
Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects - kevcampb
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/02/08/black-mirror-technology-chinese-police-don-high-tech-glasses-nab-suspects/
======
Bucephalus355
All these reports have the feelings of small rumblings or rumors of purges and
famines that leaked out of the Soviet Union in the 30’s. The dismissal of all
of them due to China’s size and growth really strengthens the analogy too.

Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day,
committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad
that alone gets most people.

The ad-tech companies of the world think they are criticized now, but they
have no idea the judgment history will render for some of the attitudes and
practices that have been promoted regarding data and privacy. Some of this
stuff is as naive as Charles Lindbergh helping the Luftwaffe because he
believed airplanes would connect all the peoples of the world and promote
global peace. What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?

All totalitarian governments, not being very innovative, have thrived off of
inventions that have been developed elsewhere and have been bearable, and then
mutated into unrecognizable monsters under them.

~~~
drawkbox
> _Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day,
> committing some kind of crime._

I think that is the big issue we will see and have seen recently.

Surveillance tools are better than ever in history. Many times, laws were
created as deterrents to some behavior, that maybe shouldn't be laws, because
it wasn't easy to nab everyone doing it. Back then cops, judges and more
weren't as locked into forced outcomes i.e. three strikes, mandatory minimums
etc and there was more humanity in corrections at that level.

Now that we have surveillance at this level and going up, we need to remove
the criminalization of certain things otherwise everyone will be locked up.

Moral laws or making illegal non-violent/no civil violations actions will not
work in mass surveillance, only laws that are violent and infringe on civil
rights of others should remain.

An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If
we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would
have a record.

With surveillance this high and going up, we MUST decriminalize and re-
evaluate every law. The problem is our 'corrections' and law enforcement, is
that both have turned predatory along with the advancements in technology that
have been used to erode privacy.

~~~
braythwayt

      > If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the
      > country at least would have a record.
    

That idea seems deeply troubling if you're a White American. Meanwhile, this
is the daily reality of Black Americans, because the police have been
systematically enforcing these laws against people of colour.

Now we face a world where that same disproportionate enforcement may be
applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against
Republicans).

~~~
gamblor956
Blacks and Latinos are already overwhelming Democrats... And the overzealous
law enforcement is usually at the hands of Republicans.

Not sure why you feel the need to throw political affiliation into the
conversation.

~~~
braythwayt
Consider a hypothetical police officer who is against "leftists" (the police
officer's definition is all that matters, not ours).

Right now, said police officer can and does enforce laws disproportionally
against Black Americans because to the police officer, they're all leftists.

But if we give the police officer access to all sorts of profiling information
about humans, when making a traffic stop, the police officer can be extra-
zealous about performing a search if the person is profiled as being a
"leftist."

The point is, prosecuting people for their political views has existed for
some time, but it didn't scale well. Now it will scale extremely well, up to
the point of wearing glasses and tagging people with certain social profiles
in real time.

------
mc32
I get why human rights orgs would want to speak against this technology, from
a Western philosophy and law perspective.

China does not have the same philosophical or legal lineage. They will have to
find out on their own whether the cons outweigh the pros.

Theoretically, if the system is not corrupted by misinformation (false or
incomplete information), it has the potential to keep the streets free of
wanted criminals --which is a noble goal. The question is whether keeping
criminals off the streets will trample on innocent people's rights and if so
whether the general Chinese public would accept that deal.

That said, I can see this technology also taking off in some public areas in
the West --ports of entry, for example.

I also think human rights orgs also are concerned that China might show enough
effective use of the tech that states outside Asia will want to at least trial
it out.

~~~
blackbagboys
This kind of tech has already come to Western ports of entry. Why else would
Snap, Inc. have millions of dollars worth of contracts with Customs and Border
Protection (alongside dozens of other contracts with DHS, DoD, etc).

[https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull...](https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22SNAP%2C+INC.%22+CONTRACTING_AGENCY_NAME%3A%22U.S.+CUSTOMS+AND+BORDER+PROTECTION%22&x=23&y=12)

~~~
rfw
The SNAP Inc. in question is actually
[http://www.snapinc.net](http://www.snapinc.net), an enterprise consultancy.

------
sundvor
TFA: "The app brings up the (scanned person's) vital information, including
name, ethnicity, gender and address (..), the address of the hotel where they
are staying and information related to their internet usage."

Wow. So just by looking at you, they can see how often you visit Hacker News -
or what else.

