions banning their use.

A switch to (1) might have similar effects, motivating the people to force a switch to (2).

Any use of traffic cameras is seen as 'aggressive'. It inevitably results in hundreds of tickets that otherwise wouldn't be written, affecting hundreds of citizens in a way they see as intrusive and 'unfair'. For better or worse.

not disagreeing with the first part of your statement, but, for the second part, a reasonable remedy would be to simply lower the cost of each violation.

e.g. if almost everyone got speeding tickets, but they only cost $15 and didn't involve any points against the driver's record or insurance premium hikes, people would simply pay up and probably speed less often. complaints about the injustice of speeding tickets would probably remain at current levels.

But that wouldn't satisfy the "if you speed you're Literally Hitler (TM) crowd" who want punishment for minor traffic infractions to be sized for deterrence rather than the actual harm to society.

Tragically, reasonable fees for bad behavior encourage the opposite behavior: all guilt evaporates and folks feel entitled to the behavior, after all they can pay for it. Famous studies of charging parent who were late picking up children from school, everybody started doing it and gladly paying.

Ok, but, could it be that the fee charged to parents was simply too low?

Can't we just view "the right to speed" as a service offered by the government and then apply the usual price and demand logic to it?

I've had the same idea - a geometrically increasing 'fee' for road use depending on speed. Kind of like toll roads, but maybe even most roads. If you want to spend the money (and have the money, thus likely the deep pockets to compensate for damage) then go ahead!

Anarchy! I remember my first time through Chicago at 7PM years ago, merging onto an 11 lane highway with a 45mph speed limit and finding everybody, absolutely everybody, going 80.

Some enforcement has to be done or it gets out of hand ever so quickly

Yeah, Los Angeles has no speed limit at all, anywhere. It's basically "don't be a dick, or you'll get pulled over" as your cruising 70 mph next to a cop in a school zone.

Exceeding $MaxSpeedInYourCountry on an empty highway isn't where the majority of speeding related accidents occur, so a basic top speed limiter wouldn't do very much anyway. Not to mention that (at least in Europe) people are likely to take their vehicles to a neighbouring country where different speed legislation applies.

A recent example of where even breaking the speed limit is how laws (or speed limits) are changed:

Recently, our county measured the speed on an 8 mile long rural road. Their conclusion was that there was no need to bump the existing speed limit of 45 up to 55 or 60 (to match similar roads) because people weren't going faster than 45 on it.

Why weren't people going faster than 45 on an empty, rural road? Because the sheriff's department enforced that 45mph speed limit very rigorously, with an average of one speed trap and one roving vehicle.

Man thats a cool insight !! Never thought about the mechanism like that !

Civil disobedience is a real thing, the first example that comes to mind is ignoring laws that require a front license plate, specifically because it reduces the likelihood that your vehicle tag will be caught on camera, those automated ticket system might move on to the next plate if they don't get a scan. I totally agree with you.

That’s not civil disobedience. In civil disobedience you blatantly and publicly violate an unjust law with the intention of being punished so that the public will be repulsed by the injustice of it. I don’t think anyone is going to cry for you if you get a ticket for not having a front plate. You’re doing it to avoid the consequences of a separate illegal act.

I mostly didn't want to drill holes in the bumper.

Gay marriage and drug abuse don't kill people. (At least other people, if we jump from weed to opioids). Car speeding does.

> it doesn't necessarily make us any safer.

As the Nazis demonstrated, a government so inclined could use this information deluge to make segments of the population infinitely less safe.

This comment Rings like a bell.

> The reality is that very few people want to live in that world

I suppose I'm in the minority, but I would love to live in a world with fewer impaired drivers and senseless motor vehicle accidents.

What I hear is an intentionally cheesy argument against a set of cherry-picked claims that are not even in the original comment.

speed limits and impaired drivers are orthogonal concepts

Thought further this might lead to a prohibition of manually driven cars and a use of only self-driving cars (talking about the future here).

As allways it boils down to freedom vs. security.

I think, as long as we all live under the same jurisdiction the only way is to find a balance between the more risk averse and the more risk taking people.

We wont find a compromise everyone is happy with, but one that does kind of work for everyone. Not enforcing laws as strictly might calm the moods a little bit where the law goes to far for some.

>As always it boils down to freedom vs. security.

No it doesn't. Often you give up 10 freedoms for .01 of anything else.

> The reality is that very few people want to live in that world and even if we do fully adopt technologies like this, it doesn't necessarily make us any safer.

Yet they will still freely give you information, their most intimate details, on social media. The sad and bitter truth is that the future will be heavily monitored and totalitarian. And there is nothing that can be done to stop this inevitable course of events.

But have you thought about the children? you can always pile on more legislation if talk about the children, u can even regulate the games they play and the porn they see. I don't think that barrel has a bottom.

And guess what, children in cars around you don't stop people from speeding and increasing the differential between them and people around them.

Thinking about the children isn't something that people generally do... So parents have to take responsibility and be a lot more cautious on the roads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30

(I do get your comment on law-creep...) Speeding kills.

> why not devise a real time geolocation device to be embedded in cars and then lobby for it to be nationally adopted so people literally can't speed

The insurance companies are absolutely working on this. https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/telematics/

In re immigration, the desire for more enforcement will inevitably lead to a national ID system, even if it's a "shadow" one like shadow Facebook profiles. The UK already has requirements for "proof of migration status" if you want to rent somewhere to live or have a bank account, and they keep trying to bring it into healthcare and schools.

In a country where illegal voter purges are a big problem, this will make the situation worse. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/19/georgia-gove...

> ticket you every time you break the speed limit.

Generally I'm against government spying and tracking, but I really don't think cities could afford the traffic situation of every driver obeying the speed limit. Think about how many commuters exceed the speed limit every single day, and imagine if every person were forced to actually drive the limit at all times. I would expect at least a 10% increase in on-road-traffic at a given time, and that's being conservative. Some places might not be able to support the additional stress on traffic.

Is it time to rethink our speed laws?

Perhaps if the speed limits were enforced with nearly 100% efficiency, they might be changed. Until then speeding fines are pretty much state sponsored highway robbery.

Agreed. I'm convinced that some laws are kept only so they can be used as leverage for police officers to legally interfere with your life/collect revenue. Artificially low speed limits are one I would consider.

"Imagine" isn't data. I wouldn't be so sure.

Rubber necking causes a lot more traffic...

Side note: Stop speeding please. You're endangering other people.

It's not difficult to work the logic out.

If ##% of commuters exceed the limit to get to work, and they are forced to cease, then the time and highway space they save speeding would instead be added to the overall stress of traffic. That would have ripple effects against people who drive the limit, and would cause everyone to need more commute time. The question comes whether the added stress would be debilitating for other commuters.

