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Comment by alfromspace | Hacker News Reader

This is something I think is justifiable in time-sensitive cases like tracking down a kidnapper, but I fear there's no way to grant such power and expect its use to always remain narrow. In my opinion, most issues in our country come from the compounding of lots of well-intentioned systems built up over several centuries that no longer even remotely serve their original purposes.

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That's how every infringement of our civil liberties has come into existence: It has one or two very limited justifiable cases, and everyone goes 100% all in on that and focuses on that, but not what we will lose. Everyone always dismisses it as a slippery slope fallacy but here we are, with our rights against illegal search and seizures almost completely chipped away. Asking an officer for a search warrant is almost a formality at this point. Cops routinely exercise civil asset forfeiture and make it impossible to regain the goods lost, the 3 letter agencies are downloading and analyzing anything we type online and building comprehensive profiles and behavior models and running our actions online against said models, etc, etc.

I see far more slippery slopes than slippery slope fallacies. It makes me want to reject these kinds of ideas from the get-go, because the pasts of our bureaucracies and representatives have given us really no good reason to believe every great new idea won't be expanded far beyond its scope sooner or later.

This is why I am for facial recognition ONLY on probable cause, and affirmed by a judge under a search warrant.

Cats out of the bag with facial recog. Might as well have strong legal documentation and judges on the line with this.

> every great new idea won't be expanded far beyond its scope sooner or later

And when the expansion is justified by shocking statements ("stop terrorists and pedophiles, think of the children" type stuff) that's when people should stop and think. Because anyone trying to convince you by shocking you probably wants to hide something in that shock.

This is why you want to set legal boundaries at the outset, rather than let the authorities push the envelope and allow bad practices to become the norm.

I think most people would be fine with using facial recognition technology in the instance of Amber Alerts or an escaped dangerous fugitive.

Likewise, I think most reasonable people would not feel comfortable in a situation where software is bulk scanning the faces of people entering a stadium and checking them for outstanding warrants for unpaid parking tickets etc.

A technologically sophisticated and ruthlessly efficient justice system in a progressive jurisdiction is far more oppressive than a backward, ineffective one under an authoritarian regime.

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