Scary as.

~~~
nine_k
Used VPN much? Tried to open suspicious sites? Issued suspicious search
queries?

A potential target for a harmonization effort.

------
globuous
Rob Lake's comment is pretty spot on (I'm taking the liberty to repost w/o his
authorization):

""The app brings up the suspect’s vital information, including name,
ethnicity, gender and address." Presumably version 2 of the app will also pop
up the person's social credit score."

That being said, this will definitely come to the west sooner or later. I
mean, doesn't London already have cameras at every street corner for instance
?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This is exactly what comes up when the police run a plate.

The only difference is facial recognition vs numbers and letters.

Querying for more invasive information such as medical history, sexual
orientation, online accounts, "undesirable people" they are acquainted with)
is a simple as a DB connection string and a select statement.

~~~
RepressedEmu
Except that not everyone has a license plate but everyone has a face. So its a
much bigger intrusion.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
License plates are much more unique than faces and they do not change over
time and you can't put a hat and sunglasses on them. What they lose in
quantity they make up in quality. They are a much bigger intrusion but for a
large majority of the population instead of literally everyone. The difference
isn't very meaningful from a surveillance POV since you can build shadow
profiles.

Two can play at the "I don't care about your problems because they don't
affect me" game.

Some people live in rural areas with little to no government infrastructure
that can be used for dragnet surveillance. They don't have to care about the
government tracking faces with the subway security cameras.

That's a dumb game to play. Dragnet surveillance is bad in all forms.

------
dalbasal
Face recognition exists, is becoming trivial and this has implications.

I saw a demo of sorts about 6 years ago, and heard rumors of various research
projects @ FB. Banner tracking in malls that link banner "views" to
"conversions" using a camera armed cash registers. Hi-res cameras on streets
that collect data like wildlife tracking collars. A stadium cam that can id
all the people at a match. A smart building that knows who's inside it &
where. Casino cams that dispatch cocktails waitresses to VIPs wherever they
are. Casinos've been using face recognition since early days, for persona non
grata identification. Coffee shop loyalty stamps. School attendance. Prison
monitoring, with relationship graphs and ML conspiracy detection. Traffic
Analytics....

There are a ton of applications, commercial, security, intelligence or general
nosiness. IMO, the best way of thinking about face recognition is: Google
Analytics will now work for physical reality.

All this stuff just exists. FB (and many others) have an enormous, proprietary
set of tagged photos. You could probably create your own set just scraping
social media and google image search. Some applications don't even need it.
Face recognition works. Cameras are high-res & cheap. The software is fast.
Customers want it. It will happen.

We (our generation) has not shown the political will (or competence) required
to create new rights and limitations on power sufficient to moderate this kind
of technology, thus far. The only thing preventing wide-scale & unlimited use
is creepiness feelings and that is temporary.

Putting the technology onto AR robocop glasses is just an illustrative way of
demonstrating implications. If this is well implemented, every police force
will want it in some form. Fugitives are needles-in-haystacks and I suspect
this will turn up a ton of them. It's probably a genuinely useful police tool,
unlike the dragnet digital snooping they do.

~~~
rtpg
A bit of a strong idea, but what if we just outright say that face recognition
is unethical?

I have a hard time finding any use that is positive for society. Advertising
and surveillance. Given that, what if we try to convince as many people as
possible to not research this tech, nor work for any company working on this.

You wouldn't work for a weapons manufacturer, maybe the same metrics need to
be applied to adtech and all this other tracking stuff

~~~
chr1
You can't make people forget technologies you don't like selectively. The more
we advance in adjacent technologies (like in autonomous driving) the easier it
will become to advance in face recognition, to the point where just a tiny
group of people can develop it.

Fighting technology with artificial bans have never worked, and privacy or
ethics based arguments won't work now either. The only hope is better
technology of controlling the government: better ways to vote, better ways to
monitor financial dealings of politicians.

If, people lose their privacy, but government loses it's privacy too, ordinary
people will be the ones who benefit the most.

~~~
rtpg
It's not about artificial bans. It's about having a social compact so that
only the most incompetent/"unethical" end up working in it.

Even when the tech is known, if you aren't good at software development then
the projects will have difficulty.

------
hmwhy
Serious question/statement looking for an answer here—I don’t understand why
every time an article along the line of this gets attention it makes me wonder
if anyone out there is working on two things:

1\. Educating the general population how the latest technologies can/are being
used to affect their privacy

2\. Working hard to be an independent, trustworthy part that scrutinises the
government

I honestly don’t understand the general attitude of most of the comments on
articles like this, particular when you are not living in a country where
censorship is “okay”.

In an ideal society (in my opinion) the government would act in the best
interest of the society and the government is scrutinised by a well-informed
population. This is certainly _not_ what is happening in most, if not all,
countries; but seeing some of the comments on HN repeatedly that don’t go
beyond “scary as” or “this is not okay” is quite disappointing and makes me
wonder where else I should look for reasonable opinions sometimes.

Have we not learn anything from storeis about govermental mass surveillance
programs in recent years? How about perhaps we should all sit down, think, and
set standards for how to protect everyone while setting encforcabke standards
for what is an isn’t okay?