Edit: I'm a _very_ conscious and aware driver, and agree that driving fast is dangerous for many people. It's an unfortunate situation we're in, where the busted family wagon must defend against the drunk loony in the sports car. Sometimes however, the drunk loony in the sports car has to defend against the family that's fighting inside the wagon.

I follow the logic, but it's not supported by data.

> and agree that driving fast is dangerous for many people

For all.

I believe slower speeds increase the carrying capacity of any stretch of road. But I could be wrong.

Count you as a yes, because you don’t have any choice in the matter.

> Sure and while you're at it why not implement cameras all over every roadway to automatically ticket you every time you break the speed limit.

This is a common and interesting sarcasm.

It is interesting because the law is indeed that drivers should get a ticket every time they break the speed limit (or for any other driving offence).

These technologies enable the law to be applied absolutely for the first time. The law is no longer subject to the major caveat "if caught". You break the speed limit you are fined, you litter you are fined, etc. 100% of the time.

Many people seems uncomfortable with that, which is interesting.

Perhaps the discussion should be about the rule of law, punishment, and leeway rather than technology.

I would also add that that particular sarcasm is deeply American. I've never seen it in the UK (yet) where these cameras are deployed and people generally obey the speed limit.

Frustration comes from laws and punishments that are optimized for less than 100% enforcement (i.e., harsh punishments for those who actually get caught) being enforced 100% of the time. Laws and punishments should be updated to account for the likelihood of enforcement.

>> Many people seems uncomfortable with that, which is interesting.

The part I'm uncomfortable with is how do we know that the cameras are setup correctly? What third party company is actually receiving the tickets before sending them out? How much are they getting from each ticket, etc?

Without transparency there's no way to trust them. If there was a way to trust them I'm sure things would be a little different.

Car traveling 10mph faster carries 77% more kinetic energy that will be transferred into human/other car in case of impact.

It is by no means as lethal.

To a pedestrian?

I believe kilotaras is implying that it is more lethal.

While I agree with your general point, I have to take objection to your car analogy.

Whether a car is travelling at 30 or 40mph makes a huge difference.

Kinetic energy is the square of the velocity and it also affects reaction time:

Total stopping distance (reaction time + braking distance):

@30mph = 44 feet + 43 feet = 87 feet

@40mph = 59 feet + 76 feet = 135 feet

Which means that chances are fairly good if you hit something 60 feet away going 30mph, but pretty grim going 40mph (basically full speed impact).

http://www.forensicdynamics.com/stopping-braking-distance-ca...

This is wrong. Kinetic energy is not what kills you. Force is not what kills you (the human body can handle triple digit G forces for a short time). Hitting things in the cabin is what kills you. The only way kinetic energy is related is that it also happens to increase with speed.

Using kinetic energy to imply that lethality goes up exponentially with speed is misleading at best.

Are you by any chance one of those people that still believe seat belts are for sissies?

Because you can just hold tight to the steering wheel?

And yes the kinetic energy per se does not kill you. It's when the kinetic energy gets converted to elastic/inelastic transformation of your head that you die. There is a clear correlation of speed and survivability.

See: http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm

5% chance of dying @ 20mph

85% chance of dying @ 40mph

>And yes the kinetic energy per se does not kill you. It's when the kinetic energy gets converted to elastic/inelastic transformation of your head that you die. There is a clear correlation of speed and survivability.

Kinetic energy does nothing. NOTHING!

It's all about acceleration (which is roughly interchangeable with force since the mass of the person is constant). The human body can deal with triple digit G forces for a short time (on the order of how long a car crash takes) so long as it's mostly in the forward direction and you have a good harness. They figured this out decades ago when designing escape systems for fighter jets (no point ejecting at Mach 1 if you're gonna get killed when you hit the outside air at that speed).

Of course speed kills when you're talking about hitting pedestrians. When you have several thousand pounds of mass vs a couple hundred the acceleration (and therefore force, because mass is fixes) on the few hundred will depend almost wholly on the speed of the several thousand pounds of mass. It still has exactly nothing to do with kinetic energy. For limited access highways, rural roads and other places pedestrians are not a meaningful concern this is irrelevant.

>Are you by any chance one of those people that still believe seat belts are for sissies?

The people who use straw-men of this caliber in online arguments is a subset of people who should avoid seatbelts if you catch my drift.

There is the same correlation in regards to vehicle occupants. At some point the kinetic energy becomes so great that the body of the car is unable to absorb it sufficently and then the remaining energy kills you.

No straw men anywhere in my line of argument. Just a cheap dig. Sorry for that.

Re: cars: that's a very interesting and deeply American viewpoint. It also smells of rationalization, because the talk of "extra 10mph don't matter" is clearly nonsense and I expect most people here realize that V squared in kinetic energy formula makes 10mph a big deal. So the question becomes — what exactly are you trying to rationalize? Because lower speeds most definitely make people safer.

Not only that, but lowered (and observed) speed limit also helps the environment and public health by encouraging people to cycle. Strictly controlled 20mph speed limit in London is probably the most important reason I like cycling here.

As a non-speeder, cyclists here in the U.S. almost never obey the rules of the road.

Your experience does not necessarily reflect the reality of it [0].

[0] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...

Ah, cyclists who were monitored break the law only 13% of the time.

A big reason for that being that they weren't made for them.

Well, if that's your excuse then the level of compliance would indicate that they weren't made for cars either.

The cops would revolt as their revenue would disappear or the voters would revolt as taxes would have to be raised to make up for lost ticket revenue.

Besides eventually they will track everyone, not just immigrants...

Police departments do not rely on ticket revenue. Cities do. In many cases, a step up in traffic violations is done by a request by a town councilman who may have been pressured by constituents complaining and not revenue.

Source: business contacts with police and relative who is an officer.

interestingly, in California a large chunk of the revenues from moving violations go to the state.

http://www.allgov.com/usa/ca/news/where-is-the-money-going/w...

"And I'm much more likely to be killed by a random traffic accident (only time I've been hit on my bike was by a white women driving a Ford) or domestic terrorist/psychopath than an immigrant."

Are you using your experience with the Ford to support that claim?

There's a sentiment which I see on HN regularly which seems to relish the idea of automated judgement where laws are strict and "objective" and violations are 100% caught, preferably by machine. The argument is that if the law is unfair, it can later be adjusted.

This was most visible in discussion of "smart contracts" where people love the idea of "code-as-law". Unfortunately, it seems to creep into much more personal stuff now, such as using machines to look at everyone's face and know who they are and where they are, all the time.

Whether you agree with automated enforcement or not, the outrageous level of power-imbalance that works against individuals here is disturbing.

