11 ms·

FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

229 points by cVwEq 7y ago

mutt2016 7y ago
Cheap technology, thousands of AI programmer monkeys. Makes sense.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
craftinator 7y ago
Yay! More surveillance! Maybe we'll finally stop getting attacked by terrorists every single day!
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
  - OrgNet 7y ago
    some comments are just common knowledge and don't require references...
    - dang 7y ago
      I don't mean lacking in citations. I mean low-information, often snarky comments of the kind that grow like weeds on the internet. We're trying for better than those here. If something is common knowledge, there is little curiosity in it, so it needn't be repeated on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- manigandham 7y ago
  This might be of interest for you then, for stats on what people actually suffer from: https://twitter.com/billgates/status/1138520780042465280 https://twitter.com/billgates/status/1138520780042465280
imglorp 7y ago
What did you think was going to happen? Did you speak out against it when it was proposed? How would they NOT use this data available to them? https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/real-id https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/r...
- roywiggins 7y ago
  It was never publicly proposed. When was it proposed, and by who? It's not been seriously debated by Congress.
  - sp332 7y ago
    I thought the point of RealID was to make state ID databases accessible to federal agencies?
    - macinjosh 7y ago
      You are 100% correct. I remember complaining about this way back in 2005 when RealID was passed. To my chagrin I just got my RealID driver's license as it became mandatory in my state.
  - macinjosh 7y ago
    It was passed by Congress in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
    - godelski 7y ago
      What the parent is trying to say is that it was not public. This can mean that they just weren't aware of it too, or thought it was something else. I know when I heard about the RealID act there wasn't much discussion about it among my peers. It just seemed like an update into how licenses were done, and one that would make them more secure (and let's be honest, identification in the US is atrocious. We even use SSNs for identification!)
xmichael999 7y ago
I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an article about the UK doing this https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognition-failure-rate/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognitio... I can't find the hacker news link, but its worth a read.
- lobotryas 7y ago
  I would say that false positives are a feature. Like you mentioned it gives authorities cause to atop/investigate you. If they are wrong they have deniability. If they are right then mission accomplished!
  - gbrown 7y ago
    Ouch, a punch right in the fourth ammendment.
  - xmichael999 7y ago
    Yah, one only needs to use drug dogs as an example here. It is a known fact the dog can be triggered to claim a hit etc... and somehow in most states a dog doing "something" is sufficient justification to have your vehicle searched..
- gbrown 7y ago
  If I had to guess, they're paying a company tons of money for a crappy product that will make us all a bit less free, and will decrease the signal to noise ratio in actual investigation of wrongdoing. I'd also bet that there will be racial bias of one sort or another baked in, since the criminal justice system is heavily biased. Outcomes like "arrests" or "convictions" are poor proxies for crime, but good proxies for being brown or poor. As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases.
morpheuskafka 7y ago
Hmm, almost like those REAL IDs weren't such a good idea... not like civil liberties advocates mentioned this or anything... The ID security improvements (central issuance, anti-copying features) were fine and good, the federal database is not.
- koolba 7y ago
  Why? This is a feature, not a bug. It’s working exactly as intended.
- tal8d 7y ago
  Oh I miss the good old days when we were fighting things like the clipper chip and weaponized algorithms. Now it is all about the data, which is much more difficult to rally people around. Anybody else remember the time the Office of Personnel Management leaked all the military biometric records (plus security clearance metadata) they fought to have stewardship over? No more vets working under cover :) You'd think they'd have learned that they can't trust themselves to warehouse so much high value data in one place, that single incident will serve as a daily reminder for about 20 years. Lots of externalities in that as well: given what would have been in my records, I don't think I'd fare well doing business in China.
metaphor 7y ago
