Yeah but from the PoV of the government everyone you meet could be a future criminal. They could have hateful thoughts towards the INGSOC party or towards Big Brother. They could even be allies of Emmanuel Goldstein. How else do you expect the government to keep you safe from such criminals, brother?
I guess I should've included a sarcasm warning. But that's certainly a view a certain type of powerful people seem to hold. Richelieu's famous (probably apocryphal) quote and all that.
Ah, the famed "Nuh-Uh" defense. The fact is, Tech companies and the bros that head them have all of the money, all of the connections, and all of the information. Those of us not on that side of the equation do not. They may not be the initial cause of so many problems but they certainly have accelerated and deepened a great many of them in their race to extract (somehow) even more wealth from the societies that host them. We aren't nearly angry enough at them IMO.
Where's our buddy Garrett Langley or even YC's Garry Tan to come to the defense of the privatized surveillance state?
Pretty much all I ever read about these systems is heinous false positives. I've currently set up automation to pull the local data that includes police activity. One of the towns over from me has, at least, 6 Flock cameras (probably more) for a locale of less than 2000 people. I've not once seen anything related to ALPR or any camera system providing any influence on assisting a crime. You'd think Mr. Langley would be begging police chiefs around the US to put in a positive spin to public information around these digital watchers.
But the morons buying these systems are also the morons taking state tax dollars to buy SWAT vehicles for 100s of thousands of dollars because they want to cosplay GI Joe. Yet... You want a park? Or something that's actually useful in your local community? Fund raise it yourself is the response.
I’m very against this type of pervasive surveillance, but that number seems implausible. The police may have only loaded a small group of suspects into the system, only targeted specific individuals, or some other reason we’re not aware of. The police protecting some criminals wouldn’t be a departure from standard practice in the UK.
That was my first thought. They scanned roughly 1% of the UK’s population. No way they didn’t identify any wanted criminals unless the set of wanted criminals scanned for was only a tiny fraction of the overall list.
Security theater is out of control. I just returned from traveling abroad to some major cities in Europe and getting back to NYC, it's the only city I've been in that let's the cops run wild and fly helicopters low over the city. Not so the cops can do any actual work but so they can take a 2 minute short cut to their private helicopter base instead of flying over the water. No person I have ever met enjoys the sudden loud noise from helicopters flying just above their head in the middle of the day/night. There are campaigns against it[0], and people despise cops. It would be such an easy win to gain some better relations with the communities and yet the cops keep on doing it.
The cops keeps doing it and the rich join in on holidays to take a shortcut to JFK from downtown Manhattan. The city were 9/11 was apparently a big deal wants to you feel like you're in a war zone all the time for shortcuts and a few $ savings on helicopter fuel.
This to me is the ultimate security theater environment, where the state is constantly pressing a false sense of FUD.
You’re conflating private helicopter rides (which are annoying and frequent) with police ones, which are generally pretty necessary. I’ve only seen them out in my neighborhood after serious crimes where a suspect hasn’t been caught.
No I'm not conflating them, I see the NYPD tags on the map flying directly over Brooklyn to their helicopter base 5+ times a day. [0]
No they are not necessary, the East River is right there to fly over. I also have never read "cops failed to catch criminal due to long helicopter route back to base over East River" as a headline or a logical train of thought.
I'm guessing you're related to, or are a police officer yourself. Which means you're conflating truth with misdirection.
A lot of those are going to be the same people day in and day out, the article says 500k faces, not people. You also have to filter out those people where the cameras aren't getting an image good enough to scan.
The article doesn't say, and I haven't seen the cameras, but it's not like you're getting every single person parsing through those stations.
I've had an idea in the back of my head but I'm no businessman so have this one for free.
Build an AI model, train it from the catalogues of JD Sports and Sports Direct (and other brands like Stone Island etc.) and how to detect balaclavas, illegal electric bikes and e-scooters. Have it link to cameras and do a percentage chance using machine learning on chance of crime. Also increase the percentage if a 'wheely' is done (riding only on back wheel).
Would minority report the majority of crime in this country in one foul swoop.
