Your Face Is Not a Bar Code

Phil Agre has a solid essay opposing automatic face recognition systems in public areas. These uses are only going to increase, because the technology is cheap (enough) and appealing to authorities everywhere; it's good to have some arguments to hand for opposing the spread of the cameras.

Facial Recognition has other uses

Just because law enforcement would like to use it for catching criminals doesn't mean it can't be used for good.

Think about it- Similiar to Gates's house- walk into a room, machine recognizes your face (instead of the pin) and changes your pictures on the wall to suit.

Authenticate your identity online to prevent fraud (although, some Celebs might have trouble with that... 3 million elvis's ... :P

Search your high school yearbook- search old newspaper clippings...

And.... catch some known pedophile that's broken parole.

It's a great technology for those who don't run afoul of the law... but... the power and lack of regulation are very worrying.

Face recognition

It's not all bad, though.

Automatic surveillance would release police resources, which are currently being stretched to the limit, to more useful purposes like responding quickly to emergencies.

It's surprising to see how anti-law enforcement the /. crowd really is. The only thing that's keeping you, your families and your property safe is a robust law enforcement system. Without law enforcement your precious computers and consoles would be stolen in no time.

As computer geeks

As computer geeks we all know that no matter how good the coders are that design the software, it still can and still WILL make mistakes.

And in things like this where having the same earlobes and chin as someone will get you taken down in a public place..... well, I wouldn't want it to happen to me.

Re:As computer geeks

The cameras are not going to be used as a definitive identification device. There is a margin of error with all forms of identification. Eyewitness accounts have been proven to be inaccurate numerous times in the past. The cameras are simply a tool to help law enforcement officers perform their job more effectively. They are NOT the judge, jury and excecutioner. They ARE an effective method of helping the police identify possible fugitives. I think anything that takes some of the strain off of law enforcement officers and increases police efficiency should be embraced with open arms.

The cameras aren't infringing upon anyone's rights. You ARE NOT entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are in a public place. You ARE entitled to privacy within the confines of your home or private property. But that's not the issue. I don't understand how you can possibly be upset about someone taking your picture in public. If you've done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide, and applaud this system for making the streets safer for our children.

How to defeat face scanners

These devices scan your face to determine bone structure, so facial hair, glasses, or anything else on the surface wont make a difference. The secret to defeating facial recognition systems is to either break your jaw and have it reset in a different position (not recommended) or to put things in your mouth (fill your cheeks and lips) that alter the structure of your face.

Pretty shaky arguments.

Ager's core assumption is that liberty is a vital attribute of the individual. Even John Stuart Mill did not go so far. JSM was willing to concede the right of the government to take preventative measures, especially in a society so overcome with crime that entire neighbourhoods resemble a different, much more dangerous nation than the rest of the city they are in.

If you relax for a moment, the belief that individual liberty is a universal right -- an assumption that has by no means been proven fait accompli, you will see that these camera's provide an a priori benefit to society. Criminals cannot wander free in our streets and malls with these around.

Let's stop and think about the children for a second. I believe that if we as a free society were to register all known pedophiles in a national database with pictures, this system could ipso facto provide massive benefits for the endangered young of our nation.

I can not in good faith oppose pro bono publico a system which almost guarantees safety for my children. I do not trust the mettle of anyone who does not agree with this.

Bow to the inevitable and kiss freedom goodbye.

Sadly, the same biometric mechaisms which will make transactions over the internet completely secure will also make it impossible for people to hide outside of their own homes (and many governments will try to put them inside as well.)

Since surveillance cameras are cheap, can be unobtrusive, (can you tell me where the cameras are around you?) always there and always on, the powers that be will use them to implement surveilance that's just as pervasive.

Since these cameras will be installed in community owned spaces surveying community owned property, you'll have absolutely no say in the matter.

In fact, the excuses will be that the surveilance is mandated and demanded by a responsable community.

I hear Ted Kazinski's cabin is for sale.

Efficent Terror

Totalitarianism in this century is going to be a lot easier because the government won't have to employ tons of informants and security service personell. They can just use face recognition to watch everybody and find out who the dangerous people are or who the leaders of insurgencies are and then locate them and eliminate them efficiently without disrupting the daily lives of everybody else. Running a good security service was possible in low tech times but was a tremendous economic drain on any totalitarian country and required executing a lot of uneccessary people just to keep people on their toes.

