cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/44251739
Advocates point, in part, to a new state law, Act 399, which went into effect Aug. 1 and establishes criminal penalties for law enforcement officials who decline ICE requests for cooperation. “If ICE were to ask for any records that NOPD would hold, they would have to risk violating a state law and facing criminal charges [to comply with] what the ordinance is asking them to do,” Sarah Whittington, advocacy director at the ACLU of Louisiana, told Bolts.
Should federal agents get access, Whittington said, “this technology would allow them to use facial recognition to try and further their reach into our communities and track people.” She thinks ICE could “use the network of cameras to target specific people and communities and wait for the technology to alert them to a match and then use it to track that person to a location for arrest—likely away from their home and away from the public.”
Should federal agents get access, Whittington said, “this technology would allow them to use facial recognition to try and further their reach into our communities and track people.” She thinks ICE could “use the network of cameras to target specific people and communities and wait for the technology to alert them to a match and then use it to track that person to a location for arrest—likely away from their home and away from the public.”
Even setting aside these new state laws, experts say the only real way to prevent ICE from accessing sensitive data is to forgo collecting it in the first place. “It is very hard to wall off data collected from lawful government use,” George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, the author of several books on big data policing, told Bolts. “The simple truth of digital surveillance is that if you build it, it will be used, and likely used against those with the least amount of political power.”
Su argues, though, that the city council’s attempts at safeguarding facial recognition technology seem to be designed according to an “an old idea” of how governments interact: “federal insulated from state, state insulated from local, and you can still have some stability or control for your own little community.”
In the era of Trump 2.0, he said, those rules no longer apply: “We’re probably at the lowest point with regard to local democratic control.”
Fuck the police but as a propagnosia sufferer, I want this.
I’m not opposed to the technology. An aid for prosopagnosia would actually be an excellent use of this tech.
But, yeah one individual using it as an aid vs an increasingly authoritarian government creating an entire surveillance network to track people is some bullshit.
I hate when people claim that something like that is inevitable, and if you disagree, then you’re anti-tech or inhibiting progress. Society is supposed to control technology, tech isn’t supposed to control society. If we’re not dictating how the tech is being used on us, then one powerful individual or group of individuals is using tech to control us.
I try not to put pictures of my kid’s face on the internet. Now every time we leave our house, somebody is going to have the ability to save images of my kid to a database, and track our movements around the city. I have no way of knowing what they actually do with those images once they’re saved, and who all might be accessing this system and database.
Knowing for a fact that our government caters to and protects pedophiles and trafficking networks, how can anybody expect me to just accept this as inevitable progress, and not fight like hell to stop it from happening?