>why not implement cameras all over every roadway to automatically ticket you every time you break the speed limit

That already happens in high risk areas. Would it be fair to do it with high risk immigrants (however you define that)?

It's just another use-case for them I suppose. Interesting to see how, as tech companies become bigger, they go the same way as companies in all the other industries. I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.

Stupid question. I actually am a big fan of no borders but what's wrong with this? Seems like America entering the new millennium.

Edited also why was this downvoted?

Because constant surveillance of a targeted group will be systematically abused. And because next is using facial recognition to monitor other groups — LGBT, activists, political opponents.

That is extremely frightening coming from an administration that is increasingly using violent and elimitionist language to levy completely made up charges at immigrants, LGBT, and particularly political opponents.

Something that doesn’t get publicized but is as onerous is that Amazon is recruiting engineers to work on facial recognition tech that was implied to be used for their warehouse workers[0].

[0] Amazon recruiter emails that coworkers and I have gotten from Amazon. These emails had a very heavy implication that that particular group was using the facial recognition tech for this purpose.

Why does it matter that this is automated? Is your issue the automation?

Do people have a right to not be identified in public? In public, your right to privacy doesn't protect you from having your picture being taken. Then, what if someone identifies you from your picture? How about if they use a CV system to speed it up? What's the argument here?

BTW, as I expand upon below, I'm against surveillance of private communications, I think we all are. As far as I understand it, this is not surveillance, this is identification technology, which is different.

It’s one thing for you to go out in public, it’s another thing when “public” follows you around like a private investigator snapping photos of you everywhere. The right to privacy is the right to be able to go about your business unimpeded. It’s a core idea on which the bill of rights was founded. It’s not written of course, but I’d argue it’s a fundamental human right.

The Bill of Rights was written in an era when most Americans lived in small towns where everyone was recognized everywhere. The anonymity of urban and metropolitan life is perhaps a happy accident, but it wouldn’t have been perceived as a fundamental right to people living in a predominantly rural country.

The Bill of Rights was also written in an era without systematic government ID or national police system, when you could live or travel in near perfect anonymity if you just left the small town where everyone knew you.

So I think the perception goes both ways.

Additionally, the bill of rights was written in an era when there were no laws about immigration to the US at all. The US had completely open borders at that time, anybody could move there if they chose.

It should also be pointed out that, at the time, cross-Atlantic travel was expensive and few people in North America outside of the US had any interest in immigrating.[1] Additionally, American independence ended the transportation of British prisoners to the colonies and severely limited the amount of indentured servant immigration.

[1] During the colonial era, the bigger problem was the risk of white settlers emigrating to a nearby American Indian community. For example, it's likely that the entire colony of Roanoke did this. Even as late as the 19th century, white children captured and raised by the Comanche almost exclusively chose to continue living as Comanche even after being given the chance to return.

if you moved towns, nobody would know who you are

Scale matters.

If it were only warm-blooded individual humans identifying you, there wouldn't be much potential for abuse. In the 1960s, your privacy was pretty much preserved even in public spaces. Unless you were a genuine person of interest, worthy of expending costly observational resources.

Now? Drive anywhere, walk anywhere - machines log your travels. It's a perfect recipe for abuse. Just scale, is all it takes.

The poison is in the dose.

At one time, rock stars were essentially anonymous and could have relatively normal lives when not on tour. The audience was huge and they were essentially faceless.

Then TV, music videos and the practice of having huge screens broadcasting the faces of the band to the audience ruined that.

KISS used face paint and that helped protect their identity, but when they got too big, you saw Gene Simmons wearing a mask on dates to try to preserve his privacy, yet everyone knew the masked guy was Gene Simmons.

Yea but it's yucky, trump is president and I wanna remain morally pure

> In public, your right to privacy doesn't protect you from having your picture being taken.

I believe it does in some places, for example France.

Rules on the sort of thing are not universal. Europe collectively (continent not union) cares a bit less about freedom of speech, quite a bit more about privacy, compared to the USA.

Guess what this is happening every time you walk into a big store , casino or mall. Americans live in a fantasy where they allow large corporations unlimited power but want to keep law enforcement stuck in the 90s because of this administration. Enjoy your fantasy

That's a broad assertion about a whole country. Plenty of us don't want any large institutions with unchecked surveillance power.

Up to a point you can choose not to patronize such places, but where do we draw the line? I'm curious as to any legal arguments other than "You don't have a right to privacy in public." You can't opt out of society.

I agree it sucks,but this is everywhere and trivial to implement . These cameras were already in the airports and borders under obama

Also, because false positives dont matter when it affects "other people"

If this technology is worse than ICE agents indiscriminately asking latinx people for their papers then it adds no value. The hope is it is better at identifying people.

I see I need to start adding /sarcasm tags. Apparently scare quotes dont work. To clarify...I definitely think false positives are a big issue, though decision makers will often think otherwise as decisions are often not made by minorities.

> ...constant surveillance of a targeted group will be systematically abused...

I'm interested in how you would define systematic abuse vs. just plain abuse.

Police forces have adopted new technology for many decades now (e.g. radio, high-speed police cars, helicopters with search lights, RDBMSs, body armor, DNA sampling and matching, speed measuring radar, tasers ...) and, while it is probably true that all of these technologies have been abused by the police at times, can we also say that they have been "systematically abused?" What does that mean?

I'd be less opposed to it if it was equally applied to everyone and not just immigrants. It becomes another tool to disenfranchise, disable and disadvantage a subset of society.

Government monitoring everyone via facial recognition isn't cool either.

Illegal immigrants are by definition disenfranchised. They are not citizens, so they do not get the franchise, which is the right to vote. That’s as it should be according to the U.S. Constitution, and the basic law of (nearly?) every democracy.

Every human has rights under the law and international law. Just because someone can't vote doesn't mean they have inalienable rights that states can disrespect.

Where does it say that foreigners can't vote in the constitution? Up until the 20th century the only requirement to vote in most states was residency, not citizenship. Many places only required 6 months stay to vote no matter who or where you were from, others required a commitment to long-term residency.

It wasn't until women's and black's voting rights started becoming a popular issue that voting was redefined to mean only citizens. And the only purpose of such a thing was to suppress the voice of these people for the benefit of those already in power.

Wow, that's an interesting point. The UK will still allow commonwealth and EU citizens to vote in some elections but the Turdy's (Tory's) are trying to get the laws changed to prevent that for precisely the same reason you state.

Well, to be fair, where does it say that anybody can vote?

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

So, if your state legislature chose to appoint electors by lottery, that would be acceptable under the US Constitution. Other options: appoint the oldest people, appoint the richest people, appoint the people who live closest to the center of the state, appoint the heaviest people, appoint the people with the longest tongues...