This line caught my attention: > The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches. What the GAO study[1] actually said: > However, we found that the tests were limited because they did not include all possible candidate list sizes and did not specify how often incorrect matches were returned. ... The FBI’s detection rate requirement for face recognition searches at the time stated that when the person exists in the database, NGI-IPS shall return a match of this person at least 85 percent of the time. However, we found that the FBI only tested this requirement with a candidate list of 50 potential matches. In these tests, 86 percent of the time, a match to a person in the database was correctly returned. The FBI had not assessed accuracy when users requested a list of 2 to 49 matches. According to FBI, a smaller list would likely lower the accuracy of the searches as the smaller list may not contain the likely match that would be present in the larger list. In other words, their acceptance test procedure was gamed from the beginning. [1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/699489.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/699489.pdf
- DanBC 7y ago
  But also, no-one understands percentages. WaPo should really present this information as a probability tree or an icon array chart.
  - iteriteratedone 7y ago
    But their readers dont understand correct methods. The readers dont see any difference between the current way and what you are suggesting. This is a uniquely hacker news read of the story.
  - krageon 7y ago
    I'm not sure I can follow your thinking when you say that a probability tree is easier to understand than a percentage. Has this been broadly scientifically understood? Is this something you have found within your field of work?
clay_the_ripper 7y ago
Sensible regulations around what the government can do/not do in regards to things like facial recognition tech seems like it’s becoming more and more necessary. I am far more worried about privacy invasions/abuse by the government than I am by private companies that seem to get all the press (ie facebook). For the simple reason that 1) facebook can’t arrest me 2) facebook has no incentive other than targeting me with ads 3) facebook is actually incentivized to keep this data to themselves now that future competitors will not be able to Hoover up as much data as facebook did. On the other hand, governments with the power to mass surveil their citizens has proven to be a horrible idea. Given the choice, I’ll take the lesser of two evils which is a company that is interested in knowing the things I buy and where I go, for the express purpose of selling better ads. But all the press goes to “let’s break up big tech”. I’d be much more interested in stopping the mass surveillance of citizens by an entity that has the power to kill, imprison, subjugate and arrest, rather than an entity that has the power to target me with ads.
- pixl97 7y ago
  The issue here is it is not an either/or. We commonly run into joint partnerships where the government doesn't have/maintain the data at all. The goverment just 'buys' an answer from the private corporation and the courts ok this behavior.
  - tal8d 7y ago
    For some dark comedy, look into NIST and their resistance to the release of their biometric software purpose built for the FBI. The solution they have since found is the purchase of COTS with contracts explicitly denying any kind of ownership as a result of purchase. We can't have the taxpayers getting too much bang for their buck!
- hedora 7y ago
  For all intents and purposes, the government has a superset of the data gathered by the big tech firms. In particular, they have to turn this data over to law enforcement by law. Separately, law enforcement routinely breaks the law and steals the backend databases these companies gather.
gizmoduck 7y ago
Is there a non-GDPR-wall, non-pay-wall, non-reenable ads version of this? Even their JS reaches through the the sands of Web Archive time and blocks viewing the article...
- gruez 7y ago
  https://archive.fo/ENxjn https://archive.fo/ENxjn
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
2Ccltvcm 7y ago
There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.
- godelski 7y ago
  These kinds of comments make me extremely upset. Such thinking is exactly why we're losing power in democracy. Such thinking is how authoritarians win. I will go as far as saying that spreading this idea is dangerous at best.
  - 2Ccltvcm 7y ago
    In my youth I spent thousands of hours I will never get back arguing about the merits of various social policies and I have never made a positive impact with my contributions.
    - godelski 7y ago
      Well then do more than just argue. And when you do argue, argue to change minds, not to win. I know I used to argue to win. I found that it just puts people off. It doesn't matter how right you are if you make the other person feel angry (obvious counter examples aside). Arguing to convince the other side is harder because you have to understand them. Not only that, but you have to demonstrate that understanding. It is always a continual battle. But besides arguing there are things you can do. As coders and techies we can contribute code. We can encourage open source and make our own code open source. We can help others find secure forms of communication. We can also do what many others in the public can do: protest, write our congressmen, and raise hell. How much and how little of this you want to do or have time for is okay. But I wouldn't say that just because you haven't convinced others means you shouldn't try. It just means you should change strategies. You after all, no matter how smart or right you are, are not perfect and neither is the person you're trying to convince.
verisimilitudes 7y ago
