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California Police Are Sharing Facial Recognition Databases to ID Suspects
- sadris 7y agoThis is great. More sharing between departments will help catch criminals faster.
- elliekelly 7y agoAnd help catch innocent people faster, which is not so great.
- sodosopa 7y agoThey’ve shared fingerprint data as soon as AFIS went online in 84. This is an advancement of the same process. How many innocent people are caught with fingerprint data?
- knd775 7y agoBasic facial structure (the kind that can be captured from CCTV) is an order of magnitudes less unique than fingerprint data.
- sodosopa 7y agoThe tech will improve. Fingerprint data from cards use to be high tech. Also the William & Will West case was an older example of misidentifying by photography. Modern tech has improved dramatically and will get more and more precise. Why apply early 2000’s tech issues to the advancements made in the past 15-20 years?
- ziddoap 7y agoIt should not be massively adopted and utilized, for real arrests with real people, on the basis that "the tech will improve".
- opencl 7y agoMaybe it will get better at some point in the future but the systems available and in use today have a very alarmingly high false positive rate. https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-tech-has-81-error-rate-independent-report-says-11755941 https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-te...
- spaceribs 7y agoThe same things were probably said when they rolled out the polygraph machine, and that's still notoriously ineffective.
- mtgx 7y agoEvery single one of "most advanced face auth technologies" have been hacked within weeks at most, including Apple's faceid.
- saagarjha 7y agoWhen was Face ID hacked?
- colejohnson66 7y agoIt wasn’t; It was tricked. But it required a 3D model of a face with a lot of effort put in. Though that’s probably what GP meant
- 420codebro 7y agoIn this thread people forget that nothing is truly perfect or secure. But it does not make it worthless. A threat model exists for a reason. A risk reduction model exists for a reason. Using a tool (computer/ML) to do 95% of the pattern matching is called one thing: not being a dumbass. I sincerely wonder if any of these super-hostile anti-facial ID activists have truly had someone close to them impacted by a crime, and had said crime go unsolved. Or are they merely idealistic loafers, clutching their pearls, to signal how "woke" they are?
- arkades 7y agoLie detectors are woefully unreliable, but PDs use them. Forensic “matching” of bullets to guns is basically pseudoscience, but continues to be used in court to convict people. Roadside drug analysis kits are less useful than dowsing rods, but get people arrested on a daily basis. People that can’t afford bail, and plead guilty just to get back to their lives, despite the fact that an actual defense attorney would have had the case tossed in the trash. Previous experience suggests that police tech does not just “get better.” They can’t even progress past “disproven pseudoscience.” And the innocent people that have their lives messed with while waiting for the tech to catch up might not be indifferent to the process.
- colejohnson66 7y agoI’ve never heard of ballistics being pseudoscience. Not that I don’t believe it, but where can I read about that?
- logfromblammo 7y agoI have heard of it being bunkum, but not quite of the same ~caliber~ as fiber matching and bite-mark matching. It can, at best, match ammo from the same machine-manufactured batch to a factory-stock model of gun. It automatically fails on hand-load cartridges, or ammo that the analyst cannot readily source. When there is a match, the prosecutor might say "this bullet was fired from this gun", but the science says "a bullet similar to the one in evidence was marked and deformed in a similar fashion, when fired by the weapon in evidence (just as it would with every other factory-stock copy of this model of gun)". It's like matching a nail to the hammer that drove it. If the test nail is already different from the reference nail, you cannot match it. If you have two or more identical hammers, you can't tell which one drove the nail. The hammer factory made thousands of identical hammers. In most cases, the tests are likely saying "the most commonly sold type of ammunition was fired from the most popular model of gun of that caliber". It's the sort of thing that should probably be used exclusively as exculpatory evidence. I.e. this model of gun always leaves distinctive markings, such as from an off-center diamond-shaped firing pin, or from an uncommon rifling twist, that were not found on the bullets in evidence, so the gun in evidence could not have fired them. Otherwise, a gun substantially similar, with all the same machine-made parts, could leave the same marks, so you could never know for sure which one fired the bullets. The only time it would be useful to convict is if someone used a unique, hand-made, gunsmithed gun to fire factory-made ammunition. And the number of (violent) crimes committed with that type of display-piece gun approaches zero, because they tend to be both expensive and less fit for use as a weapon than cheaper factory-built guns.
- rhacker 7y agoIf that data can lead to suspects that's a start. Then you have 4 suspects to put a subpoena to google for tracking data. Go from there.