Could call it ScroteScanner.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of ASB I see around my area are people dressed/using those exact things.
If they start to catch-on (unlikely) then worse case we have a fancier looking society with gangsters in suits again.
We also need a points-based system on the tube, if you’re walking slowly in tunnels blocking traffic at rush hour because you’re staring at your phone you get a point. 5 points and you get a 6 month ban from the tube.
Not excusing it but it's a large reason to why people skip red lights on rented bikes and electric scooters. It's more of a reason than just doing it because you're not afraid of the law.
They should just round up and imprison all the people who walk in my neighbourhood.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of people who commit crimes in my area are people who can walk. I rarely see the wheelchair crowd pulling off B&Es.
Oh, or people who wear clothes. Criminals seem to like wearing clothes. Point proven: you never see nudists shoplifting Old Navy.
People who make comments like this don’t have to deal with walking stereotypes committing crimes in broad daylight and it’s so fucking annoying for people who do.
And let me remind you those criminal stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
I would rather all my shit get stolen at gunpoint and my local grocers close due to rampant shoplifting than put a single innocent man in jail over some bullshit “minority report”-esque pre-crime algorithm someone with three squares and reliable housing decided was a good idea.
The problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are usually right (they’re not), it’s that they’re sometimes (usually) wrong.
People on illegal escooters or illegal electric bikes are already committing crimes, there's rarely a decent reason to be wearing a balaclava in the city.
As I said, machine learning to take all these pointers into perspective.
In the age of everything being filmed in a panopticon, I look at the teens wearing balaclava and wonder where they bought theirs. Good on them for having a modicum of privacy.
I think what makes this resemble a moronic idea is it’s a thin veneer of an invention based on your personal stereotyped perspective.
The real challenge, if you wanted to work on the meat of the issue, is that we need to reduce crime without catching the innocent in the net, without having a chilling effect on legal behaviour and people’s rights, and without normalizing the mindset that we should just precrime people.
One of the core points of Minority Report is in the film’s title: that even if technology becomes 99.99% accurate, we are still damned by the destruction of due process and the presumption of innocence.
I think ideas like yours belong in the incinerator.
Yes, they actively make public spaces unpleasant and dangerous. Town centres are on their knees as people don't want to go there anymore due to ASB like this.
Trouble is you'd be scooping up 90% of boys in a certain race, class, age bracket, because those ballys and bikes and Nike tech are effectively fashion at this point even if you're doing nothing wrong. And if that's the case you don't need AI you can just wait outside the school gates and arrest everyone.
Hook this up into the facial recognition tech they're in no doubt are already using, and then you could also collect data from people's social profiles, ensure they vote for the right parties and generally don't get into trouble like opposing mainstream political ideas and such things.
I've spent a whole of 15 seconds thinking about this and I don't foresee a single drawback here, lets just try it and see if we can prevent future crimes 100%, because then the future will have been saved.
The degree to which the British underclasses adopted a dress-code in the late '80s (quite conveniently, for the authorities), is a social phenomenon that should be studied. They openly self-discriminate, willingly reducing opportunities and outcomes. Was it just evolutionary adaptation (tracksuits make it easier to run in dangerous situations), or was it pursuit of a tribal sense of belonging?
violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviours are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offences”.
So much effort to protect little girls. Yet if you get stabbed, say clearly that you've been stabbed, they will not believe you. Then they will arrest your dead body.
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
It would be interesting to see how these are justified internally. If I had to guess, it’s either excess budget being channeled into “something” or a justification to reduce street patrols/street crime.
I truly think it's safetyism. People seem to have a lower and lower tolerance for risk as society gets safer.
Since governments are run by people, this safetyism
has become enshrined in law, typified by nonsense like criminalizing free-range parenting and mass surveillance.
its one of the value function that makes it almost impossible to evaluate.
Lets imagine that catching someone in the Interpol list of wanted terrorists is a huge catch. You would expect the avg catch rate to be almost 0 but once one is caught the avg value of the system becomes very easy to justify.
Its the same idea as having photos of known terrorists in airports and train stations to see if guards recognise someone. But with the added benefit that the facial recognition should not miss them.
