Protecting All Citizens / Big Brother is Watching

[khadaji2002]

Yea, it's not a lot of work at all, really. It's an incremental addition to the counting and dispensing machines.

Consider another example.

The post office pretty much tracks every piece of mail. Every piece of mail is scanned, simply as part of the routing process.

It would not surprise me at all if you got a letter with anthrax in it, that the post office could not tell you from which route that letter came from, where it was picked up. I doubt they have it down to the mail box, etc. But they could probably tell you which route.

Is that actionable on its own? No. But it's data that can be used in a post mortem to gain insight for an investigation.

If you have Netflix, you should watch the show they have that was on Discovery about the Unibomber and appreciate the level of effort the FBI went through. And that was pre- a lot of stuff that we have today.

I work for the Post Office. It's true that much of what goes through the Post Office is tracked. No, the letters are not tracked from the mail box. They first get tracking information at the sorting machine at whichever distribution center the letter goes to. However, that distribution center will include what office that letter came from. So with cooperation of the Inspector General it would not take long to find out where in a given town letters are coming from if they are sent over time.

Someone who stays very mobile of course avoids that kind of tracking. However, a mobile lifestyle also requires a fair bit of resources to maintain, so unless our anthrax mailer has a large amount of non-anthrax-tainted cash laying around they're going to be using cards for many of their transactions. It would take some time, but even today the FBI could track someone like that down in a surprisingly short amount of time.

So, IMO, high law level/high tech level worlds routinely trace essentially all activities of their citizens, and anyone entering the world from the starport is going to have a more or less recognizable tracker on their person to allow their movements to be followed as well. If you don't like it....don't level the starport.

 

[aramis]

So, IMO, high law level/high tech level worlds routinely trace essentially all activities of their citizens, and anyone entering the world from the starport is going to have a more or less recognizable tracker on their person to allow their movements to be followed as well. If you don't like it....don't level the starport.

I doubt that a tracker will be needed. Current face ID systems are pretty good - and given another TL or two, the AI nets used will likely be able to track you without a tracer.

 

[Condottiere]

China builds 'the world's most powerful' facial recognition system that can identify any one of its 1.4 billion citizens within three seconds
The aim to match someone's face to their ID photo with about 90% accuracy
Project launched by China's Ministry of Public Security in 2015 is in development
System can be connected to surveillance camera networks to connect with data
By CLAIRE HEFFRON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 14:40 GMT, 13 October 2017 | UPDATED: 14:51 GMT, 13 October 2017


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/chi...rld-s-powerful-facial-recognition-system.html

 

[Ulsyus]

As a consumer of the product previously, it's in need of a bit of help to be accurate

And if they're going to scan 1.4 billion people then there might be a bit of a queue to use the supercomputer.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I'm just a bit skeptical of some of the performance parameters described.

 

[nobby-w]

[ . . . ]
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I'm just a bit skeptical of some of the performance parameters described.

Replicate the database to local nodes and you can run the matches as quickly as you can afford to buy computers for. The matches can be passed to a central database, which can also be scaled through clustering.

This is probably even an application where quorum replication would be acceptable, so eventual consistency baby!¹

It's worth noting that most successful bitcoin wallet attacks have worked through exploiting eventual consistency semantics, so compromising some of the cameras and spamming the server of a system that relied on it could give you a window where the system could perceive you as being in more than one place at once.

If it had a fallback protocol for error correction where it took the highest match probability then you could fool it into thinking you were somewhere else for long enough to do something nefarious. Perhaps long enough to use a disguise kit to change your appearance and interrupt your trace long enough to throw off some pursuers. If the false positive was close enough to your last real match then it could well be quite plausible in an AI system designed to run off heuristics.

¹Remember, MongoDB is web scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

 

[coliver988]

As a consumer of the product previously, it's in need of a bit of help to be accurate

And if they're going to scan 1.4 billion people then there might be a bit of a queue to use the supercomputer.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I'm just a bit skeptical of some of the performance parameters described.

Scale horizontally, not just vertically. Mentioned in a later post - it is not just 1 computer, it is thousands running in parallel and collating the results up the chain. Massive parallelism is becoming an interesting trend and it could be alarming to see just how far this is going. Or could be great - depends on who you ask.