- knd775 7y agoGreat! So now the police can go through my personal information because I happen to look slightly like a criminal from a certain angle.
- harry8 7y agoand you don't come to the attention of the police by being innocent so it's safe to assume you're guilty and watch the evidence appear. And this is why the advice is to say nothing whatsoever to police. Don't help them get the falsehoods out of their case anywhere but in front of a judge in a court. And the police may not be bad people or involved in organised crime. All this tech makes a turnkey police state right there waiting. Who is going to turn that key before we dismantle it? Think of the children.
- refurb 7y agoHow would it be any different than if they showed a witness your mug shot and the witness said "yup, that's him!".
- RHSeeger 7y agoSearching for your exact question indicates it does happen. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27233798/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/review-lapd-fingerprint-unit-sought/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27233798/ns/us_news-crime_and_cour... > Commission President Anthony Pacheco said Friday that he was highly concerned after learning police have arrested at least two innocent people because of faulty fingerprint analysis.
- sadris 7y agoAnd how many innocent people were convicted based on false positives? How many guilty people were convicted based on true positives?
- Jill_the_Pill 7y agoThese are not comparable. The first must be zero, and the second should be "as many as possible while keeping the first at zero."
- sadris 7y agoIt must be zero? What if that resulted in 50% of murderers getting away?
- UncleEntity 7y agoThen the justice system is relying on faulty technology.
- sodosopa 7y agoThe justice system relies on human memory all the time. That’s the most unreliable thing we currently use.
- ericns 7y agoWhat happened to "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." As expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s. Seems you're willing to punish an innocent man and a guilty man just to make sure a committed crime is followed up with a conviction. Why have such a low bar in 2019?
- lightbyte 7y agoConsidering fingerprint analysis is pseudoscience and almost entirely made up (along with most other "forensic science") [1] [2] we can assume LOTS AND LOTS of innocent people are caught with "fingerprint data" [1] http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?recordid=12589 http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?rec... [2] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12589/strengthening-forensic-science-in-the-united-states-a-path-forward https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12589/strengthening-forensic-sci... >"There is some evidence that fingerprints are unique to each person, and it is plausible that careful analysis could accurately discern whether two prints have a common source, the report says. However, claims that these analyses have zero-error rates are not plausible; uniqueness does not guarantee that two individuals' prints are always sufficiently different that they could not be confused, for example. Studies should accumulate data on how much a person's fingerprints vary from impression to impression, as well as the degree to which fingerprints vary across a population. With this kind of research, examiners could begin to attach confidence limits to conclusions about whether a print is linked to a particular person."
- sodosopa 7y agoI would still want to look at the rate. Is it 1 of 10 or 1 in a million? At what number are we comfortable for our safety?
- navigatesol 7y ago>Considering fingerprint analysis is pseudoscience and almost entirely made up Quite the stretch to go from "non-zero-error rates" to "made up pseudoscience" isn't it? It's a problem if people are being convicted on fingerprint analysis alone. But as a piece of the puzzle, when combined with other evidence, what is the issue?
- mtgx 7y agoHow about the fact that those fingerprints Haven long been stolen and likely abused by all sorts of undergeound criminals? Even federal workers fingerprints were stolen in the OPM hack.
- 420codebro 7y agoI love HN. Comments like this get downvoted, but everyone knows it is true.
- homonculus1 7y agoThat is essentially the problem to those of us who oppose it. When you say "criminals" you are probably thinking of strictly people who harm others, but the state is thinking of anybody who breaks its laws. Currently many of those laws exist solely to keep certain groups in power, and there is no guarantee it won't get even worse in the future. Human law enforcement ensures layers of decisionmakers who are at least theoretically capable of empathy, and limited manpower makes them prioritize the worst or most flagrant crimes. Automated law enforcement gives a smaller group of people horrifyingly granular levels of control over all of society.
- dannykwells 7y agoI often criticize SF for being overly zealous around weird issues...but their ban on facial recognition is looking more prescient by the day. I hope other cities follow suit. Also, non sequitur, have there been any proposals for how to detect when your country has become an authoritarian dystopia?
- gumby 7y agoI have a hard time getting too upset about this as described in the article. Sharing police fingerprints and mug shots doesn’t sound too bad. There are of course “but”s: - should mug shots be retained for people later freed/not convicted? Certainly. It he case today for photos, prints, and (in California) DNA. - expanding into the DL database, as mentioned in the article seems like a dangerous scope creep — though what if they are investigating a driving offense like a hit and run? Anyway, a useful article. But not necessarily a bad thing, for a change.
