Cops Already Have All Your Info, Just Waiting for the Right Charge

And under the Fascist Tangelo, Living While Non-White, Non-Male, Non-xian and Non-Straight will be capital crimes.

Patricia J. Williams at The Nation:

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.