If the evaluation function is it costs X to run each day and we caught Y number of criminals who robbed phones worth Z > X then the system will come off pretty badly in terms of ROI.
This is a take I hadn't heard before, pretty interesting. I wonder if there are already any fiction out there where some widespread religion turns out to be an automated mass surveillance and policing system gone awry. Neat concept
"Most everyone you meet is not a criminal"
Uncomfortable facts certain bigots dont want to understand.
Yeah but from the PoV of the government everyone you meet could be a future criminal. They could have hateful thoughts towards the INGSOC party or towards Big Brother. They could even be allies of Emmanuel Goldstein. How else do you expect the government to keep you safe from such criminals, brother?
To be fair, if you work in the UK government then everyone you meet on a daily basis is in high likelyhood a criminal.
If they're not laundering money, trafficking people or avoiding taxes, they're likely a visitor who has come to commit bribery. Oh sorry, "lobbying".
"If most everyone you meet is not a criminal, the definition of 'criminal' is not yet sufficiently comprehensive."
Edit: added scare quotes because it's difficult to be sarcastic on the internet these days.
You think the definition of criminal is wrong unless the majority of people are defined as criminals?
I guess I should've included a sarcasm warning. But that's certainly a view a certain type of powerful people seem to hold. Richelieu's famous (probably apocryphal) quote and all that.
Tech bros pushed us to believe that disagreeing and arguing instead of voting is the right way.
So we are now distracted while they reshape the world with hunger and death
How constrained must one's thinking be to think like this? There are massive actual issues, and they're not your hated group of choice's fault.
Ah, the famed "Nuh-Uh" defense. The fact is, Tech companies and the bros that head them have all of the money, all of the connections, and all of the information. Those of us not on that side of the equation do not. They may not be the initial cause of so many problems but they certainly have accelerated and deepened a great many of them in their race to extract (somehow) even more wealth from the societies that host them. We aren't nearly angry enough at them IMO.
Why are you on a YCombinator subdomain if this represents your beliefs?
So now that the "trial" has failed we're going to stop doing face scanning, right? ...right???
In the UK it has worked at other places
"He said 103 arrests has been made so far and there was one false alert which did not result in an arrest.
Supt Luke Dillon said overall crime figures in the Fairfield ward, where the pilot has been held, fell by 12% per cent.
"We're seeing reductions in almost all crime types, certainly in shoplifting and robbery," he said. "
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2056r07rjlo
I’m more interested in whether these arrests were appropriate, the suspects convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers.
If it's not working it's because there isn't enough of it, silly.
"Last month BTP announced it was extending the trial for a further four months and expanding the deployments to include London Underground stations. "
No, because think of the children. /s
100% success!
Good news: rolling these facial scans everywhere in the country should lead to dozens of false positives.
Where's our buddy Garrett Langley or even YC's Garry Tan to come to the defense of the privatized surveillance state?
Pretty much all I ever read about these systems is heinous false positives. I've currently set up automation to pull the local data that includes police activity. One of the towns over from me has, at least, 6 Flock cameras (probably more) for a locale of less than 2000 people. I've not once seen anything related to ALPR or any camera system providing any influence on assisting a crime. You'd think Mr. Langley would be begging police chiefs around the US to put in a positive spin to public information around these digital watchers.
But the morons buying these systems are also the morons taking state tax dollars to buy SWAT vehicles for 100s of thousands of dollars because they want to cosplay GI Joe. Yet... You want a park? Or something that's actually useful in your local community? Fund raise it yourself is the response.
I’m very against this type of pervasive surveillance, but that number seems implausible. The police may have only loaded a small group of suspects into the system, only targeted specific individuals, or some other reason we’re not aware of. The police protecting some criminals wouldn’t be a departure from standard practice in the UK.
That was my first thought. They scanned roughly 1% of the UK’s population. No way they didn’t identify any wanted criminals unless the set of wanted criminals scanned for was only a tiny fraction of the overall list.
