Decentralization isn't as protective as you might think, as most capital funding for this type of public safety infrastructure comes from Federal grants.
Technologists have no professional ethical duties, licensure or other reasons to behave ethically. It's unrealistic to assume that individuals will choose some vague ethical position over money.
a) Western municipalities have deployed similar systems, albeit with massively significant differences in use case
b) Western political structures aren't perfect
c) the professional ethical obligations of technologists have yet to be codified
I'm certainly in agreement with you on all of these points, but I'm unclear on your argument. Is it just that many talented people will happily contribute to building a nightmarishly repressive socio-technical apparatus if the money is good enough? Again, no disagreement there, the article itself, and the many other stories on HN related to the shenanigans of Western security agencies, is ample proof of that.
If you ask a CPA or Attorney to do something contrary to their professional code of ethics, they will typically tell you "no" -- their livelihood is at stake.
The grey areas in IT are much broader and more situational. Is pervasive surveillance to protect citizens from terrorists unethical? Is it unethical to automatically police jaywalking? Is it unethical for me to use facial recognition to identify people approaching my home? There is no right answer to these questions.
I've forgotten the company name, but I googled it at the time and it was indeed a facial recognition hardware company.
Yes, US is more democratic and power is more decentralized, but without guardians or more awareness from the citizens, it's easily a slippery slope. Think UK and Theresa May. All Powers want more power.
Keep in mind, this necessarily includes not building those types of systems for their own use either.
Once a private entity has collected some juicy data, the government gets roll up and say "I'll help myself to some of that." And at that point the company has also preemptively conceded the vast majority of principled opposition to government use of such systems by exploiting them for commercial reasons.
this wouldn't defeat something like gait detection though: http://www.geradts.com/html/Documents/gait.htm
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528835-600-cameras-... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925574/ [3] http://www.ai.mit.edu/research/abstracts/abstracts2001/visio...
It's incumbent upon all of us to apply that pressure and work to maintain that decentralization. It's especially incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems and b) develop counter-measures.