We are seeing this put into practice, for better or for worse, in Israel. Let's ignore completely who's right and who's wrong in the whole thing (I don't want to get off topic). The Palestinans are still low tech and have to rely on generalized terror of the old inefficent kind that brings a lot more condemnation on them then they would like because it often kills people who are not involved in the conflict per se. The Israelis on the other hand have very good intelligence, possibly even face recognition that lets them locate leaders of insurgency groups and meticulously pick them off.

So in the future the world will enter an era of permanent stablity, for worse no doubt, because if you get out of line you can be effciently eliminated.
The only solution I can see to this is to put this kind of technology into the hands of civilians. Put together a big network of civilian owned face recognition systems and feed into them the faces of politicians and then watch what they do.

Between this and the traffic cameras

things are really starting to get tight. All of these stories about traffic cameras, facial recognition and monitoring cameras just go together too well. It seems like you can believe in one of two things:

1. This gradually closing surveillance net that will be able to track you anytime you leave your house is a result of the unwitting acts of many legislatures/public officials which result in "skynet". or

2. This really is a "boil the frog" approach by government to keeping tabs on everything. IOW, they really *are* out to get you.

I think that it's probably the first but the end result is the same. More people need to make their voices heard on this type of stuff. We here in America, in general, seem to depend on the media to out this kind of stuff but we should not be so lackidasical (sp?) about it. This really is important. Oh, btw, the "traffic management" cameras are just stupid. A highway isn't like a train where you can divert trains onto extra tracks. There just aren't any extra 6-lane highways laying around. Sure, you might "divert" traffic from the highway to surrounding streets but what do you think will happen when 6 lanes of traffic gets "diverted" to a 2 or 4 land suburban avenue.......

Why this will happen

When talking to some of my friends about privacy issues, even some of the computer geeks (I mean this in a good way) to do not have too many concerns about privacy and that kind of stuff, like they don't expect to have any. Sounds like one of those things where everyone will only miss it when it's gone.

One possible solution

One possible way to defeat these systems is to have everyone wear halloween masks in areas with these cameras. It's tough to figure out who is who if we all look like Richard Nixon. Perhaps citizens in areas with these systems can organize a protest by walking around these areas with masks on. If someone will pay for airfare to Tampa plus hotel accomidations, I'll make some time to come down there and take part in such a protest.

your face could easily hold a bar code

I thought the fascists running the CIA and the FBI and the NSA and the DEA had a long term plan to tatoo barcodes on everybody's forehead they could get away with.

B.

privacy is the problem, not the solution

trying to stop a piece of software is ridiculous. (DMCA?) Its inevitable that information will become easier to collect. Society is becoming more transparent and that can be a good thing-

read some David Brin [lycos.com]
Salon also had this [salon.com] to say

Great

You know in all of my days dealing with all kind of people, the people I fear the most is law enforcement.

Sure, you can say "you should have nothing to fear if you aren't doing anything wrong." but that is the problem. Sometime you have to fear when you haven't done anything wrong. In some places you will be hounded becuase you're a white man in the black part of town. Other time, you're get pulled over becuase you drive a red car. Then you get a gun pulled on you and your life treated becuase some pig "don't like your kind."

It's like i was saying the other day to a friend "you have nothing to fear but cops." Think about it, when someone robs you, you have to right to fight back. If you fight back to a cop, they can kill you. Oh sure, it not all that bad, until you had a gun pointed to you by the protector of the law knowing his buddy would go right long with the story that you resisted assest. And you might make news, and you know what? People are going to say "yeah he should've been shot." Then media pumps the crime like every person walking around is a rapist, like everybudy is just waiting to rob you blind, or jack you when ever they get a chance.

I know there is crime, and I think it's bad, but when the police turns to law abidders and make crimes, that is where I draw the line.

What's the difference?

A security guard recognises a criminal from a mug shot on one of his cameras. He might be right, or mistaken. He'll have to check to be sure.

A piece of software flags a person as a criminal. It might be right or mistaken. It will have to let the security guard check it out to be sure.

The only difference is now one guard can handle more cameras better. The same with finger print software. You can check more fingerprints faster. The crime labs have used those for years. A human eye must still be the ultimate authority, the computer narrows the field a bit.

-Bocaj

countermeasures

This face recognition scare can be put to rest if Madison Avenue just decides that the newest fashion trend will be masks. Yes, masks. We will all wear masquerade garb. It will be facial encryption.

Another alternative would be to figure out how to send an electronic signal of someone else's bone structure into the camera eye of the facial recognition device, perhaps with the use of an altered laser pen-like device.