Security theater is out of control. I just returned from traveling abroad to some major cities in Europe and getting back to NYC, it's the only city I've been in that let's the cops run wild and fly helicopters low over the city. Not so the cops can do any actual work but so they can take a 2 minute short cut to their private helicopter base instead of flying over the water. No person I have ever met enjoys the sudden loud noise from helicopters flying just above their head in the middle of the day/night. There are campaigns against it[0], and people despise cops. It would be such an easy win to gain some better relations with the communities and yet the cops keep on doing it.
The cops keeps doing it and the rich join in on holidays to take a shortcut to JFK from downtown Manhattan. The city were 9/11 was apparently a big deal wants to you feel like you're in a war zone all the time for shortcuts and a few $ savings on helicopter fuel.
This to me is the ultimate security theater environment, where the state is constantly pressing a false sense of FUD.
[0] https://stopthechopnynj.org/
You’re conflating private helicopter rides (which are annoying and frequent) with police ones, which are generally pretty necessary. I’ve only seen them out in my neighborhood after serious crimes where a suspect hasn’t been caught.
No I'm not conflating them, I see the NYPD tags on the map flying directly over Brooklyn to their helicopter base 5+ times a day. [0]
No they are not necessary, the East River is right there to fly over. I also have never read "cops failed to catch criminal due to long helicopter route back to base over East River" as a headline or a logical train of thought.
I'm guessing you're related to, or are a police officer yourself. Which means you're conflating truth with misdirection.
[0] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/
16 deployments for 6 months at rail stations - they must have been off 99% of the time to only scan 500k faces.
For scale 500k people is 2 days of Liverpool Street Stations daily average
How many unique faces though
A lot of those are going to be the same people day in and day out, the article says 500k faces, not people. You also have to filter out those people where the cameras aren't getting an image good enough to scan.
The article doesn't say, and I haven't seen the cameras, but it's not like you're getting every single person parsing through those stations.
But, yes, the numbers seems low.
I've had an idea in the back of my head but I'm no businessman so have this one for free.
Build an AI model, train it from the catalogues of JD Sports and Sports Direct (and other brands like Stone Island etc.) and how to detect balaclavas, illegal electric bikes and e-scooters. Have it link to cameras and do a percentage chance using machine learning on chance of crime. Also increase the percentage if a 'wheely' is done (riding only on back wheel).
Would minority report the majority of crime in this country in one foul swoop.
Could call it ScroteScanner.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of ASB I see around my area are people dressed/using those exact things.
If they start to catch-on (unlikely) then worse case we have a fancier looking society with gangsters in suits again.
Its like Shazam for Scrotes
Indeed.
Set up some automated scanners for cyclists jumping red lights in the City as well.
Hm, would depend if they're on rented or own bikes.
Rented you're charged by the minute so there's a financial incentive even for non-scrotes.
If you jump a red light you are a scrote.
We also need a points-based system on the tube, if you’re walking slowly in tunnels blocking traffic at rush hour because you’re staring at your phone you get a point. 5 points and you get a 6 month ban from the tube.
Yes. Also 10 years in jail if you litter.
Let’s not be too harsh, 3 years should be sufficient.
Are you seriously excusing bad behaviour on the basis that there was a financial incentive to behave badly?!
Not excusing it but it's a large reason to why people skip red lights on rented bikes and electric scooters. It's more of a reason than just doing it because you're not afraid of the law.
Can we make the city scanners look like the ones in HL2?
They should just round up and imprison all the people who walk in my neighbourhood.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of people who commit crimes in my area are people who can walk. I rarely see the wheelchair crowd pulling off B&Es.
Oh, or people who wear clothes. Criminals seem to like wearing clothes. Point proven: you never see nudists shoplifting Old Navy.
People who make comments like this don’t have to deal with walking stereotypes committing crimes in broad daylight and it’s so fucking annoying for people who do.
And let me remind you those criminal stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
I would rather all my shit get stolen at gunpoint and my local grocers close due to rampant shoplifting than put a single innocent man in jail over some bullshit “minority report”-esque pre-crime algorithm someone with three squares and reliable housing decided was a good idea.
The problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are usually right (they’re not), it’s that they’re sometimes (usually) wrong.