You're right, the issue is more nuanced than I had assumed.

Federal law (not the Constitution) prohibits non-citizens from voting in national elections [0]. However, it seems like states can establish their own rules for state and local suffrage, and non-citizens can vote under certain circumstances in states like Maryland [1].

Personally, I like the citizenship requirement for voting. It requires voters who weren't born in the U.S. to demonstrate a certain level of investment in the system they're seeking to change.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/611 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...

You need to consider how the US was originally intended to be organized, which is radically different than what is has become. States were envisioned as practically independent nations which would be tied together by an extremely minimal set of shared rules and obligations. The constitution doesn't really lay out many rules for states at all. What it does lay out is mostly just things preventing states from taking on national rules like entering into alliances, printing their own money, or declaring war.

The constitution focuses on laying out those minimal set of laws for the federal government. So it makes no sense for the constitution to tell states how they can or cannot vote. This was antithetical to the entire notion of what the United States was supposed to be. It was a state level matter. As an aside this is also part of the motivation for institutions like the electoral college - to ensure a strong separation between state internal affairs and their influence on the federal level, which could affect other states.

> it makes no sense for the constitution to tell states how they can or cannot vote. This was antithetical to the entire notion of what the United States was supposed to be

The United States was originally "supposed" to be made up of a number of slave states where a large chunk of the population wasn't allowed to vote (but their numbers still counted for seat allocation). Everything follows from there - they went to war with the US government, lost, and had their independence taken away to ensure fair treatment of the black population.

Without the Federal government a number of those states would revert to apartheit.

I don't really agree with your perception of what the current state of affairs would be without the federal government, nor the ideology behind the founding of the US. However, that's tangential to the important point - which you do indirectly hit on. The swap from a state based system to a federal based system most fundamentally changes the scope of operation. Good things, such as the direct termination of slavery, can affect the entire nation at once. On the other hand, this power also comes with an equal but opposite negative. In that bad things can now also affect the entire nation at once.

So for instance not that long ago in the past we were enforcing eugenics from federal level down. In the famous supreme court case Buck vs Bell, where the US federal government ruled in favor of eugenics, supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.".

Interestingly enough that ruling has never actually been overturned. The reason that eugenics fell out of fashion lay largely with a certain German enthusiast. If not for him it's not unreasonable to imagine the federal level dystopia that we were starting to consider going down. When things are enacted at the state level this gives people the option of getting away from the insanity. When things happen at the top, leaving your country is usually not a practical option.

And so too for the question I was responding to. Should it be legal for foreigners to vote in US elections? Maybe, maybe not. It would probably depend heavily on the state in question. But thanks to our system, that question can no longer be answered by states. In 1996 the federal government made it illegal at the national level.

I agree with your comment but am unsure what is the point you're trying to make? My point was that these techniques might be used to later disenfranchise immigrants, legal or otherwise.

I made a comment below about how does this violate privacy rights? I think we all feel at a certain level, making it easier to identify people feels unnatural and unnerving, may be because for long swaths of history we had a certain level of anonymity just by the nature of reality. Should that be something that is our right? Does that mean we should explicitly impede the efficiency of the government in doing things like identify people?

I sort of know where I fall, but that is the discussion that we should be having. Because one could read the law or at least think about the logic of the situation and not see this as really being worse in terms of surveillance. If you're in a public place, you have no guarantee of privacy. Therefore, the question should move to whether this is in fact "okay" or "wrong".

Nowhere in my previous comment does it say that I'm opposed to lack of privacy in public so I'm not sure how to respond to your comment -- that's not my issue. My issue is that someone shouldn't be targeted for monitoring on the basis of their immigration status. Either do it for everyone or nobody. If you're going to do it for everyone, then have a technical framework in place to ensure (to the best of our ability today) that the system cannot be abused by an errant clown, and have the procedures to provide transparent auditing etc possible and enforce these audits. Otherwise, it's my opinion we'll end up with a corrupt, abused system.

Interesting intellectual question for you -- if I have no rights to privacy on going outside, what are your views on the government making it illegal for me to obscure my identity when I'm in public (say, with a mask?)

I agree with you on the monitoring bit. That is a bigger question, more important question is who could the state monitor without a warrant. I guess the nuance is that this tech is not about surveillance/monitoring but it is about identification. Of course, that implies that one had to get the picture in the first place, which brings up that question about who could the state monitor, but I guess that's separate question from whether this tech is good or bad.

As for the mask deal, I agree with you, that someone has a right to obscure their identity if they want to.

Wouldn't this inherintly target everyone crossing a border? What if it was used for rapid progression through border control for Americans? Would you still be against it?

Is that true? I've only seen this for banks and stuff.

Perhaps U.S. v Jones has some insight. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones

FBI/police put a gps tracker on a guys car for long term tracking. Ruled 4th amendment violation, unanimous. Differing reasons. The trespass reason wouldn’t seem to apply but the long term expectation of privacy would seem to apply. Oral arguments included ‘beeper’ vehicle tracking which is labor intensive, vs gps which they can do automatically behind their desk...

It is. Every bit store, casino, major airport and mall already is

Good news. The purpose of the program is for catching any felon, not just immigrant felons. So I guess you are for it?

I downvoted because open-borders is one of the stupidest mainstream ideas I ever heard. Right up there with flat earth.

Of course you want to keep people that don't share your value system out of your country.

That statement is incoherent. I know for a fact that 90% of the population of my country don't share my values in a material way. I am perfectly happy sharing my country with them.

Was just about to say this

I also think nations and tribes are outdated. Glad to know people will down vote because they differ politically. May I ask why you support nations?

Nobody here will ever complain about illegal aliens because they are wealthy programmers, etc and won't be affected by their unfair competition.

Just look at this tweet I saw a few hours ago from the editor of boingboing: https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1054816681699139584

Imagine her shock when she learns that most people can't afford to hire someone to mow their lawns, mop their floors, or raise their kids! Talk about living in a bubble. Some people here are like her and would never understand the troubles of the working class. And others are terrified of being called racist.

Speaking of fairness, why exactly should we have more concern about the job prospects of someone who happens by random chance to be born on one side of a border than someone who happens to be born on the other?

If anything, isn’t it less fair if the person who previously lucked into being born in the wealthier country gets the job?

My point isn’t to diminish the very real problems facing the US working class. I just don’t see why working class people from Mexico or El Salvador are any less deserving of my sympathy.

Being born here or there is an act of random chance. The fact that some countries are developed while others aren't is not random chance. Especially in the new world where all countries have had exactly the same amount of time to develop.

What does that have to do with anything?

Doesn't this statement ignore a huge amount of context?

Things are the way they are because American laws are made by American lawmakers, elected by the American electorate.