Admittedly, this is all fantasy and science fiction. But I don't think speculation hurts us at this point.

You can say your ass is not a shit hole...

... but you can't stop shit from coming out of it.

The author of the article is probably right that it is not pertinent for government accelerate the trend towards automatic recognition at this point, but the just the topic betrays a dangerous fallacy in his reasoning. If it is possible to use your face to identify you (and it is, of course, we evolved that way) then your face is, for all intents and purposes, a human barcode. You can throw a fit and argue all you like about how horrible that is, but by denying the simple inevitable truth you will just be making your situation worse.

Your ass is a shit hole, and your face is a bar code. Get over it, and start from there. The right thing to do when technology starts infringing on our integrity and liberty is not to fight technology, because that is futile and stupid, but to develop technology that evens the scale, or to compensate by other means.

In this case there is no need to develope new technology, masks have been around for some time. If you are not willing to pay the price of inconvience of wearing masks in public, then you do not deserve your freedom. The true infringement on liberty is, of course, when somebody tells you that you cannot use a mask (just like Carnivore is not an issue, while bans against encryption are crimes against humanity).

As for compensating, the best way to compensate against a loss of privacy is to decrease the amount of power over you that you grant to others. As governments are able to track us better, we need to make sure that the amount of power we grant to them decreases accordingly.

Now here did I leave my tinfoil hat?

...To advance the control of public opinion and to research and expand the understanding of how to manipulate the human psyche, individually and collectively. Today this agenda includes the microchipping of people and their permanent connection to a global computer.

This is a line from this site [converge.org.nz] here, and a quote from a book by a certain David Icke. I was pretty sure the bit about microchipping was pretty far-fetched.
I'm not so sure now, at least conceptually speaking. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. The desired end it would seem, can be achieved by tracking individual's movements coupled with thought manipulation through popular media.

This needs some constraints, but not a bad idea

I can't really say that i like the idea that i could be under surveillance of this type in a public place, but i DO see how it can be of great value to protecting public interests, such as catching dangerous criminals.

This is why i think that some laws should be placed to guide the use of this technology.

First of all, it should be available to ONLY law enforcement. Using this technology in bookstores, malls, etcetera, is wrong, this allows corporations to use this for their own profit, most likely at the customer's expense (we all know how trustworthy corporations are).

Second of all, if a known criminal is identified by this system and apprehended, s/he should have to go through a proper identification process before anything further occurs. This *should* go without saying, but if it isn't explicity stated in the law then i can imagine many occurrances of "mistakes" leading to some pretty uncomfortable situations.

Haven't we heard these arguments before?

Is anyone else struck by the similarity in argumentation for creating DMCA and that for limiting face recognition?

Parts of DMCA were written because those with the power to do so believed people couldn't be trusted with technology. In that case the technology to break copyrights and hence illegally spread copyrighted material.

Now we are sitting back and use the same arguments ourselves that we can't trust the people in charge to make reasonable use of facial recognition technology, or to limit the system in response to privacy and rights concerns.

Obviously both scenarios bring up rights issues which differ significantly, but the arguments for DMCA and against facial recognition rarely focus on these. As you might notice 5 of Arge's 7 main points against facial recognition rest on the potential for abuse or considerable privacy invasion (linking such systems to information about average people).

Perhaps this is the nature of society and we really can't trust enough people to be responsible when it comes to the oppurtunities new technology gives us. Frankly though if that's true, it says something sad about the state of the world we've made for ourselves.

Personally I feel that both DMCA and facial recognition software benefit legitimate concerns and can serve a useful purpose. If properly legislated in an enforcable way then it should be possible to strike a balance between the varying concerns. That's not to say that DMCA as currently constructed couldn't use revision or that facial recognition should grow unchecked.

Ultimately, if we are going to make arguments, then we need to be consistent. Either we accept or reject the argument that people will abuse new technologies on a wide scale. From there we decide how the issue plays out with respect to human rights concerns. Beware of people that will dismiss your concerns in one setting and then champion them in another setting. (For the record I don't know if Ager does this since I can't recall hearing arguments from him about DMCA, but I know some organizations certainly have put forth contradictory arguments when it serves their purpose.)

Oh no

I won't be able to pick my nose or scratch my butt knowing that a camera is watching me. I don't want to be walking with an itchy butt all day.

Mom used to be afraid of the Sears catalog...

because her kids would look at the underwear section. Now we are flooded with all types of much more graphic imagery from numerous sources. It's the onward march of technology, and we have to take the good with the bad.

