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from the they-should-look-into-getting-some-artificial-intelligence dept.
One of the individuals who first brought the Internet to Australia, Geoff Huston, writes in his blog:
I recall from some years back, when we were debating in Australia some national Internet censorship proposal de jour, that if the Internet represented a new Global Village then Australia was trying very hard to position itself as the Global Village Idiot. And the current situation with Australia's new Data Retention laws may well support a case for reviving that sentiment. Between the various government agencies who pressed for this legislation, the lawyers who drafted the legislation, the politicians who advocated its adoption and the bureaucrats who are overseeing its implementation, then as far as I can tell none of them get it. They just don't understand the Internet and how it works, and they are acting on a somewhat misguided assumption that the Internet is nothing more than the telephone network for computers. And nothing could be further from the truth.
The intended aim of this legislation was to assist various law enforcement agencies to undertake forensic analysis of network transactions. As the government claims: "telecommunications companies are retaining less data and keeping it for a shorter time. This is degrading the investigative capabilities of law enforcement and security agencies and, in some cases, has prevented serious criminals from being brought to justice." ( https://www.ag.gov.au/dataretention ). So what the agencies wanted was a regulation to compel ISPs to hold a record of their address assignment details so that the question "who was using this IP address at this time" had a definitive answer based on the retention of so-called meta-data records of who had what IP address when.
[Also Covered By]: Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 04 2015, @07:20PM
Facial recognition algorithms are being developed right now.
That work has already been done. Your drivers license photo is stored with the pre-calculated reco numbers.
The point about no expectation of privacy is a good one.
We have a reasonable expectation of privacy as we go about our daily business in public, even if we might
fall into the sight line of John Q Public, John is unlikely to know who we are, where we live, where we work, and
have instant access to our banking records.
It is reasonable to be seen in public, by friends, foes, and even (occasionally) police officers. What is unreasonable
is for any of those people to have access to a full dossier, or to report that information to police, or to enter
that information into a computer for future use.
I suspect, in time, the GPS Tracking ruling [networkworld.com] will be expanded to require warrants for other means of tracking, via facial recognition, license plate readers, etc/ (Or at least it should).
Requiring a warrant to track a specific face, or license plate, would require the hardware/software to instantly discard any "non-hits" with no matching warrants. That's just about what every cop on the street does when they are looking for the Red Chevy Impala with Florida plates. Blue cars are pretty much ignored, unless they are doing something egregious. The Face Reco systems should do the same.
The argument is about the word "reasonable". Creating police databases of every person walking by a camera is not reasonable.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.