If the rules could being set independently of the interests of the electorate, our rules could become more moral - but it seems to me more likely they would become a lot less moral.

Reading through that thread reminds me why I deleted my Twitter account.

Her comment was being targeted at the upper class who are the loudest ones yelling for this. There's also a fair amount of 'working class' industries who rely on migrant workers to keep labor down, such as landscaping and house cleaning. This is what the tweet is hammering at.

Keeping the price of labor down is exactly what they're talking about. She knows that illegal immigrants providing cheap labor won't affect her wages and allows her to hire people to do manual labor for dirt cheap, so she accuses people of being xenophobic racists if they aren't fine with exploiting illegal immigrants to provide cheap labor.

Huh? She's trying to highlight the hypocrisy in people who want border walls but then demand those services at cheap rates. This is nothing specific to her own thinking and want of cheap labor. It's purely calling out the conflicting stances.

And once again the kind of people who hire others to mow their lawns or deal with their kids won't have their own wages affected by the cheap labour those illegal immigrants will bring.

"Edited also why was this downvoted?"

I downvoted you because you talked about your downvotes.

Please don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

Horray for Free market!

So this means you're gonna start voting with your wallet? You can always host on Azure; Microsoft takes an ethical stance against this stuff. They have an AI ethics review board that vetoes projects like this.

Yikes. I’ve heard of some American citizens being mistaken for illegal immigrants and being detained with no recuse[0], I could only imagine how bad it could get if the machine errors.

[0] https://nypost.com/2018/04/27/ice-wrongfully-detained-nearly...

According to some of my team mates, a computer is never wrong. And they would gladly replace the justice system with AI ones. They program computers and they should know better but I am lost wondering at what level they are thinking to even go down this road.

Always remember its really hard to get 100% accuracy on AI.

But is it more accurate than human judgement?

Well, it certainly depends on the person doing that, like accuracy of AI depends on the programmer.

AI does not remove bias since AI will reflect the biases of their creators

Right/wrong for immigration is decided by the political landscape anyway, so they're a bit dim and AI is a bad tool for the job.

Makes sense.

Jeff Bezos wants to provide the tech that lets Washington form the first pre-crime unit.

What they didn’t tell us in the movie was that the precogs were AI.

More evidence that the invention of the transistor marked the doom of individual liberty.

By the time I die I assume we'll all be tracked at all times or well on the way to that.

Yeah. Completely fuck this trend in totalitarian thinking. It seems like all these big tech executives are precumming at the thought of joining hands with China to bring on the brave new world. I have a feeling things are not going to go down the way anyone thinks they will.

> By the time I die I assume we'll all be tracked at all times or well on the way to that.

If you have a smartphone this is already the case.

Regarding speed cameras. I was driving around the Netherlands and saw speed cameras for the first time (I'm from the US) in Apeldoorn. There were signs that warned drivers about them. In the US, in several rural areas have electronic signs at the edge of town, just outside of the limit change, which warn you when you are exceeding the limit through town. I would have no problem at all with permanent enforcement systems provided they were accompanied by advance warnings. If I am so inattentive to my driving that I miss the warnings and get a ticket, so be it. It is much safer (and should be much cheaper) than randomly placed patrol cars performing radar/laser speed enforcement.

I believe speed cameras might be good if they're installed in dangerous areas to enforce lower speed limit to decrease accidents number. When they're installed in good spots to increase fine collection and the speed limit is also lowered (e.g. 60km/h on a highway just because the nearby town border crosses 500m on the map, but no pedestrian ever shows up close to the highway) for the same reason it is abusive usage of technology. Unfortunately in my home country the second scenario is the most common.

Speed cameras are one of those things that seems good as a concept but are always abused in practice. We seem to be unable to remove the profit motive from local governments so the only real recourse is to deny them the ability to profit from an activity that will always be abused.

> It is much safer (and should be much cheaper) than randomly placed patrol cars performing radar/laser speed enforcement.

The fact that it has a lower ROI to post an officer+radar than the ROI from a speed camera is a feature, not a bug. It helps control abusive revenue seeking behavior.

> We seem to be unable to remove the profit motive from local governments

As in, "such changes would be hard to achieve currently in the current US", or not possible in principle? I'd disagree with the later one. Redirect those funds to the federal budget and I'd expect such abuse to plummet. Tragedy of the commons can sometimes work in our favor as well, at least if we manage to set up system accordingly.

Could websites use all the data they collect about their users to determine when it's a good idea to auto-play videos, and when not? Because I, for once, would sure like this functionality implemented on Bloomberg, among others.

anybody can elaborate on why amazonians can't pull a Google and make them drop the contract?

No company employees other than Google are known to be as vocal about business decisions,AFAIK. Culture matters. The culture which Larry,Sergey and others started is reaping benefits today. I might be wrong,but if we look at companies in general, Google is the closest to having a democracy-type of vibe.

Couldn't agree more. I don't think Amazon listens to its employees on how to run a business.

"amazonians" isn't even a thing. there are various articles about how toxic their work culture is(as ordered from bezos downward). right now i'd say they're like how Microsoft used to be under ballmer except with employees actually treated like kept pets. they argue against each others ideas constantly but anything from the top is taken as sacred law. bezos probably said "I want to get into the surveillance game" and all the poor employees got to work arguing about how best to get there

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/08/former-amazon-employe...

Amazon needs a manifesto

Well, it's clear they already have one.

It's like Amazon and Google are competing on evilness.

1984 is coming...

Unrelated, but when, and if Bloomberg is found guilty of pushing the fake Supermicro China story there should be a penalty for publishing clickbait headlines that are, for lack of a better term, fake news.

I know for a fact HN blacklists conservative news outlets such as Breitbart across the board. It seems a little biased and double standard to just let Bloomberg continue to push outrage and in some cases baseless stories and have them make the front page of HN.

/rant

You will be downvoted for speaking your mind, but well said. Hn doesn't claim to be free speech forum which is quite unfortunate, as most of the discussion here is usually academic.

Yeah isn’t there a named phenomenon when an expert reads an article from a source, realizes it’s full of factual errors, dismisses the article only to continue reading the rest of the articles from the exact same source?

I am not an American and I obviously have no right to meddle in your affairs. But only today Trump tweeted out Obama being against immigration and then from their the rabbit hole went deeper and there was a video of gasp, bernie sanders calling open borders a "Koch brother" conspiracy.

I'm beginning to wonder if anyone high up in America really has any integrity? I fail to see anyone who is consistent in their views and actions.

Google cooperating with Chinese censors knowing fully well how China persecutes Muslims (and that is something I do get emotional over), and Schmidt talking about bifurcation of internet soundbyte to make a case when its clear that the so called bifurcation is because of language.