I'll resubmit since the tree my comment was in is dead. Firstly, I had to have this website believe I was using it from the US before it would let me read the article. Secondly, it's for exactly these reasons that I find it awful and indefensible that I should be required to have a driver's license. Thirdly, this is why I have a single photograph and will be reusing it for as long as I can. >Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases. This doesn't seem like an issue, considering those wouldn't be US citizens. It's bad when it happens to US citizens. Only an idiot would enter a country illegally and then register with some of its systems, such as this. It's important to remember that one reason a country may allow lawlessness, violence, or unchecked immigration is to then demand stricter laws and security measures to the problem it created.
_iyig 7y ago
Fairness of the U.S. immigration system aside, what is wrong in principle with law enforcement using driver’s license photos to uphold and enforce the law? When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S. I would be much more concerned if law enforcement were, for example, using these photos to profile drivers by race or using them in an otherwise illegal manner. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Just because I am in public doesn't mean that I want to be tracked by government all the time. The idea that FBI constantly knows where I am sounds Orwellian and unconstitutional to me.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  "When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy." I think in the age of automated large scale image recognition we need to revise the concept of privacy. I don't think we should lose our privacy completely as soon as we leave our home. And with devices like the Echo we don't even have privacy at home. There need to be restrictions on mass processing of this kind of data. Otherwise we'll create a version of the world of "1984" where nobody can escape surveillance.
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    I agree 100%. At least we can opt-out by not buying an Echo. People can't choose to not have a face when they want to go outside.
- aasasd 7y ago
  > When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy Would you say that someone stalking you all day every day is alright if it's in public? (Also, you seem to have missed that the police aren't using photos from just road cameras, but that's beside the argument really.)
aasasd 7y ago
I keep seeing the press complaining of police using face recognition that “is not accurate.” IMO yall might want to stop making that argument. Because you're gonna one day find cameras on every lamppost, and police tracking your every movement and saying “it's alright now because it's 100% accurate.”
RaceWon 7y ago
Imagine a USA where the citizens are no longer armed, and the 1st Amendment has been cannibalized by the passing of various "hate speech" laws that only serve the interests of the current elected... and then imagine trying to redress a Government gone full Orwellian. Just sayin.
- identity0 7y ago
  What you're describing is literally the UK right now.
  - RaceWon 7y ago
    > What you're describing is literally the UK right now. That's what I understand... and that is Exactly why I posted my original comment.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  How is this particular development relevant? The US government still has nukes, SSN, etc etc etc. This particular reading of the 2nd Amendment seems to have been frozen in time since the drafting of the Constitution.
  - RaceWon 7y ago
    > How is this particular development relevant? Well God forbid it ever comes to that, but there's probably 60 Million people with guns here, and most own more than one... so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. I mean it's not like we won in Viet Nam, to name one armed conflict that didn't go our way.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      >>so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. No it isn't? I mean, I know it's a very common conservative fantasy, but if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters, and your puny guns won't change the outcome. Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those things. This is aside from the fact that an armed populace only encourages the government's law enforcement agencies to arm themselves more, and increases tensions in every encounter because the LEO has to assume the target is armed.
sys_64738 7y ago
This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities. I think that there were plenty of problems with the old approaches to policing, too. It was and remains the case that there's no need for detection if you can manage to pin the crime on a conveniently available candidate, whether or not that person did it; and pinning the crime on whoever you've got is greatly assisted by brute-force techniques that have nothing to do with technology.
ct520 7y ago
Yeah this was a given when Arizona had to get new photos taken. We got called in 5+ years ago (we never have to renew) for new head shots. They zoomed in and were really particular about how our face showed up.
nirav72 7y ago
was in Aruba recently - The US Custom clearance occurs there before your return trip to the U.S. The CBP officer didn't even open my passport. just had me look into a webcam and he had my info pulled up on his screen with few seconds.