~~~
otaviokz
I think/believe there's lack of "external stimulus" for doing that. Unless you
have a channel where a big part of the audience is both intelligent and
independently thinking, your message get's no traction.

Simple defences of this or that extreme get a lot of attention because anyone
can understand that. Maybe it's time the average "above average brained
citizen" grow up and start uniting. But then we all know what can happen to
such groups, either being eradicated or hijacked by political interests.

Sorry, I'm feeling very cynic today.

------
commandpaul
Has anyone played with Baidou`s Face Ai Products , I cant read Mandrin and The
site is impossible to navigate with google transelate.@
[http://ai.baidu.com/tech/face](http://ai.baidu.com/tech/face) Would really
appreciate a pointer to a independent performance eval of the same .

~~~
shironineja
OK. Did you find these SDK?

[http://ai.baidu.com/sdk#bfr](http://ai.baidu.com/sdk#bfr)

from there you will need to still sign-up via their free tier via dreaded
portal for API key:

[https://console.bce.baidu.com/ai/?fromai=1#/ai/face/overview...](https://console.bce.baidu.com/ai/?fromai=1#/ai/face/overview/index)

Apparently "立即注册" means "Sign up now"! So you will have to go through that and
lovingly translate each field. If you right-click in Chrome and click Inspect
on a textbox you will see they have English names for their control namess
(like name="userName") ... lol.

~~~
commandpaul
Thanks !

------
gruez
>the newest use of facial recognition technology that has drawn concerns among
human rights groups

why are they getting up in arms about this? networked cameras with facial
recognition have been around for years. what's so different about mounting it
on a police officer's head?

~~~
akira2501
> what's so different about mounting it on a police officer's head?

I'm not even mad at the implementation in general, the article implies that
the officer first identifies a suspicious person and then engages the
technology to make an identification. However, it's probably due to the fact
that China is a country where your religion can get you arrested or kidnapped
by the state.. so, it's still unsettling.

~~~
gruez
still, it's not like they couldn't do it before, with security checkpoints and
face recognition cameras everywhere.

~~~
test1235
So why bother with this new tech? Obviously so they can do it more.

------
ocdtrekkie
Remarkably close form factor to Glass, but definitely not something Google
would be participating in. Glass Enterprise Edition is much sleeker, this has
a much more boxed-off front. Looks like they may be using the same projector-
style display as Glass, but it's covered so that an onlooker can't see if it's
displaying anything or not.

Fairly thick tether cable, seems thicker than you'd need for just power,
unlikely it operates standalone. Could be like a USB-C cable, maybe, to run
all the power, display, and camera data to another unit on her person?

~~~
grondilu
Notice that the smart glasses tech is improving fast. Intel recently showcased
a very convincing (according to a reporter) prototype called "Vaunt". One
advantage is that it looks basically like a normal pair of glasses.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnfwClgheF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnfwClgheF0)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I did see Vaunt! For someone who already wears prescription lenses, that looks
fantastic. (And the camera was never a key perk of my Glass unit to me.) The
biggest thing right now for me, is what software I can run on it, and how much
control I have over that software.

