As you've probably heard surveillance cameras are in place along Seventh
Avenue in Ybor City that use computer face recognition software to check
EVERYONE who passes' face against a database of known and suspected criminals.
The Tampa City Council is having a public hearing on the face scanning
software at 11:30AM this Thursday, the 19th, at City Hall in downtown Tampa.
Anyone who wants to can speak for 3 minutes on the subject. PLEASE come out
if you can and show your support for getting RID of this fascist monitoring
system!
This is messed up for several reasons:
- It destroys the public's reasonable expectation of being able to move
around in public without being searched and accosted by police. Suppose you
look like someone who robbed a bank a few years ago. The cops stop you and
search you on 7th Avenue because you matched on the face scanner. You aren't
the person they want, but they find a bag of weed in your pocket and arrest
you for posession. Or you're drunk and start arguing with them. They haul you
in for resisting arrest and public drunkenness. Without the face scanner,
none of this would have happened.
If the court rules that a face match is probable cause to conduct a
search. What next? What if a cop thinks you look like that suspect he saw
last week? Can he search you then, too? These cameras will be the first step
in the erosion of our Fourth Amendment protection from random searches and
the transformation of America into a police state.
- Every other city in the country is looking at Tampa to see how this goes
over. If we set a precedent of allowing this to pass in our city, soon EVERY
streetcorner in the COUNTRY will have a camera hooked up to unreliable face
matching software.
- The framework will then be in place for total 1984-style tracking of the
whole population. They'll be able to tell when you go out, where you go, who
you associate with.. what next? If they arrest some guy for selling drugs and
you've been seen in his vicinity several times that week, can they use that
to get a warrant and search your home for drugs? Anyone the government
decides to target will be subject to all kinds of fines and penalties for
trivial crap like jaywalking, dropping a gum wrapper, etc. In short, the
government will gain the ability to make anyone they want to's life a living
hell by pulling out a backlog of minor offenses and prosecuting for them.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If we let this go, it'll open the door
to a whole new era of technological monitoring of the populace. (What if your
car was required by law to have a device which issues you a ticket if you
speed?) It will become 1984. If we slam the door on this now and make clear
laws saying we don't want this, it can be caught and stopped now before it's
everywhere. If we don't, it will become precedent, accepted, and commonplace.
We decide the future NOW.
PLEASE come out if you can, or at least visit http://www.tampagov.net/ and
e-mail City Council to let them know what you think. The whole world is
watching us. This public face-scanning system is the first of its kind in use
anywhere in the entire planet. WE decide the what the future of the world
will be like by what we do now.
Thanks. Please forward this to anyone you know who cares about privacy and
uncontrolled government power.
-Paul
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