- alfromspace 7y agoThis is something I think is justifiable in time-sensitive cases like tracking down a kidnapper, but I fear there's no way to grant such power and expect its use to always remain narrow. In my opinion, most issues in our country come from the compounding of lots of well-intentioned systems built up over several centuries that no longer even remotely serve their original purposes.
- icxa 7y agoThat's how every infringement of our civil liberties has come into existence: It has one or two very limited justifiable cases, and everyone goes 100% all in on that and focuses on that, but not what we will lose. Everyone always dismisses it as a slippery slope fallacy but here we are, with our rights against illegal search and seizures almost completely chipped away. Asking an officer for a search warrant is almost a formality at this point. Cops routinely exercise civil asset forfeiture and make it impossible to regain the goods lost, the 3 letter agencies are downloading and analyzing anything we type online and building comprehensive profiles and behavior models and running our actions online against said models, etc, etc.
- alfromspace 7y agoI see far more slippery slopes than slippery slope fallacies. It makes me want to reject these kinds of ideas from the get-go, because the pasts of our bureaucracies and representatives have given us really no good reason to believe every great new idea won't be expanded far beyond its scope sooner or later.
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoThis is why I am for facial recognition ONLY on probable cause, and affirmed by a judge under a search warrant. Cats out of the bag with facial recog. Might as well have strong legal documentation and judges on the line with this.
- close04 7y ago> every great new idea won't be expanded far beyond its scope sooner or later And when the expansion is justified by shocking statements ("stop terrorists and pedophiles, think of the children" type stuff) that's when people should stop and think. Because anyone trying to convince you by shocking you probably wants to hide something in that shock.
- landcoctos 7y agoMy local PD wants to do this. The need the City Commission to pass a resolution allowing them to sign this agreement. I spoke with one of my commissioners who then had a meeting with the Police Department. The end result was the Police removed the item from the Commission meeting because they needed more time to prepare, justify and lay out policies in its use. Had I not reached out this likely would have been rubber stamped.
- landcoctos 7y agoFor the record I am against any use of facial recognition, however, I do acknowledge that many are not. Thus, I would at a minimum like to see a clear policy for when it can be used, image retention (if any), image sharing, etc.
- nerdponx 7y agoThus, I would at a minimum like to see a clear policy for when it can be used, image retention (if any), image sharing, etc. This is what's important. There need to be clear legal expectations set about the security of this data. It has legitimate uses, but it should be a pain in the ass to access and share, like HIPAA. You have to really need it and make a case for needing it.
- rhacker 7y agoSan Jose, 2010 Me to cop: That's him you can see him breaking into the car here at 10:15, then at 12:05 we have a perfect clear view of his face. Cop: We can't really do anything with this, I mean we can take the copy of the video but we don't have any way to identify him. Me: So we can't really do anything? Cop: Yep sorry
- justinclift 7y agoStill have that video? Statute of limitations not run out yet? :)
- vinbreau 7y agoYou must not own capital then. If you had they would have worked hard to help you. If you had been a big box store showing the footage to the police they would have helped. But as an individual, they are not there for you.
- nerdponx 7y agoThe point is that the police wouldn't have the "it's too hard" excuse with a face database.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- swebs 7y agoDo you have evidence, or is this just a conspiracy theory?
- Nuzzerino 7y agoAre you really implying that the police apply protection equally? That's a naive worldview imo. Do you have evidence for the contrary?
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- kbos87 7y agoFacial recognition technology has all sorts of situations where one can imagine where it would be useful. Unfortunately all of the ways you could use it to suppress, discriminate, silence, and intimidate people outweigh any upsides by miles. Facial recognition tech should be outlawed, unequivocally, plain and simple. I’m not holding my breath that will happen.
- SN76477 7y agoAny profiling or identifying should require a warrant or reasonable (and well documented) suspicion.
- doc_gunthrop 7y agoPerhaps this can lead to the birth of an industry of clothing and facial-wear as a countermeasure against facial recognition.
- openforce 7y agoBurqas?
- throwawaysea 7y agoGood. This means police will be more efficient in identifying and catching suspects. Facial recognition is always used as a first-pass filter, so the false positive rate is not relevant - it simply narrows the search space so that limited police resources are used efficiently.
