What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in making surveillance data transparent and public.
We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least.
Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it.
If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - by gosh, eventually it will become true.
Ultimately what the Bill of Rights means is determined by the Supreme Court. It could limit the Third Party Doctrine, which is really what gives the government warrantless access to that information, in light of new technology and social circumstances.
> "More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
Gorsuch may also be on board:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
> [Gorsuch] appeared eager to apply originalist principles to contemporary technology in a way that shields cellphone users from law enforcement overreach. Indeed, Gorsuch seems poised to build upon the jurisprudence of his predecessor, Justice Antonin Scalia, to establish real constitutional limits on the government’s ability to track our movements through our mobile devices.
The same recourse when you're false-positived by a witness, I'd assume: get a lawyer. Personally, I'd probably place my trust in facial recognition (possibly not this system specifically, though) over human eye-witness testimony, based on my understanding of human psychology and its vulnerability to incentives.
It's not as dire as it's sometimes painted. MD attempted to apply mass-ticketing with intersection cameras, and it was found to violate the state Constitution because the use of a car in committing a crime didn't imply the owner was behind the wheel at the time.
If the technology is unreliable, we call it out as unreliable. What society is going to need is people well-versed in the ways the tech can fail to be good, not a doom-sayer's disregard of the ways the technology can help.
I can see a time where the presumption of guilt is assumed simply because the technology says so. Clearly we are not there yet and possibly never will be. I hope that issues will be sorted out before the technology gains widespread use.
I still shake my head that "wiretap" laws are what are being used (last I knew a few years ago) - why not have a clean law to address modern communication capabilities and proper privacy & court interests? :-/
This isn't a technology problem, it's a legal problem.
The technology isn't going away no matter who provides it and as long as it's legal someone will.
What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real, pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in the system.
The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-cit...