It just all seems so staged at this point. And I don't mean to insult my America brothers here but I just want to know who actually is on the "right" side?

Edit: I see that the person who replied "politics I'd cesspool of.." Has his comment deleted. I understand that this is defeatist attitude and we are all smart people but better to talk than to silence him. Silencing is the reason I never saw this 10 year old video.

Politics is dirty pool and is mostly a distraction. Show me the incentives and I'll show you the result.

> but I just want to know who actually is on the "right" side?

What is the “right” side?

Trump is quintessentially American and a nationalist.

Is that good? I guess it depends on who you are and what you want.

The “right” side is the one supported by evidence. There are some things maybe people can never agree on, but for the vast majority of issues, there is evidence that supports one side more than the other.

> but for the vast majority of issues, there is evidence that supports one side more than the other.

I’m not so sure that is true.

In my experience there is propaganda everywhere and politicians are trying to build a narrative instead of trying to find the truth.

> there is propaganda everywhere

The propagandists would love you to throw up your hands and believe this; their goal is to paralyze you, sow chaos and despair.

It's like a liar saying to you, after they lie to your face for the 10th time, 'everyone lies'. It's a false attempt to justify and normalize their bad behavior. Technically yes, but it's meaningless; some people are far more trustworthy than others. The trustworthiness of information and politicians varies greatly.

> The trustworthiness of information and politicians varies greatly.

Yes it does - and we are hopeless at determining who is trustworthy and who isn’t.

For example I am a well educated, well paid, and politically aware person and I trust Trump. Other equally educated, paid, aware, etc people distrust Trump.

> throw up your hands

I think we need techniques to move in a positive direction even in the face of propaganda.

Techniques to ensure politicians are worse off when we the people are worse off. E.g. Salary capping for life at say 2x median state pay.

Techniques that help us risk adjust decisions based on how easy it is to back out of them. E.g. It’s far easier to add more immigrants if we find out we have taken in too few than it is to kick out immigrants if we find out we have taken in too many.

Techniques that ensure negative consequences of voting a particular way are felt by the voters. E.g. if you vote to ban private schools and it goes through then your kids are assigned to a bottom 25% public school.

Etc.

> we are hopeless at determining who is trustworthy and who isn’t

We are not at all hopeless. We're not perfect, but we do pretty well. Just because people make mistakes sometimes doesn't at all mean that everyone is hopeless. Bad software is written, but we can produce good software. People trust the wrong person, but democracy and human rights has blossomed and spread.

Your proposals about politicians are interesting in that Trump likely wouldn't agree to facing the consequences of his actions.

> Bad software is written, but we can produce good software.

Great example! How do we make our political system more robust like software dev?

Even good software developers make plenty of mistakes and the system overall manages to keep trucking on.

It’s because we have a whole host of techniques to limit our losses - for example at work we have systems in place to automatically roll back recent changes if we detect a problem.

We could apply this technique to legislation by putting in a set of conditions under which the legislation would be automatically revoked.

> Your proposals about politicians are interesting in that Trump likely wouldn't agree to facing the consequences of his actions.

It is not just politicians - we all have an aversion to taking responsibility for our actions and beliefs.

I disagree. Political questions are matter of choice, not fact. Values will always be a matter of debate.

Absolutely true. The only problem is that rarely are actual values being debated in politics.

And that's a shame. People are scared to debate values because they don't want the value structures that their lives center around to crumble. Without debating values, you might end up spending a huge proportion of your life on something that later doesn't matter to you...

This is politics in general. The power structure incentivises liars and crooks. It shouldn't be a surprise.

> bernie sanders calling open borders a "Koch brother" conspiracy.

Quite right. It wasn't just that Bernie disagrees with open borders, in that video he is visibly upset. He really doesn't like it.

(It was the Vox interview I assume, unless you saw another one)

Also if you are old enough you might remember large anti-globalization protests around G8, Bilderberg and other such meetings.

It is kind of baffling how just a decade ago left groups were getting teargassed fighting globalization and now they are openly advocating it.

Such is the power of propaganda. It is extremely effective and could turn pink into blue, and then yellow with some moderate effort.

I suggest everyone read Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent. It was actual when it was written and just as actual even if not more today.

Speaking of Chomsky, find his writings on NAFTA and globalization as well. It might also surprise you what he has to say.

There's a wide variety of positions between "open borders" and "forcibly take refugee children away from their families and put both in detention facilities".

One can object to the latter without supporting the former.

In theory - in practice though we have had decades of weak borders.

Weak borders are still not open borders, and I again ask that you not conflate the two.

Please name a crime where you are allowed to take your children with you when you're arrested.

Requesting asylum is not a crime, so I'm confused by this request.

I think that's more than valid. Does doing so require always crossing border illegally? Also, what percentage of people are under a legitimate threat of their lives (or relatives)?

Why are you focusing on people who entered the country illegally? The trump admin has separated families who crossed the border legally at ports of entry and then requested asylum[1].

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-right...

crossing the border illegally is

Please name a misdemeanor crime that results in loss of custody of your dependent children on the first offense.

I'm pretty sure we don't permanently separate families for doing things like petty theft.

There's also the the 'Affluenza' case where a teenager killed four people and got off scott-free. Well, until he was found fleeing probation in a foreign country and was dragged back here.

So I don't know: Do you think crossing the border is worse than murder?

The affluenza comparison feels like a "whataboutism" to me. Virtually nobody holds that case up as an example of the system working in a healthy and desirable way.

No. It's not. The comment I directly replied to was asking for a crime where you can take your children with you when you're arrested.

We've already established the fact the system is massively stacked against minorities. Then we continue to use 'but it's a crime!' as justification for vile and malicious behavior to people that have committed something without an actual victim like smoking marijuana or crossing the border.

And again, we do not permanently separate families in every single case where someone commits misdemeanor. So then why is it OK to permanently separate all immigrants who cross the border despite it being the same level of crime? Give me one reason outside of 'racism and xenophobia.'

I'm only commenting on your affluenza comparison specifically.

Here's an example of why I think the comparison is meaningless. Grand theft can be charged as a misdemeanor with up to a two year jail sentence. But Brock Turner was sentenced to only six months of jail time for rape. Do you think grand theft is worse than rape? Of course not, but the problem here is the Brock Turner sentence, not the sentencing for grand theft. This question could only be posed because, by design, I selected a more serious crime (rape) for which there exists at least one case where an inappropriately lenient sentence was given out.

You did the same. By design, you selected a more serious crime (murder) for which there exists at least one case where an inappropriately lenient sentence was given out. You then used this highly dysfunctional example to draw a comparison to the less serious crime. But the simplest response to your question comparing crossing the border and murder is simply that the affluenza sentencing was wrong.