I find it interesting that so many people here on Slashdot are opposed to the restriction of technology that may be used for fraudulent purposes, such as copying DVD's or bypassing software security features, but seem to have no problem pushing for restrictions on other technology that may be used for such sinister purposes as "strangers calling you by name" or "shops pulling up your credit report when you walk in."

This is the Age of Information. The shape of your face is just another piece of information. If we need restrictions, we should restrict uses rather than capabilities.

Read that again: We should restrict uses rather than capabilities. Try thinking about that concept in different contexts that are important to you: facial recognition, copyright protection, encryption, decryption. Does it mean the same thing in each context, or do you change your opinion based on whether the technology benefits YOU?

I have to close with this gem from the essay: "For example, the press cannot publish pictures of
most people in personally sensitive situations that have no legitimate news value." What?! And this guy is worried about Big Brother?

Might b a good idea but...

One possible hole is that .. those of us with extremely ugly faces will cooredump the face recognition system.

Well.. Old Ben used to say...

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin.

Wider applications

C'mon you geeks... Think past the base application.

There's a lot more that the system could do than
just perform spot identification. Say you are
walking down the street with another "face" on
the list, now -you- get the bit set that you are
associating with known criminals, even if that's
not known to you. Now, that you are on the list,
anybody that you're seen with is a possible
associate.

The system can also be used to watch a certain
place and track who goes there. Go to a pr0n shop
that sells materials that border on pedophilia,
data mine that against your M$ passport account
that shows your net activity and that you've
got a 10 year old that also uses the machine.
Guiliy by triangulation.

I'm sure your employer would want to know that
you head to the corner bar every day after
work and stay for 2.3 hours.
After all, they have the right to protect their
profits by eliminating those with potential
"problems".

Data mining against cameras watching a poling
place on election day, correlating against the
sequence of votes cast brings up all kinds of
intriguing possibilities for those eager to
manipulate the process and influence future
outcomes.

As the software gets more sophisticated, it
could not only track you but also look at how
your image varies from your template. Eyes seem
a little red? Gait is a little unsteady?
Better set that bit and flag them for a closer
look.

Say you are a congressman and one day your
girlfriend comes up missing...uh, forget that.

This shit is as dangerous as it is inevitable.
--

Beware if you're a look-alike...

I have a relative who has the same name as a criminal's alias. The criminal does not have any other identification similar to that of my relative. But whenver my relative gets stopped by an officer (typically randomly), he typically is held for several hours if not days before they realize they have the wrong man. So far, this has happened two or three times.

Now my relative went to a police station to see if there was a way to warn police stations in the area that that someone else had the same name as the criminal. He was told there was not. While face recognition systems hopefully will have a lower error rate than the odds your name will match a criminal's, you better hope you don't look like one.

lets get real

fbi files show that John Lennon was monitored 24 hrs a day, including long range survelance using cameras and parabolic mikes, all his conversations and telecommunications were recorded, you can't get any more invasive than that, a few public cameras with recognition programs won't make a difference. In the long run it's no different than adding a couple more plain clothes police officers, except it's cheaper.

Problems have solutions...

Perhaps the most insightful work I've ever seen on the advance of cameras is an article put out there by wired YEARS AGO.... (December '96)

Really, Wired was so far ahead of its time....

The transparent society [wired.com]

I defy anyone to explain why this article doesn't, in two pages or less, explain the problem and the only truly viable solution...

Government vs. Capitalism

I'm not too concerned about face recognition technology being used by the government to track me. That would require that I've done something illegal, was caught, and my mug shots are in the system. Now, I doubt a government funded system will be powerful enough to track all the mugs of all the felons in America.

What concerns me are the Commercial applications of this kind of tool. We've all complained about how Doubleclick.com and other such businesses invade our privacy by tracking our web surfing habits. Well, imagine getting a membership card to someplace like Sams or Costco. They take your picture when you get this card. These stores have cameras. These stores have affiliates. Imagine if the corporate world decided it was a good idea to use this face recognition technology to follow consumers around and find out what their shopping habits are. The camera a the local grocery store may catch you lingering too long in the baby section, showing that you likely have children, or in the frozen section next to the ice cream, showing that you likely have a sweet tooth. Or maybe that surveilance camera at the convenience store will catch you lingering by the nudy magazine rack...

If you're really worried about this technology, don't be afraid of how the government will use it. The government has limits in budget and what it can get away with. Worry about the corporations.