229 points by cVwEq 7y ago

mutt2016 7y ago

Cheap technology, thousands of AI programmer monkeys. Makes sense.

dang 7y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

craftinator 7y ago

Yay! More surveillance! Maybe we'll finally stop getting attacked by terrorists every single day!

dang 7y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- OrgNet 7y ago
  some comments are just common knowledge and don't require references...
  - dang 7y ago
    I don't mean lacking in citations. I mean low-information, often snarky comments of the kind that grow like weeds on the internet. We're trying for better than those here. If something is common knowledge, there is little curiosity in it, so it needn't be repeated on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
manigandham 7y ago
This might be of interest for you then, for stats on what people actually suffer from: https://twitter.com/billgates/status/1138520780042465280 https://twitter.com/billgates/status/1138520780042465280

imglorp 7y ago

What did you think was going to happen? Did you speak out against it when it was proposed? How would they NOT use this data available to them? https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/real-id https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/r...

roywiggins 7y ago
It was never publicly proposed. When was it proposed, and by who? It's not been seriously debated by Congress.
- sp332 7y ago
  I thought the point of RealID was to make state ID databases accessible to federal agencies?
  - macinjosh 7y ago
    You are 100% correct. I remember complaining about this way back in 2005 when RealID was passed. To my chagrin I just got my RealID driver's license as it became mandatory in my state.
- macinjosh 7y ago
  It was passed by Congress in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
  - godelski 7y ago
    What the parent is trying to say is that it was not public. This can mean that they just weren't aware of it too, or thought it was something else. I know when I heard about the RealID act there wasn't much discussion about it among my peers. It just seemed like an update into how licenses were done, and one that would make them more secure (and let's be honest, identification in the US is atrocious. We even use SSNs for identification!)

xmichael999 7y ago

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an article about the UK doing this https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognition-failure-rate/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognitio... I can't find the hacker news link, but its worth a read.

lobotryas 7y ago
I would say that false positives are a feature. Like you mentioned it gives authorities cause to atop/investigate you. If they are wrong they have deniability. If they are right then mission accomplished!
- gbrown 7y ago
  Ouch, a punch right in the fourth ammendment.
- xmichael999 7y ago
  Yah, one only needs to use drug dogs as an example here. It is a known fact the dog can be triggered to claim a hit etc... and somehow in most states a dog doing "something" is sufficient justification to have your vehicle searched..
gbrown 7y ago
If I had to guess, they're paying a company tons of money for a crappy product that will make us all a bit less free, and will decrease the signal to noise ratio in actual investigation of wrongdoing. I'd also bet that there will be racial bias of one sort or another baked in, since the criminal justice system is heavily biased. Outcomes like "arrests" or "convictions" are poor proxies for crime, but good proxies for being brown or poor. As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases.

morpheuskafka 7y ago

Hmm, almost like those REAL IDs weren't such a good idea... not like civil liberties advocates mentioned this or anything... The ID security improvements (central issuance, anti-copying features) were fine and good, the federal database is not.

koolba 7y ago
Why? This is a feature, not a bug. It’s working exactly as intended.
tal8d 7y ago
Oh I miss the good old days when we were fighting things like the clipper chip and weaponized algorithms. Now it is all about the data, which is much more difficult to rally people around. Anybody else remember the time the Office of Personnel Management leaked all the military biometric records (plus security clearance metadata) they fought to have stewardship over? No more vets working under cover :) You'd think they'd have learned that they can't trust themselves to warehouse so much high value data in one place, that single incident will serve as a daily reminder for about 20 years. Lots of externalities in that as well: given what would have been in my records, I don't think I'd fare well doing business in China.

metaphor 7y ago

This line caught my attention: > The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches. What the GAO study[1] actually said: > However, we found that the tests were limited because they did not include all possible candidate list sizes and did not specify how often incorrect matches were returned. ... The FBI’s detection rate requirement for face recognition searches at the time stated that when the person exists in the database, NGI-IPS shall return a match of this person at least 85 percent of the time. However, we found that the FBI only tested this requirement with a candidate list of 50 potential matches. In these tests, 86 percent of the time, a match to a person in the database was correctly returned. The FBI had not assessed accuracy when users requested a list of 2 to 49 matches. According to FBI, a smaller list would likely lower the accuracy of the searches as the smaller list may not contain the likely match that would be present in the larger list. In other words, their acceptance test procedure was gamed from the beginning. [1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/699489.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/699489.pdf

