From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 09:34:51 MDT
On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 02:52:52PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> > I wonder when this system will come to Virginia. If we had it now, the
> > Virginia sniper would hardly even make it into national news - he
> > would have been caught after the first shooting.
>
> Am I the only one who thinks that a system allowing you to obtain complete
> trajectories and fingerprints of all moving objects on a 24/7/365 manner
> in realtime something that is bound to be abused, and abused horribly?
> Think of all the pattern matching and crosscorellation analysis you could
> do with that data. <SHUDDER>
On the other hand, the NSA has repeatedly been critiziced for gathering
enormous amounts of data which nobody has any real use for. Sifting
through the sheer mass is too much work, and automated techniques will
produce enormous amounts of suspicious patterns that have to be studied
by humans, mostly resulting in nothing useful. Unless one assumes some
magical AI a huge system like this would likely be more of a drain of
resources than a 1984 nightmare. It won't be security through obscurity,
but rather inefficiency through too much data acquisition.
Besides, would systems like the one that started this thread even be
helpful against a sniper? Tracking bullets seems to require a higher
resolution than I can imagine you get using microwave/radio signals from
the existing systems. Even if you could do the tracking accurately, the
information that the sniper was at location X at time Y might not be
very helpful if location X is (say) the roof of a building filled with
people where he could vanish into the crowd quickly. The assumption seems
to be that the police would immediately know something was afoot and
immediately appear at location X; in reality there are lots of delays
that just makes the system helpful in doing the investigation - it does
not solve the crime immediately.
I see the temptation in the system, and the false security it could
create. But the important thing for all privacy advocates is to make sure
that whenever proposals for employing systems like these are made, clear
demands for accountability and efficiency testing are made. So far it is
often a choice between no system or a system (where the pro-system side
usually wins in the present climate of paranoia), not a choice between no
system and a monitored system.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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