Google has developed face-scanning technology that would block children from accessing adult websites ahead of a crackdown on online porn.
So, this is scary as hell, Google's developing tech to scan your face as a form of age identification, and it's yet another reason why we need to stop the various bad internet bills like EARN IT, STOP CSAM, and especially KOSA.
Because, that's why they're doing this, and that sort of invasive face scanning is what everybody's been warning people they're going to do if they pass, so the fact they're running up to push it through should alarm everyone.
And, as of this posting on 12/27/2023, it's been noted that Chuck Schumer wants to try and start pushing these bills through as soon as the new year starts, and some whisperings have been made even of all these bad bills being merged under STOP CSAM into one deadly super-bill.
So, if you live in the US call your senators, and even if you don't please boost this, we need to stop this now.
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON on FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.
Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly) BigLaw firms:
Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance ā that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.
23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety ā to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.
Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if ā as a condition of protesting ā you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.
Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):
Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.
One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:
By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":
This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."
Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights are human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.
The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left ā it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' ā on the grounds that private property owners have the absolute right to decide which speech they will or won't permit. Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":
But while private censorship is often less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.
Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:
Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship ā with the main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.
The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private rule has been in America since its founding, when Thomas Jefferson tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution. A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:
If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.
40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form. The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:
This is especially true of our speech forums ā the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:
These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:
It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also privacy law. The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy ā like the failure to act on monopoly ā has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action ā every utterance, every movement, every purchase ā to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course sold.
With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.
Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country. The company is notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents in which the company used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that was suing the company from entering any of its premises:
This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:
Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.
But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added their faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises. For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:
This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.
Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton. Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and they add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?
After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?
Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?
More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights ā they're the ultimate human rights?
The old fears of Thomas Jefferson and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Starting Tuesday, customers who board most domestic Air Canada flights atĀ VancouverĀ International Airport will be able to walk onto the plan
Air Canada is poised to roll out facial recognition technology at the gate, making it the first Canadian airline to deploy the software in a bid to streamline the boarding process.
Starting Tuesday, customers who board most domestic Air Canada flights at Vancouver International Airport will be able to walk onto the plane without presenting any physical pieces of identification, such as a passport or driver's licence, the country's largest airline said.
Participants in the program, which is voluntary, can upload a photo of their face and a scan of their passport to the airline's app.
Mobile Fortify lets agents obtain vast amounts of information on anyone by scanning their face
After taking someoneās picture, an ICE agent can now scan for that personās face or fingerprints in a host of government databases that reportedlyĀ includeĀ more than 200 million images. The agent will immediately obtain vast amounts of information on that person,Ā includingĀ name and date of birth, possible citizenship status, names of family members, markers like alien registration numbers and much more.
ICE is reportedly using the app on people itĀ suspectsĀ of being in the country without authorization, but this presumption comes with its own host of problems. (ICE is alsoĀ believed to beĀ scanning random people of color on the streets to determine citizenship.) Representative Bennie G Thompson, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, toldĀ 404MediaĀ that ICE considers āan apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify [to be] a ādefinitiveā determination of a personās status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship ā including a birth certificate ā if the app says the person is an alienā.
It gets worse. In a document obtained byĀ 404Media, the governmentĀ admitsĀ that āit is conceivable that a photo taken by an agent using the Mobile Fortify mobile application could be that of someone other than an alien, including US citizens or lawful permanent residentsā. No one, citizen or non-citizen, is allowed to opt out, either. And, as the document states, ā[e]very new photograph or fingerprint, regardless of match, is an encounter and stored and retained inĀ ATSĀ [Automated Targeting System] for 15 yearsā.
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