DanBC 7y ago
But also, no-one understands percentages. WaPo should really present this information as a probability tree or an icon array chart.
- iteriteratedone 7y ago
  But their readers dont understand correct methods. The readers dont see any difference between the current way and what you are suggesting. This is a uniquely hacker news read of the story.
- krageon 7y ago
  I'm not sure I can follow your thinking when you say that a probability tree is easier to understand than a percentage. Has this been broadly scientifically understood? Is this something you have found within your field of work?

clay_the_ripper 7y ago

Sensible regulations around what the government can do/not do in regards to things like facial recognition tech seems like it’s becoming more and more necessary. I am far more worried about privacy invasions/abuse by the government than I am by private companies that seem to get all the press (ie facebook). For the simple reason that 1) facebook can’t arrest me 2) facebook has no incentive other than targeting me with ads 3) facebook is actually incentivized to keep this data to themselves now that future competitors will not be able to Hoover up as much data as facebook did. On the other hand, governments with the power to mass surveil their citizens has proven to be a horrible idea. Given the choice, I’ll take the lesser of two evils which is a company that is interested in knowing the things I buy and where I go, for the express purpose of selling better ads. But all the press goes to “let’s break up big tech”. I’d be much more interested in stopping the mass surveillance of citizens by an entity that has the power to kill, imprison, subjugate and arrest, rather than an entity that has the power to target me with ads.

pixl97 7y ago
The issue here is it is not an either/or. We commonly run into joint partnerships where the government doesn't have/maintain the data at all. The goverment just 'buys' an answer from the private corporation and the courts ok this behavior.
- tal8d 7y ago
  For some dark comedy, look into NIST and their resistance to the release of their biometric software purpose built for the FBI. The solution they have since found is the purchase of COTS with contracts explicitly denying any kind of ownership as a result of purchase. We can't have the taxpayers getting too much bang for their buck!
hedora 7y ago
For all intents and purposes, the government has a superset of the data gathered by the big tech firms. In particular, they have to turn this data over to law enforcement by law. Separately, law enforcement routinely breaks the law and steals the backend databases these companies gather.

gizmoduck 7y ago

Is there a non-GDPR-wall, non-pay-wall, non-reenable ads version of this? Even their JS reaches through the the sands of Web Archive time and blocks viewing the article...

gruez 7y ago
https://archive.fo/ENxjn https://archive.fo/ENxjn
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

2Ccltvcm 7y ago

There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.

godelski 7y ago
These kinds of comments make me extremely upset. Such thinking is exactly why we're losing power in democracy. Such thinking is how authoritarians win. I will go as far as saying that spreading this idea is dangerous at best.
- 2Ccltvcm 7y ago
  In my youth I spent thousands of hours I will never get back arguing about the merits of various social policies and I have never made a positive impact with my contributions.
  - godelski 7y ago
    Well then do more than just argue. And when you do argue, argue to change minds, not to win. I know I used to argue to win. I found that it just puts people off. It doesn't matter how right you are if you make the other person feel angry (obvious counter examples aside). Arguing to convince the other side is harder because you have to understand them. Not only that, but you have to demonstrate that understanding. It is always a continual battle. But besides arguing there are things you can do. As coders and techies we can contribute code. We can encourage open source and make our own code open source. We can help others find secure forms of communication. We can also do what many others in the public can do: protest, write our congressmen, and raise hell. How much and how little of this you want to do or have time for is okay. But I wouldn't say that just because you haven't convinced others means you shouldn't try. It just means you should change strategies. You after all, no matter how smart or right you are, are not perfect and neither is the person you're trying to convince.

verisimilitudes 7y ago

I'll resubmit since the tree my comment was in is dead. Firstly, I had to have this website believe I was using it from the US before it would let me read the article. Secondly, it's for exactly these reasons that I find it awful and indefensible that I should be required to have a driver's license. Thirdly, this is why I have a single photograph and will be reusing it for as long as I can. >Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases. This doesn't seem like an issue, considering those wouldn't be US citizens. It's bad when it happens to US citizens. Only an idiot would enter a country illegally and then register with some of its systems, such as this. It's important to remember that one reason a country may allow lawlessness, violence, or unchecked immigration is to then demand stricter laws and security measures to the problem it created.

