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FF4m3
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FF4m3

Anon

Congress Report Warns: Drones Will Track Faces From The Sky

From The Register:

With the FAA working on rules to integrate drones into airspace safety by 2015, the US government’s Congressional Research Service has warned of gaps in how American courts might treat the use of drones.

The snappily-headlined report, Drones in Domestic Surveillance Operations: Fourth Amendment Implications and Legislative Responses (PDF here), notes drones now in use can carry thermal imaging, high-powered cameras, license plate readers and LIDAR (light detection and ranging). “Soft” biometrics and facial recognition won’t be far behind, the report suggests, allowing drones to “recognize and track individuals based on attributes such as height, age, gender, and skin color.”

“The relative sophistication of drones contrasted with traditional surveillance technology may influence a court’s decision whether domestic drone use is lawful under the Fourth Amendment,” the report compiled by legislative attorney Richard Thompson II states.

The report expresses a view that in most cases, using drones to spy on people in their homes would have to fall within the legal “plain view” doctrine (which means police can only carry out surveillance of someone’s home from a “lawful vantage point”). However, areas nearby the home – say, in a driveway or at a gate – receive a much more ambiguous protection.

The report is also concerned that the falling cost of drones could, in itself, exacerbate privacy concerns, noting that: “access to inexpensive technology may significantly reduce budgetary concerns that once checked the government from widespread surveillance.”

The Congressional research report comes hard on the heels of a Panopticon-style FBI project became public. The Feds’ billion-dollar facial recognition “Next Generation Identification” project, described here in New Scientist.

Concerns about citizens being “droned” into a Panopticon* aren’t confined to America. Following stories in the Sydney Morning Herald about the increasing adoption of unlicensed private drones in Australia, the nation's Privacy Commissioner Tim Pilgrim has called for public debate about the technology, since the use of a drone by individuals “in their private” capacity is not covered by Australia’s Privacy Act.

* The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without their being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

It was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise.

The Panopticon creates a consciousness of permanent visibility as a form of power, where no bars, chains, and heavy locks are necessary for domination any more.

...contemporary social critics often assert that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures invisibly throughout society.

Blackbird
Built for Speed
Premium Member
join:2005-01-14
Fort Wayne, IN

Blackbird

Premium Member

Not to worry... we all just need to start going around wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Let's see what their facial-recognition drones do with that!

GadgetsRme
RIP lilhurricane and CJ
Premium Member
join:2002-01-30
Canon City, CO

GadgetsRme

Premium Member

said by Blackbird:

Not to worry... we all just need to start going around wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Let's see what their facial-recognition drones do with that!

Don't need a mask. Everyone just start wearing wide brimmed cowboy hats pulled down close to the eyes, ala Clint Eastwood.

FF4m3
@bhn.net

FF4m3 to FF4m3

Anon

to FF4m3
From Panopticism:

According to the tenets of Foucault's panopticism, if discursive mechanisms can be effectively employed to control and/or modify the body of discussion within a particular space (usually to the benefit of a particular governing class or organization), then there is no longer any need for an "active agent" to display a more overtly coercive power (i.e., the threat of violence).

The Canadian historian Robert Gellately has observed, for instance, that because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933-45 was a prime example of Panopticism.

Panoptic theory has other wide-ranging impacts for surveillance in the digital era as well. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, for instance, have hinted that technological surveillance "solutions" have a particularly "strong cultural allure" in the West. Increasingly visible data, made accessible to organizations and individuals from new data-mining technologies, has led to the proliferation of “dataveillance,” which may be described as a mode of surveillance that aims to single out particular transactions through routine algorithmic production.

Foucault also relates panopticism to capitalism:

"[The] peculiarity of the disciplines [elements of Panopticism] is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this 'economic' growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all elements of the system".

"If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power [i.e. torture, public executions, corporal punishment, etc. of the middle ages], which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. ... The growth of the capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, 'political anatomy', could be operated in the most diverse political régimes, apparatuses or institutions".
In their 2007 article, Dobson and Fisher lay out an alternative model of post-panopticism as they identify three panoptic models. Panopticism I refers to Jeremy Bentham’s original conceptualization of the panopticon, and is it the model of panopticism that Foucault responds to in his 1975 Discipline and Punish. Panopticism II refers to an Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ ideal of surveillance. Panopticism III, the final model of panopticism, refers to the high-technology human tracking systems that are emergent in this 21st century.


wxboss
This is like Deja vu all over again.
Premium Member
join:2005-01-30
Fort Lauderdale, FL

wxboss to FF4m3

Premium Member

to FF4m3
I wonder if these 'Panopticon pics' would have Facebook links, or would that be too redundant?