The Argument is Based Well; But in Fallacy

"A free society is a society in which there are limits on what the police can do. If we want to remain a free society then we need to make a decision. Once a new surveillance technology is installed, it is nearly impossible to stop the slippery slope toward ever broader law enforcement use of it."

I think his paper is a good one, it serves to illustrate his points and he does have some good ones. However, statements like the one above show how persuasive logic fallacy can be, which is all over the document. In fact, he actually uses the term 'slippery slope' to identify the pattern, while not realizing that his argument is, in fact, a slippery slope of possibility and conjecture.

Just like Jews w/ numbers tattooed on their arms

The concept is identical; only the technology has changed.

What difference the database created with one than the other?

face identification software

Wow! You USians aren't on the slippery slope leading to fascism... you're there. If this had been practiced in the old USSR twenty years ago, USian politicians would have been trumpeting the dangers of Communism ergo 'Big Brother' and building more missiles.Now there seems to be a disconcerting number of you who think this is OK because it's just for criminals... and this in a country that seems to be rapidly criminalizing a HUGE proportion of their citizens.

As a matter of interest, you folks that agree that facial recognition software is Ok should look up the definition of 'psychopath' in a dictionary, and then ponder how many cops, politicians and Corporate CEOs you know that DON'T fit the profile.

Scary eh?

We certainly have our share of dipshit pols and CEOs here in Canada, not to froget the pscopaths in power at the corporate, judicial and governmental level, but I hope that this lust for technology to control the rest of us doesn't bleed across the border or it'll soon be time to build the Great Wall of North America... or failing that, to head for the mountains.and settle in for a long battle.

This is just one more reason why I will never, under any circumstances, ever visit the US again. Me and Dimitri.

Question:

Is there any legal requirement stating a person must be unmasked when entering a business establishment?

Individuals typically have the right to wear anything they like--to cover whatever body parts might offend, or to uncover them as they please. Can we assume a person may choose to not be videotaped when entering a business which has cameras? While I've seen signs stating video taping is in progress, I have never seen anything stating you waive your right to remain unidentified. I mean, sure, they're alerting you to the fact that there's cameras, but you never signed anything and they never stated you could not enter unless you were identifiable by video.

Perhaps the next Big Thing(tm) could be long, face-obstructing hats...

If nothing else, it might be fun for a weekend dodge to visit a store with a mask on in protest of video cameras. Should someone actually *do* this, let /. know how it goes, but I never suggested it!

Devil's advocate, point by point

The potential for abuse is astronomical. Pervasive automatic face recognition could be used to track individuals wherever they go.

If the government wanted to secretly track me wherever I went, they could easily do so today by deploying a team of operatives to follow me everywhere. As long as the surveilance takes place in public, my understanding is that there is nothing illegal about this.

If the government wanted to track everyone in the country using facial recognition, they would have to buy a lot of powerful computers. If the government wanted to track everyone in the country using physical surveilance, they would have to hire a lot of operatives. Ultimately, the former avenue will turn out to be more fiscally and logistically prudent, but we can't fault the government for frugality.

The technology is hardly foolproof. Among the potential downsides are false positives, for example that so-and-so was "seen" on a street frequented by drug dealers. Such a report will create "facts" that the individual must explain away.

This point is ridiculous. The same issue exists will all current forms of identification: there is a probability of misidentification associated with the identification method. If a fingerprint says you were at a crime scene, your defense attorney will call a scientist as an expert witness to state that the technology is XX.XXX% inaccurate. Same with DNA, witness identifications, etc. The process of "explaining away" digital face recognitions identifications is no different, and the possibility of misidentification no more alarming.

It is very hard to provide effective notice of the presence and capabilities of cameras in most public places, much less obtain meaningful consent.

BS. All over Britain, for instance, you'll find signs that say, "This area monitored by CCTV." That's effective notice as far as I'm concerned. The average citizen there knows what a CCTV camera does and is capable of, just as the average citizen will become familiar with facial recognition technology if it becomes pervasive. (I think it's reasonable to demand that the capabilities of the system be publicly available.)

If face recognition technologies are pioneered in countries where civil liberties are relatively strong, it becomes more likely that they will also be deployed in countries where civil liberties hardly exist. In twenty years, at current rates of progress, it will be feasible for the Chinese government to use face recognition to track the public movements of everyone in the country.

We can only debate the propriety and legality of the technology in countries that protect privacy. The technology will advance and cheapen to the point where it avails the government of Evil Country X regardless of American civil liberty law. I really don't think the Chinese government bases its surveillance decisions around what happens at the Superbowl.