I've been fiddling with a Vufine, which I can connect to pretty much any HDMI
feed. Very cool, though it's a fair bit larger and bulkier than the state of
the art.

~~~
grondilu
Since this thread is about an article mentioning Black Mirror, I am reminded
of the episode "crocodile". It depicts a tech that allows insurance companies
and law enforcement to tap into people's memory and extract images of what has
been seen.

Reading visual information from the mind is still far off, but if someday
smart glasses become widespread, and assuming that they backlog their video
input to the cloud or something, then for all intents and purposes, it'd be
basically the same.

A very significant fraction of the population already wear glasses, so it's
not too far fetched to imagine that soon, everything we see will be logged
somewhere.

------
drvdevd
IMO the most dystopian part of this technology will be, as usual, the failure
modes.

------
azurezyq
According to Chinese news for the same event, the vendor is
[http://www.llvision.com/](http://www.llvision.com/)

The product and the logo look so similar to google glass though. Good product
and use case from technical perspective.

------
firebender6
Why is this not evoking a stronger response from the public? Or globally? Mass
surveillance has always been a troubling possibility with computer vision.

I remember a client who approached us a few years ago to develop software to
surveil his employees in departmental store (containing no particularly
special commodity). To track his employees 24-7. We refused to take up the
project. I can't believe we are on the way to implement to the same idea at
this large a scale!

No matter what the short term benefits are, I believe the long term effects
are going to be very very unpleasant. Orwell's world doesn't seem too far off.

------
arkh
> The system is part of China’s efforts to build a digital surveillance system
> able to use a variety of biometric data — from photos and iris scans to
> fingerprints — to keep close tabs on the movements of the entire population.

Currently in some country people pay to live in cities or neighborhood with
better security theatre. I can imagine 50 years from now when you'll be
recorded and traced everywhere people will pay for the privilege of living in
closed neighborhood with no sensor inside.

------
coldcode
While the tech is interesting, I'd like to know the security of the backend
system and the data access system. Poor security allowing it to be manipulated
by others could make it a powerful tool for all sorts of criminals or foreign
governments. Like Stalin said, its not who votes that matters, its who counts
the votes. Likewise the recognition might be perfect but the data is fake.

------
jorblumesea
Leading the way in totalitarianism! One thing I'm glad the West is not a
leader in...

Just a http call away from "enemy of the state".

------
meri_dian
Good, technology like this is good. Worrying about potential misuse of this
technology is misplaced worry. Our concern is better placed on forming
governments that will use this technology for the common good (whatever that
is determined to be) than on the availability of the technology itself.

It's not about the technology.

It's about the will of the government.

Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early
nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a
twisted view of right and wrong.

What this tells us is that regardless of what technology is available, a good
government will do good, and an evil government will do evil. That really goes
for any entity. You name it.

~~~
tanilama
Government is never good or bad. If government has a will, it can only be to
preserve itself. That is why it is so important to hold it accountable, to
align its objective with the will of the society. Weirdly, Chinese government
is driven by the fear that it can be overthrown if the economy stops growing,
thus it delegates so much focus to economic investment. With technology like
this, they might, in one day, think they are no longer have such concern
anymore.

------
metaphorical
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-
Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass)

------
CodeSheikh
Do foreigners have to give biometric information such as finger prints, facial
data to the Chinese airport authorities when they visit China? Anyone?

~~~
blackoil
US asks for photo/fingerprints while getting visa.

~~~
liuw
EU and Britain, too.

------
danschumann
I think we romanticize "being on the lamb". For the 99.999% of the time, if
someone is a "wanted man", it's much better for society if he is apprehended.
I don't see this as a threat.

If, however, every innocent person were tracked, and crimes were generated
based on observations ( like souped up red-light cameras for every imaginable
crime ), and charges were created automatically ( and algorithmically ), that
would suck. Or, it would make us realize most laws suck and we'd remove them.

~~~
kristofferR
Most people in the US are wanted for stupid stuff, like not being able to pay
their parking fines.

~~~
paulie_a
Parking fines are generally on the car, not a person

~~~
knowThySelfx
So the car will pay the fine?

~~~
paulie_a
The owner will, if they would like the car to be legal to drive with updated
license plates. It is a minor but important distinction. I can't speak
directly that no states in the US operate differently. but as far as I know,
you don't become a wanted person for parking tickets.

------
taherchhabra
I feel, once criminals realize this facial recognition thing, they will start
using facemasks or some other new techniques

~~~
tsukikage
Just a beauty spot or two in suitably adversarial locations.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08945](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08945)

------
marcrosoft
Like Bitcoin, this type of technology will be used for good and bad. How can
we use this to our advantage?

------
samdk
This is very reminiscent of Charlie Stross' Halting State/Rule 34

------
dredmorbius
Miss Pao's phenomenoscopic spectacles.

(Neal Stephenson, _Diamond Age_ )

------
Tech-Noir
Idea for a Black Mirror episode (from the past):

In the future, people of the internet are unable to write about new technology
without resorting to increasingly tiresome, lazy and spurious references to a
popular British Twilight Zone remake.

------
vadimberman
I'm sorry, I do not understand the alarmist tone.

Yes, in many cases the uses of tech in China are disturbing (like the
supposedly planned social credit system).

But this case? It's the job of the police to find people. Facial recognition
helps it (although, I suspect, it won't be as flawless as advertised). How is
it functionally different from the recognition tech in airports? Because the
cops look scarier?

~~~
drawkbox
Even the police/government can contain bad actors, some might even like the
cover.

The problem is when access to private data goes beyond the need,
probabilistically people will abuse it, especially people with an
authoritarian slant that are tripping on the power.

~~~
vadimberman
So how is it different?

The police can access files online anyway, it's just a matter of convenience.
Most likely, the online databases are now accessible on mobiles.