- inetknght 7y ago> This means police will be more efficient in identifying and catching suspects. That's quite a claim. Prove it. > Facial recognition is always used as a first-pass filter, so the false positive rate is not relevant I don't understand. Are you saying that using a filter negates a false positive? I don't think that's accurate at all. > it simply narrows the search space so that limited police resources are used efficiently. What about the rights of someone who's been falsely implicated?
- throwawaysea 7y ago> That's quite a claim. Prove it. Why does it need to be proven before it is implemented? Did you ask for proof that use of Microsoft Office or electricity by police departments would make them more efficient? It seems inherently obvious and frankly, common sense, that a network of cameras and facial recognition software are going to be more effective at identifying perps in the wild than a handful of officers patrolling the streets, needing to remember the faces of everyone they're on the lookout for, and scanning their surroundings constantly for matches. > I don't understand. Are you saying that using a filter negates a false positive? I don't think that's accurate at all. The concern often raised is that trusting an imprecise algorithm is risky. But in reality matches from facial recognition software are reviewed by humans as a second-pass filter prior to taking action (like dispatching officers). We already trust humans to perform policing inherently by the act of having police forces exist, so there is no elevated risk introduced by use of facial recognition that isn't proportionally offset by a higher degree of true positive matches, since any elevated false positive match raised by the algorithm is contained by the humans reviewing potential matches first. > What about the rights of someone who's been falsely implicated? They still have rights, and can fight those claims. Why would you expect this to be any different due to the use of facial recognition? If the suspect looks like whoever police are seeking, then they would be exposed to the risk of implication orthogonal to the existence of facial recognition. And there are ways (even if not perfect) to fight those claims. We retain policing as a necessary part of society despite its imperfections because it is necessary and hugely better than the alternative of not having police forces. And all this holds true even with police departments adopting technology - whether that is electricity, Microsoft Office, or facial recognition.
- ThrustVectoring 7y agoThe cat's out of the bag with this technology - it exists, citizens will demand that the police use it to help solve crimes. The way forward is to ensure that it gets used as an investigative tool, rather than part of mass surveillance. The way to do that is to make sure that querying a facial recognition database is too expensive for ubiquitous use. A court order per face you want to identify is likely enough, though I'd like an additional $100-$1000 fee to discourage rubber-stamping. IIRC, the police have hired people who are just really good at recognizing faces and given them a giant stack of photographs of criminals. Driving down the difficulty of that sort of process - identifying suspects with known faces - seems actually reasonable. Driving down the cost of identifying faces to the point where you can have a historical database of identity-annotated sidewalk footage of an entire city is the sort of thing we need to fight.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>IIRC, the police have hired people who are just really good at recognizing faces and given them a giant stack of photographs of criminals. Driving down the difficulty of that sort of process - identifying suspects with known faces It's believed in some circles this at least sometimes just BS and is a cover for parallel construction.
- mcny 7y agoPreviously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563430 > Today, you are not you, you are your data, a persona. And you are somehow responsible for it or anything that casts a similar shadow. I think it is a similar case here. The main problem won't be that my face is out there. The problem will be that the police will stop you or stop by at your house to "just have a chat" because some algorithm matched your face to some input somewhere with a 90% confidence. By the way, who owns the photographs and how do the departments have authority to share them with some company? If they can share with with that company, why not make the data public and let everyone have access to it? I'd like to play with the data as well.
- johnday 7y agoDo you think there's more chance of this happening, versus Barbara down the shops being shown a photograph and saying "oh yes, that looks just like mcny from two doors down"?
- pavel_lishin 7y agoI'm not mcny, but yes, of course. It'll be massively cheaper to just yank the confidence slider down until results pop out, vs. sending meatbags walking around an area, showing photographs to neighbors.
- proc0 7y agoI'm glad SF outlawed facial recognition. At least they got one law right.
- justchilly 7y agoSan Francisco has the #1 highest property crime rate in the country. Can hardly compliment their policing policies. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-San-Francisco-ranks-No-1-in-13267113.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-San-Fr...
- entropea 7y agoMaybe fix the issues that cause those crime rates instead of throwing more abilities at already overpowered police departments?
- proc0 7y agoSFPD don't even enforce homeless laws properly and let people live in same street in tents for years. However facial recognition wont fix any of this, and just make things worse.