And yet you failed to address my point entirely. Which is that far worse crimes in the US end up with more lenient sentencing than immigrants crossing the border.

But fine then, I want to draw up a more apt comparison and I want you to address this. Public intoxication is a misdemeanor similar to crossing the border illegally. How often do you think people caught being publicly intoxicated end up losing custody of their children or being permanently separated from their family?

As was clear from my first post, and as I stated explicitly in my second, and as I now state explicitly again, I was only commenting on your affluenza comparison. I found the comparison to be meaningless and invalid for the reasons I stated above. I never registered any opinion whatsoever on the specific issues at the border, so in particular I’m curious why you’re so confident I even disagree with you on that. Someone who agrees with your conclusion may still find your path there fallacious.

> Public intoxication is a misdemeanor similar to crossing the border illegally.

I’d argue trying to illegally immigrate to the US is a serious crime and public intoxication is not.

So who is doing this? And why? I only know the top leaders of US politics and all of them pretend that they are holy and the other side is pure evil.

Funnily a child comment to you points out that "trump puts children in cage" and I followed the issue and somebody said it was an Obama era photo and they were detained by Obama because the so called parents were actually traffickers which I of course would support Obama for

I'm pretty sure the people getting tear gassed over globalization at the G8 were against capital leveraging international workers to destroy domestic labor power and the ones getting tear gassed recently are fighting against policies targeting immigrant and refugee communities. It seems pretty consistent to want to protect workers and also fight xenophobia.

The left was the major source of anti immigration law until they replaced xenophobic labor laws with today's political reality

Why was this so downvoted?

They think it's political point scoring but you are substantially correct. Maybe mentioning that this shift took place in the late 80s and 90s would have helped.

Yep, indeed. This has turned quite strikingly since the Seattle round. Democrats used to be pro-Us workers. Pro-Union. Now they forget about US workers, except to demand minimum wage increases but that does not do anything to protect well-paying union jobs which get shipped off or get undercut by illegal workers who work for less then minimum wage.

It's quite interesting to see the Trump faction take this mantle and the Democrats (and traditional Repubs) have no idea how to react except to be reactionary and be pro-Globalization pro-TPP, pro-intervention, etc.

Globalism is part of the core philosophy of neo-liberalism, which most mainline political parties were advocating up until the past couple of years when public sentiment went against globalism. Both Republicans and Democrats were in favour of the TPP, for example.

Globalism is orthogonal to leftism/rightism. Brexit support was roughly similar among both Labour and Conservative party supporters.

Chomsky's Profit over People is also a fantastic read.

I will sound jaded and trite when I say this but if you want to understand American decisions (corporate or government) the most accurate thing to do is to follow the money. If you remember that point, it becomes quite simple that decisions are not really inconsistent. They're actually completely consistent. It's not bad or good, it's just the way it is.

Conflating things like maintaining a border and detaining children of asylum seekers as a deterrent doesn't help the discussion other than to muddy the waters.

I think you have a wonderful observation. I don't think so lot of people know what is right. I think most people's definition of right is totally driven by political ideology consumed via mass media and social network echo chambers. I think most of us aren't educated about this topic to know the real long-term effects of open borders or isolationism. I think all sides have to put the emotion and rhetoric down and view it through multiple lenses. What does open borders look like for our economy and form of government in 10. 25, or 50 years? Does it likely lead to a place America loses the good parts of its national identity because the amount of people coming in can't be assimilated into our philosophies in our constitution? Does isolationism lead us to a place where we aren't longer a world leader and some horrible state fills the vacuum on the world's stage? I certainly don't know. How do we define right and wrong in an era where ever issue of morality is polarized? Or where it's okay for one politician to do something but not for another politician? I think in the case of Google, they are selling their souls by providing services to a government that persecutes Muslims (and their own people), but we can't forget that they also have cooperated with the U.S. government which has committed just as many atrocities here and around the world. It's not in this moment that Google crossed the line. I think unfortunately, the great experiment of democracy is just about over. I fear it will be looked upon by historians as this emergent phenomenon that occurred between massive tyrannical empires.

There won't be any historians if you are right.

> Does it likely lead to a place America loses the good parts of its national identity because the amount of people coming in can't be assimilated into our philosophies in our constitution?

The people who have most challenged U.S. principles of liberty and democracy, and 'all men are created equal", have been those whose families have been in the U.S. for generations. They've supported slavery, segregation, lynching and other oppression, voter suppression, and, whether one agrees with the policies or not, the Republican Party's current policies of being anti-immigrant, voter suppression, supporting partisanship in the judiciary, and in foreign policy ignoring human rights and democracy while supporting dictators.

I hear ya.

I'm definitely not saying that ideology is right, I'm just saying that I don't think that any side really has a good understanding of the impacts of either decision. I've been careful to not express my own opinion, but I'll share it now, probably to my own detriment.

I think that immigration doesn't have to be a polarized thing. The two major sides have done their best to turn this into a polarized issue and a false dichotomy. While I would certainly love to see people coming into the country through legal means, I also feel that our legal process is shit. The thing that I can't get through the heads of anyone that oppose "those brown people" is that yeah, statistically, we may get some criminals, but per capita, we have wayyyy more people trying to come here than are likely criminals. If this many people are trying to escape from their country, be it Syria or Mexico, we have to look at that and think about what it takes to drive someone to leave the place that they grew up.

The other thing that I've shared in the past that will likely get me shredded if the wrong person comes across this, is that I'm happy to not be in the majority race. I would rather be in a place where everyone has a seat at the table. As far as losing our national identity, I don't buy that either. The number one threat to our national identity right now is... wait for it... Americans. For years we were told that Muslims would come here and implement Sharia law. We are now seeing court enabled protections for those who feel their religious beliefs are violated by LGBT people such as myself. We are actively taking the steps to implement the Christian version of Sharia law.

Even at the end of these opinions, I still don't think I fully understand the right solution. I think this is a dangerous time for this country. History is on the side of us having another civil war or revolution. I hesitate to compare us to the French Revolution as so many do, so I'll draw out a larger comparison. What has happened in history when laws begin to favor wealth and the center of power? I don't mean everyday legislation, but the level of shit we are beginning to see here with extreme tax breaks and protections. It doesn't look good.

> As far as losing our national identity, I don't buy that either.

Well there is an easy compromise - for the first two generations immigrants have their vote automatically assigned to the most right wing candidate.

Then the right wing won’t be so worried about losing their voice.

Also this is not meddling. Part of being a super power is out politics is world polifics . Keep asking questions

Why was this downvoted?

Good point,thank you. No offense but I guess your politics affects ours very directly.

