And under the Fascist Tangelo, Living While Non-White, Non-Male, Non-xian and Non-Straight will be capital crimes.
This
lack of regulation—and public ignorance of such systems’
existence—means that police departments are able to use facial
recognition to identify and track law-abiding citizens as well as
criminal suspects. Many police departments are able to run “continuous,
real-time scans of people walking by a surveillance camera”—without
warrant, reasonable suspicion, or any other limitation. The report found
that of 52 agencies polled, only one prohibits officers from “using
face recognition to track individuals engaging in political, religious,
or other protected free speech.” In addition, facial-recognition
technologies are manufactured by private companies using proprietary
algorithms generally classified as intellectual property or trade
secrets. Hence, few measures exist for ensuring accuracy through public
oversight, regular maintenance, or published operating standards.
In addition, the potential for error—particularly racially based error—seems built into the machine
Having
“nothing to hide” only gets you so far when there is no way to contest
the judgments of a hidden gaze. “We don’t want the bad guys to know that
we’re out there,” declared Rhodes. “We want them to worry about whether
or not they’re being watched.” This appropriation of surveillance
authority creates a pervasive us versus them mentality, eradicating the
boundary between liberty and license. So here we are, fellow citizens—at
a moment when libertarianism’s distaste for oversight intersects with
technological totalism. We flow seamlessly, helplessly, into sweeping
currents of the quietly totalitarian.
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