- justchilly 7y agoQuestion for people that are anti facial recognition. What methods of identifying people are you ok with? Are you ok with the police/news asking other people to help identify someone? To me that sounds like facial recognition with extra steps? The arguments against facial recognition like that there can be false positives, or that can affect some groups more than others, doesn't that also apply when people are identifying people? If so isn't the real solution to require more evidence than just a facial match, not to ban an effective way of narrowing a suspect pool. That way police can spend less time manually identifying people and more time getting other evidence.
- sjaknanxnnx 7y agoI’m concerned because probability is not intuitive. Suppose a store is robbed, and there’s a video. The police identity some suspects - the guy who just got out of jail for robbing the same store, and another person the store owner had a dispute with. Neither of them look like the robber in the video. Then the police take a still from the video and knock on some doors around the block. Somebody recognizes the person in the video, and the police investigate that person. This scenario seems pretty fair to me. Now suppose the police run it through the facial recognition system. It identifies one person as a 99% match, and the police go investigate this person. This scenario does not seem so fair to me. Here’s how I see the math: P(A) = P(robber has a doppelgänger living on the same block) = .01 P(B) = P(robber had a doppelgänger somewhere in the database) = .9 P(X) = P(police screw up investigation, and will convict the suspect whether or not they are guilty) = .2 P(AX) = .002 P(BX) = .18 The exact numbers are made up, but as long as P(A) << P(B), you can see you this tech will result in a huge increase in false convictions. Even if P(X) is low, the number of false convictions increases by P(B)/P(A).
- justchilly 7y agoI'd argue the %s are not intuitive either way. In fact, if P(A) does happen, and there really is an unlucky doppelganger, that person is very likely to be charged. That could have been avoided with technology produced gave 5 other suspects that don't live on that block. Should it therefor be allowed for criminal defense if not prosecution? The issue with the P(A) and P(B) argument is that police already use databases heavily, and most people don't have any problem with it. But why when it comes to facial recognition, is it too dangerous to use technology to drive efficiency. If they're looking for somebody named Jane Doe, anybody with that name shows up on a list and police investigate. Of course if there are Jane Does in a 2 mile radius, they start with those. So why not just say if the system delivers a match within x accuracy and the person is within y residents (plus a variety of other variables), and x/y is below a threshold, then the match can be presented to police for further investigation. Searching databases for matches is fine for names, or fingerprints, shoe prints, tire track, fiber analysis - but not faces? I personally wonder if it's really any different, or if its just better tailored for the media outrage machine because "China does it", or because "facial recognition targets minorities".
- User23 7y agoI came to a realization on this subject while visiting Las Vegas: Pragmatically, a maximally high trust society and a maximally low trust society permit the same behavior patterns. In Las Vegas casinos, which are low trust and have high surveillance, one can comfortably leave tens of thousands of dollars or more on a gaming table while one goes to use the bathroom or whatever. In a hypothetical high trust low surveillance environment one could do the same. The difference is, we know how to engineer for low trust and high surveillance. We don't really know how to engineer for high trust and low surveillance. So our practical choices are to either live in a low trust low surveillance society and having to constrain ourselves as that requires, or to live in a low trust high surveillance society that simulates a much more pleasant high trust society.
- carapace 7y ago> live in a low trust high surveillance society that simulates a much more pleasant high trust society And in a high surveillance society, whatever the initial conditions, the cost/benefit ratio of cooperation vs. defection is biased towards trust. In other words, the ersatz high trust society would become the real thing, of course only provided the surveillance is trustworthy. For example, China's social credit system might work if it is administered sans corruption. It has to be self-reflexive. As incredible as it seems, Mrs. Grundy will save us.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- raven105x 7y agoThese are essentially 'super-technologies', much like government-requested back doors and master keys. It's not an overstatement to say that the potential they hold is on par with human genetic engineering - something the civilized world has thus far agreed is a road best avoided. Sure, the ethical dilemma of them is enough to give pause - but are the following not much greater risks? * These systems will crowdsource "evidence", and by proxy, accountability - what happens when a mistake is made? * Increased centralization will eventually enable 'single point of failure' scenarios in systems of a national/international scale. * What happens when someone misuses or gains unauthorized access to such systems? Will the damage be reversible? Such technologies will be deployed before accountability for them is defined, leading to a temporary absence thereof. Systems of the past (digital or otherwise) were inherently tolerant to misuse, malfunctions & misfires because only so much damage could be done before the errant behavior was discovered & handled. Today, how many seconds would it take to plunge a country into chaos?