People on illegal escooters or illegal electric bikes are already committing crimes, there's rarely a decent reason to be wearing a balaclava in the city.
As I said, machine learning to take all these pointers into perspective.
In the age of everything being filmed in a panopticon, I look at the teens wearing balaclava and wonder where they bought theirs. Good on them for having a modicum of privacy.
I think what makes this resemble a moronic idea is it’s a thin veneer of an invention based on your personal stereotyped perspective.
The real challenge, if you wanted to work on the meat of the issue, is that we need to reduce crime without catching the innocent in the net, without having a chilling effect on legal behaviour and people’s rights, and without normalizing the mindset that we should just precrime people.
One of the core points of Minority Report is in the film’s title: that even if technology becomes 99.99% accurate, we are still damned by the destruction of due process and the presumption of innocence.
I think ideas like yours belong in the incinerator.
Is arresting someone for (what fact about?) their scooter actually making society better?
Comments like these reinforce my belief that the UK is a panopticon because UK residents sincerely want one and not because the government is corrupt.
Yes, they actively make public spaces unpleasant and dangerous. Town centres are on their knees as people don't want to go there anymore due to ASB like this.
Trouble is you'd be scooping up 90% of boys in a certain race, class, age bracket, because those ballys and bikes and Nike tech are effectively fashion at this point even if you're doing nothing wrong. And if that's the case you don't need AI you can just wait outside the school gates and arrest everyone.
Those are the types likely to be committing a lot of the crimes. Come to a working class town and see for yourself.
Hook this up into the facial recognition tech they're in no doubt are already using, and then you could also collect data from people's social profiles, ensure they vote for the right parties and generally don't get into trouble like opposing mainstream political ideas and such things.
I've spent a whole of 15 seconds thinking about this and I don't foresee a single drawback here, lets just try it and see if we can prevent future crimes 100%, because then the future will have been saved.
The degree to which the British underclasses adopted a dress-code in the late '80s (quite conveniently, for the authorities), is a social phenomenon that should be studied. They openly self-discriminate, willingly reducing opportunities and outcomes. Was it just evolutionary adaptation (tracksuits make it easier to run in dangerous situations), or was it pursuit of a tribal sense of belonging?
[delayed]
They could just make sentencing tougher and keep criminals in prison.
The strongest predictor (by far) for committing a crime is having a prior criminal record.
It's "fell swoop".
We already have plenty of gangsters in suits. They travel in taxis and chauffeured cars, not on e-scooters.
So much effort to protect little girls. Yet if you get stabbed, say clearly that you've been stabbed, they will not believe you. Then they will arrest your dead body.
It was one case, hardly systemic yet. Shit happens, mistakes are made.
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
It would be interesting to see how these are justified internally. If I had to guess, it’s either excess budget being channeled into “something” or a justification to reduce street patrols/street crime.
ROI won't be measured in crimes stopped, since they're not actually intended to do that. It will be measured in votes changed or blocked.
I truly think it's safetyism. People seem to have a lower and lower tolerance for risk as society gets safer.
Since governments are run by people, this safetyism has become enshrined in law, typified by nonsense like criminalizing free-range parenting and mass surveillance.
its one of the value function that makes it almost impossible to evaluate.
Lets imagine that catching someone in the Interpol list of wanted terrorists is a huge catch. You would expect the avg catch rate to be almost 0 but once one is caught the avg value of the system becomes very easy to justify.
Its the same idea as having photos of known terrorists in airports and train stations to see if guards recognise someone. But with the added benefit that the facial recognition should not miss them.
If the evaluation function is it costs X to run each day and we caught Y number of criminals who robbed phones worth Z > X then the system will come off pretty badly in terms of ROI.
Man we technologists are so bad at dealing with societal issues.
We try to reinvent something that claims that keeps tabs on everyone and for sure will punish you if you don’t behave well but will reward you if do!
The thing has a name. It’s the religion.
This is a take I hadn't heard before, pretty interesting. I wonder if there are already any fiction out there where some widespread religion turns out to be an automated mass surveillance and policing system gone awry. Neat concept
Humans are inherently religious, whether you see it or not. We all worship something.