Of course, if the US chose to oppose widespread deployment of facial recognition technology, then it would have a moral high ground from which to decry Chinese human rights abuses. This works in China because the US holds a carrot of cash and commerce that allows it to exert influence on Beijing. In North Korea, Iran, and a whole lotta other countries that couldn't care less above American notions of morality, the opposition would gain nothing.

.............

I'll close by mentioning that in the country I live in (the United States of America), my identity is not private when I'm in public. I am required by law to carry legal identification with me at all times when in public, and am required to present it to any police officer who asks to see it. If a cop asks to see my ID 50 times an hour, I would consider it harrassment and grounds for a civil suit. But (again, IANAL) I consider the harrassment to be a result of the repeated interaction between me and the cop; if the cop were to establish my identification once and then tell all his cop and robot buddies, "Hey, this is Steven, he looks like this, keep an eye on him," I wouldn't have grounds for complaint. (This obviously links back to the operative surveilance scenario mentioned at the beginning.)

How to REALLY defeat face-recognition...

Just wear a pair of Groucho Glasses [google.com]!
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&c li ent=googlet&q=%22Groucho+Glasses%22&btnG=Search&si te=images

public camera's easy to disable

our local city government has been in the habit of putting up camera's everywhere around here. I finally decided enough is enough when i found one in a public washroom.. so i devised a simple solution. a laser pointed at the camera for more than a couple of seconds has proven very effective. the results are quite tangible, I laze an offending camera, and the next morning the repair crews are replacing it the next day.. (im surprised they haven caught on to what has been killing their cams)

Re:Want this to go away?

Wanna bet that they would start to vote differently on this kind of stuff?

Yes they would. As typical in federal legislation, the law would be written that they were exempt.

Re:So What

This logic reminds me of poor Mr Gattling who was convinced that his invention would save lives...

Here in Quebec we had a thing in octobre 1970 where a small group of extremists kidnapped some bigwig and killed him (accidently it turns out).
well our fine governement declared martial law, and thousands of people were arrested and roughed up (pushing shackled people down long flights of stairs was a favourite) because they had done "something wrong". their political beliefs made them criminals in this situation. (being a member of the wrong political party...)

Wait until they use this technology to scan crowds of protesters, labelling them as though-criminals, and then they can just wait until they go back home and next time they go shopping they can arrest them one by one with a nice pretense (pedophilia, how hard is it to "find" kiddie-p0rn in a siezed computer?) and lock them away, rough 'em up, whatever.

And if you think that this will never happen you need a history class ASAP. Governments aren't nice, governments start wars, they're in it for the money and power.

Re:I wonder if painting stripes on your face...

The thing is that one lone zebra looks damn conspicuous in the savana. That camouflage only works if you're blending in a crowd of people doing the same thing as you.

Hey, it could be the next big fad!
:)

Right, but no Copyright required

You own your own face, the government cannot afford to use this technology, we'll all just charge $500k, and then they'll stop using it. I don't think that you should even have to copywrite your own apperance.

Re:This is ALL BAD

We've been on the slippery slope for years. A "crime" is not something you commit against your fellow man, it's a beaurocratic catch-all term for anything that it was once politically expedient to outlaw. Possessing MDMA can get you 10 years, and no lawmaker ever voted on that ... MDMA was just lumped in with other drugs that people in power didn't like and/or their corporate constituents couldn't compete with. No Constitutional amendment started the Drug War, which both started and ended Alcohol Prohibition. We have been lawless for a long time and are getting more and more lawless with each new law that is passed. There's no underlying tenet that explains why hemp is so illegal and the alcohol, tobacco, and Nylon(TM), Valium(TM), etc. that has replaced hemp for most people is not. Valium(TM) is more addictive; Nylon(TM) is not environmentally responsible. Nobody dies from smoking pot and yet doing so alone in your house is a very dangerous act solely because your fellow man will send in cops to commit you to prison where you will be raped and tortured.

The number of people who celebrated freedom at Woodstock in 1969 is dwarfed by the number of people who were ruined by Prohibition and the Drug War in the 20th century. The US puts more people in prison than any other country. The majority of prisoners are there for consensual crimes ... they just offended an aristocrat or religious leader's sensibilities is all. They did something "heathen" and they went to jail for it. At the same time, we all pretend that the Constitution is actually followed ... we pretend that all of our laws are Constitutional when it is plain that very few actually are.