High tech may save CA, but it will definitely doom privacy

I’m all for technological advances. In fact, I’ve slowly come around to the wild-sounding idea that scientific breakthroughs just might save California from decline by creating so much wealth and free stuff that eventually we will live in what Slate economics writer Matt Yglesias calls a “post-scarcity” world.

But it’s going to be a world without much privacy, also thanks to advanced technology. Such tech makes it easy to track your phone and your car. And then there’s this sci-fi development in San Diego’s largest suburb, as detailed by the Center for Investigative Reporting:

“On a residential street in San Diego County, Calif., Chula Vista police had just arrested a young woman, still in her pajamas, for possession of narcotics. Before taking her away, Officer Rob Halverson paused in the front yard, held a Samsung Galaxy tablet up to the woman’s face and snapped a photo.

“Halverson fiddled with the tablet with his index finger a few times, and – without needing to ask the woman’s name or check her identification – her mug shot from a previous arrest, address, criminal history and other personal information appeared on the screen.

“Halverson had run the woman’s photograph through the Tactical Identification System, a new mobile facial recognition technology now in the hands of San Diego-area law enforcement. In an instant, the system matches images taken in the field with databases of about 348,000 San Diego County arrestees. The system itself has nearly 1.4 million booking photos because many people have multiple mug shots on record.

“The little-known program could become the largest expansion of facial recognition technology by U.S. law enforcement. Amid an international debate over collecting and sharing huge amounts of data on the public, this pilot program is putting that metadata to use in the field in real time.”

Public input? No need. Let’s just militarize!

As the report points out, this technology was developed for use on the battlefield and in hostile lands — meant for authorities bent on keeping a populace subjugated. Now it’s arrived in civilian USA …

” … without any public hearings or notice. In turn, the secrecy of the program has alarmed privacy experts and raised questions about whether San Diego is the leading edge of an alarming future –- one in which few people escape cataloging in a government database.

“Twenty-five local, state and federal law enforcement agencies -– including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and San Diego State University -– participate in the system. The project is coordinated by the San Diego Association of Governments and relies on a vast data-sharing program called the Automated Regional Justice Information System.

“For some, the use of biometric technology by police represents a radical milestone in the militarization of American law enforcement.”

Unfortunately, for most, they will just shrug it off, the way they’ve shrugged off all the insane stories the past four months about the nearly unlimited NSA spying on innocent people around the world.

That won’t change until this mass surveillance is linked to a horrendous abuse of power or to some immense financial crime.

It’s coming. Power corrupts. And the power to conduct mass surveillance on innocent and unknowing people presents opportunities for high-tech corruption that dwarf anything we’ve seen before.