I totally agree although I now have people down voting everything I post. Bizarre

You have every right to meddle in American affairs. This is the country of all people of the world. All people who value freedom and individual dignity. Decent Americans welcome everyone and want to help everyone because they realize it helps themselves to do so. It does no good for regular people to buy into these notions of separation. That notion is a tool for maintaining power. The underbelly of the world are the only ones who care about power for themselves. It's a disease.

For context , this is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

and yeah, open borders was a libertarian idea but somehow the tables have turned.

If you think putting children in cages and having open borders is the only two positions you can hold, you're delusional.

Bernie wants a stronger social system in the U.S. If you want universal healthcare, you can't have open borders. But you also don't have to put children in cages. You consider each case, provide asylum if they're in danger, deport if not etc.

Yeah, "Open borders" is a pretty extreme example of "weasel words" that we would spot if it came in a set of product requirements. Does it refer to residency or just to visiting? What's the opposite of an open border, a closed border? Would a closed border with Mexico really mean no travel across it at all, like the Berlin wall?

People argue about "health tourism" in the UK system of near-universal healthcare(+), and the actual hospitals point out that it would cost them far more to check everyone's immigration status than they would recover from visitors who technically aren't entitled to care. There's nothing to say you can't have a "universal" healthcare system which imposes a residency requirement for non-acute care.

(+) except dental and optician services, $10 prescription co-pay applies outside Scotland

I agree, that "health tourism" isn't really a thing, however my use of the term "open-borders" was in reference to how detractors of universal healthcare, (mostly on the right), in the U.S. straw man it as meaning that it means the entire Latin America moving to the U.S. Putting aside the implied supremacy of the U.S. etc., I just wanted to point out that this is not what people like Bernie are arguing for and is therefore a total strawman.

Health tourism absolutely is a thing. There are even companies that specialize in arranging it. However, my understanding is that it predominantly falls into two categories, neither of which is particularly about exploiting systems like the NHS:

1) People traveling to e.g. the US or Israel to get procedures that aren't available in their home country.

2) People traveling from high-cost to low-cost countries and paying everything out-of-pocket because even forgoing insurance and adding travel costs still leaves it drastically cheaper than their home country.

There are some cases of people scamming government-funded healthcare, but I think those have been sensationalized by the press.

I meant [exploitative] health tourism as that's what the term usually refers to.

If not Amazon, another company will do business with gov. Face recognition is mature enough, there is no very high barrier. Even if US gov doesnt adopt such technology, another gov will do and already done. It is just business.

So I'm not sure 100% where I stand morally on the "if not us then someone else" argument as whole but I'm pretty sure it's better to just not let that person/entity be you (in this case Amazon), and figuring it out from there.

Even if the world is lacking in your brand of ethics/morals doesn't mean you need to stoop to the same level as someone who doesn't hold the same brand of ethics/morals.

> If not Amazon, another company will do business with gov. Face recognition is mature enough, there is no very high barrier. Even if US gov doesnt adopt such technology, another gov will do.

> It is just business.

Guns are a mature technology, and pretty easy to use. If I don't do the hit for Vinny, some other hitman will, so I might as well make some cash. It is just business.

The fact that someone else may perform a morally dubious action if you don't does not provide any justification for you to perform that action.

gun is gun, please don't mix together. Face recognition doesn't attack people. I admit that someone might feel uncomfortable but it can protect you in another cases. (another privacy vs safety argument)

Needless to say this technology can only deploy in public places. If someone appear in public places, why you think he would like to become invisible to all others.

In the meanwhile, I agree that no gov employee can be authorized to access the data without limitation. There must be some laws to regulate its usage.

> gun is gun, please don't mix together. Face recognition doesn't attack people. I admit that someone might feel uncomfortable but it can protect you in another cases.

Guns don't attack people either. There's a saying: "guns don't kill people, people kill people."

And they kill each other much more the easier it is to do so...

Data is truth, it wants to be free. It will be free. It is impossible to control. I have tons of confidential data under my control and I can do what I like with it. At a company/government with controls that are nothing less than stellar in comparison to most.

> ...do the hit for Vinny...

Why did you choose that name?

Don’t Worry!!! Face recog startup founder here. Amazon’s tech only allows them to monitor a specific people list in real time. So search period should be limited. Otherwise it’s so expensive to do that. It only tracks for specific target list on real time cameras or photos. When it comes to searching on archives Amazon is so expensive to do it. As Reminisce Inc we are a photo delivery company. We have a face search tech ( similar to face recog but different, ours is exponentially faster than existing ones). Our tech is the only solution that allows us to search for specific list in archives. However we use our tech only to deliver souvenir photography to event attendees. We will not sell it to government. You can check for your photos in our db here it gives you the result in 15 seconds https://www.reminis.app

Kudos for the principled stance. Hope you can maintain that in the face of investor pressure.

Are you saying it's prohibitively expensive to archive footage to later recog against (storage), or is the recog itself the expensive part (compute)?

That data is not regulated. Basically an open book. Try again.

The first thing we tell to investors is we are not building a security or surveillance product and we don't have a vision like that.

Storing and indexing (computation but not search) is expensive on AWS. Practically 1000 face metadata is not more than 4MB's of data in practice. 4MB face data is 1$ on AWS. Just one surveillance camera output archive + real time recognition costs 400$ / month according to my calculation.

Search part can be extremely fast with postgres in a special setting. It's kinda instant.

.... what? This reads a lot more like an advertisement than a comment about the story, with a bit of sarcasm?

I just wanted to show a different application area. The leads I will get from here probably will not bring any sales before 5 years lol.

> However we use our tech only to deliver souvenir photography to event attendees. We will not sell it to government.

Do you have a warrant canary or similar in place?

How hard is it to defeat the "live face" thing and get your system to search for someone else using a photo or something? Could I use a video of someone I want to track?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here. Your service and tech looks awesome if you continue to provide it ethically, it just seems like there are a bunch of ways that services of this kind could be exploited.

We are based in Turkey for now. Our database is full of public event photos. Surveillance in Istanbul is not good enough to make a good face recog search. We are too fresh and young for a warrant canary.

There is too many face spoofing prevention techniques. We are actively testing one right now.(Currently on A/B test) Especially after iPhone X which brings depth camera someone should replicate your face in 3D to make a face spoof. More info about face spoofing techniques: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09868.pdf

> We are too fresh and young for a warrant canary.

Turkey doesn't have the best track record on this, if you don't have a canary might as well assume you are already cooperating

> Don’t Worry!!! Face recog startup founder here. Amazon’s tech only allows them to monitor a specific people list in real time.

Don't worry because I'm presumably not on that list? But what if I am somehow? And what about the people who are? Who sticks up for their interests?

I know I'm basically replying to a spam comment here but this logic just doesn't make sense. It's basically the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument all over again.

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