_iyig 7y ago

Fairness of the U.S. immigration system aside, what is wrong in principle with law enforcement using driver’s license photos to uphold and enforce the law? When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S. I would be much more concerned if law enforcement were, for example, using these photos to profile drivers by race or using them in an otherwise illegal manner. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

ma2rten 7y ago
Just because I am in public doesn't mean that I want to be tracked by government all the time. The idea that FBI constantly knows where I am sounds Orwellian and unconstitutional to me.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
"When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy." I think in the age of automated large scale image recognition we need to revise the concept of privacy. I don't think we should lose our privacy completely as soon as we leave our home. And with devices like the Echo we don't even have privacy at home. There need to be restrictions on mass processing of this kind of data. Otherwise we'll create a version of the world of "1984" where nobody can escape surveillance.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  I agree 100%. At least we can opt-out by not buying an Echo. People can't choose to not have a face when they want to go outside.
aasasd 7y ago
> When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy Would you say that someone stalking you all day every day is alright if it's in public? (Also, you seem to have missed that the police aren't using photos from just road cameras, but that's beside the argument really.)

aasasd 7y ago

I keep seeing the press complaining of police using face recognition that “is not accurate.” IMO yall might want to stop making that argument. Because you're gonna one day find cameras on every lamppost, and police tracking your every movement and saying “it's alright now because it's 100% accurate.”

RaceWon 7y ago

Imagine a USA where the citizens are no longer armed, and the 1st Amendment has been cannibalized by the passing of various "hate speech" laws that only serve the interests of the current elected... and then imagine trying to redress a Government gone full Orwellian. Just sayin.

identity0 7y ago
What you're describing is literally the UK right now.
- RaceWon 7y ago
  > What you're describing is literally the UK right now. That's what I understand... and that is Exactly why I posted my original comment.
JetSpiegel 7y ago
How is this particular development relevant? The US government still has nukes, SSN, etc etc etc. This particular reading of the 2nd Amendment seems to have been frozen in time since the drafting of the Constitution.
- RaceWon 7y ago
  > How is this particular development relevant? Well God forbid it ever comes to that, but there's probably 60 Million people with guns here, and most own more than one... so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. I mean it's not like we won in Viet Nam, to name one armed conflict that didn't go our way.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    >>so basically a gun for every man, woman and child; its a formidable defense against tyranny. No it isn't? I mean, I know it's a very common conservative fantasy, but if the federal government comes after you, they are doing so with tanks and helicopters, and your puny guns won't change the outcome. Vietnam is not a good analogy. Your average American is dumb, fat and undisciplined. The Viet Cong were none of those things. This is aside from the fact that an armed populace only encourages the government's law enforcement agencies to arm themselves more, and increases tensions in every encounter because the LEO has to assume the target is armed.

sys_64738 7y ago

This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities.

JadeNB 7y ago
> This is the problem with technology. In the old days the police were required to use detective work to solve crimes with supporting evidence. Nowadays they use brute force technology to find an alleged felon then use brute force techniques to take them down. Usually the latter is based on probabilities. I think that there were plenty of problems with the old approaches to policing, too. It was and remains the case that there's no need for detection if you can manage to pin the crime on a conveniently available candidate, whether or not that person did it; and pinning the crime on whoever you've got is greatly assisted by brute-force techniques that have nothing to do with technology.

ct520 7y ago

Yeah this was a given when Arizona had to get new photos taken. We got called in 5+ years ago (we never have to renew) for new head shots. They zoomed in and were really particular about how our face showed up.

nirav72 7y ago

was in Aruba recently - The US Custom clearance occurs there before your return trip to the U.S. The CBP officer didn't even open my passport. just had me look into a webcam and he had my info pulled up on his screen with few seconds.