8 ms·

California Blocks Police Body Cam Use of Face Recognition

137 points by danso 7y ago

greatjack613 7y ago
Great news, but I want to get rid of those face recognition border-pass less gates by airports. It scares me that the DHA has a picture of my face without my knowledge
- mtgx 7y ago
  This should be a much larger scandal. It's beyond creepy, and it seems like something only a government that intends to abuse this sort of power would do. Otherwise, they'd hold a public debate, pass a law, and then ask people to come and give them their facial profiles, like you would a photo ID. But the US gov goes ahead and collects everyone's facial profiles, when even something like photo IDs is super controversial with Americans. I think most American would be outrage to discover this has been happening -- most probably assume that it's the airlines that has gotten their photo when they signed-up or something.
- mlindner 7y ago
  What are these? I've never heard of such a thing.
- kyboren 7y ago
  > Great news, but I want to get rid of those face recognition border-pass less gates by airports. I have not yet had to deal with that, but CBP tries very hard to capture your facial biometrics when you cross the US border. FYI, US citizens are not required to use those kiosks with the facial biometric scanners. You can simply present yourself directly to a CBP officer with your passport and completed Form 6059B and they must admit you. The most recent time I entered the US, CBP insisted repeatedly that they had to use facial biometrics in order to assess the validity of my claim to US citizenship (i.e., to authenticate me against my passport) and that without submitting they would not admit me into the country. I refused, as CBP has neither the constitutional nor the statutory authority to seize my biometrics. In the end, the CBP supervisor went into his office, presumably called CBP lawyers, and then one particularly dull CBP officer did a literally minute long theatrical hexadecimal-take looking back and forth at my face and at my passport photo. Again, CBP tries really hard to collect all the data they can, and they do everything possible, including outright lying and threatening, to make people think they just have to go along with it. If you're a US citizen, you don't, and I encourage you to join me in resisting their tyranny-building.
- vinay427 7y ago
  I don't understand why this is a comcern, to be honest. Government agencies already have your photo if you enter the US (among other countries) legally, and they presumably have CCTV in airports that can be used to identify people after the fact. They also know when and where you entered the US regardless of whether you use the kiosk. What is so special about the kiosk taking another picture of you to compare?
someonehere 7y ago
For the record if anyone didn’t know, they ran the software against the state politicians. It misidentified 26 (I think) state politicians as existing criminals. Which I see irony in there.
- daenz 7y ago
  Being misidentified as a criminal is a feature not a bug.
- mc32 7y ago
  There are likely more than 26 state politicians who are criminals who have not been discovered yet. It’s gotta be more than 26. The hard part is figuring out which ones are the criminals and which ones are politicians doing their thing.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Yes, they're probably all authoritarian crooks but that's not the point. The point is they haven't been convicted so they weren't in the data set yet the software thought they were. The false positive rate is unacceptably high.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  >It misidentified 26 (I think) state politicians as existing criminals. It's both funny and sad at the same time on multiple levels.
- briandear 7y ago
  Misidentified?
  - hasahmed 7y ago
    Tuche
- jklontz 7y ago
  The AWS Rekognition study I believe you are referring to was fundamentally flawed in two ways. First, the threshold used was the default suggested for one-to-one matching (lower false reject rate, higher false accept rate). It doesn't make sense to use this threshold for search applications, and when the study was reproduced with a more appropriate (higher) threshold there were 0 mis-identifications. Second, law enforcement use of face recognition doesn't even involve the algorithm making a lights-out identification decision. Instead, the most similar faces are presented to the user in ranked order by similarity (like a search engine). It's a tool for generating investigative leads, often preferable to publishing the face image of a wanted perpetrator on local news.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
Designed in California.
- li4ick 7y ago
  Dataset assembled in China
- dang 7y ago
  Nonetheless, please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
  - annoyingnoob 7y ago
    I support this decision by California. I support a lot of what comes out of California. Its okay if you don't agree with me. Can you point me to your definition of 'substantive comment'?
    - dang 7y ago
      It should contain information that isn't obvious and not read like a snarky toss-off.
m0zg 7y ago
Sounds dumb, but typical for CA. I think it's dangerous to have pervasive, Chinese-style always on face recognition surveillance. But I see no problem whatsoever with face recognition on body cams, because the officer is actually there, and if they could recognize faces well, they would. The cam is just providing an assist - even trained humans are pretty terrible at matching against a large number of faces. Even if the system doesn't work super well now, systems like these improve as they are fed more data and told when they guessed wrong. That's why it's called "machine learning".
- hokumguru 7y ago
  Fun fact, some humans are in fact better than even our best computer algorithms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/11/super-recognisers-police-the-people-who-never-forget-a-face https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/11/super-recogn... But obviously the required resources between these two solutions vary wildly.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    That guardian article got posted here back when it was new and the general consensus was "sure there's some people who are that good but they're so few and far between it's probably just a front for parallel construction"
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  It's not a useful assist if it's misinformation. There's a tendency to trust what comes out of a machine as infallible. I certainly don't want anyone armed carrying a badge getting notified in real-time of false-positives for potentially violent, armed, most-wanted criminals. It just becomes a green light for use of excessive force. "The officer feared for his safety, the automated identification system reported the driver with the busted tail light as being the violent drug lord known as El Chapo. Our condolences go out to the substitute teacher's friends and family."
  - m0zg 7y ago
    >> It's not a useful assist if it's misinformation. You're making a typical mistake by thinking these systems will not improve over time as they get more training data. They will, and given enough time, data, and elbow grease they will eventually reach superhuman levels of accuracy. But for them to get there they need to be exposed to the world under realistic circumstances.
mullingitover 7y ago
The ACLU has some weird goals - arguing that businesses should be forced to deal in cash, forcing cities to allow slums on their streets, and now preventing automated detection of wanted criminals. I know they do some good things, but they're definitely not hitting home runs when it comes to making the world a better place.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  Can you link to the specific cases that the ACLU was advocating for and the exact legal arguments on both sides? Law tends to be exceptionally rigorous and technical on language, and not linking to the specific cases in question and how their formal arguments conclude in your claims makes them sound like bad faith oversimplifcations.
  - mullingitover 7y ago
    I honestly don't care about the justifications. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm just observing the outcomes.
    - Falling3 7y ago
      >I honestly don't care about the justifications. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Do you not see the irony in that statement in the context of discussing whether further infringements on our civil liberties are worth it because "bad guys"?
      - mullingitover 7y ago
        The world isn't black and white. Giving everyone freedom to camp wherever they want takes away people's freedom from disease and crime. Giving everyone freedom to transact purely in untraceable cash takes away freedom to transact how you want, and also enables fraud and money laundering. Taking facial recognition tools away from law enforcement prevents crime victims from bringing their victimizers to justice.
bsenftner 7y ago
This law and media surrounding it is the CA state pandering to misinformed and reactive public pressure. First off, police body cameras are dumb recording devices. They cannot run FR software without being completely different devices, probably requiring a completely different set of hardware and software producers than now. Police body cameras are little more than GoPro like compact cameras with holsters for wearing while recording. They are not designed with any feedback capability, no networking, and no load and run some software capability at all. If they could run FR software, which they can't, their expense would prevent their adoption. And if they could, they would need to have wireless FR synchronization between officers and command to make any tactical sense. They probably should have AR to actually be of use in the field. Sounds too expensive to be affordable by police. At that level, keeping the technology an officer wears down starts to make sense; the body cam sends video to command and command is where FR is run on more economical and faster servers for all the officer video feeds. Any meaningful FR or related information is digested with command and verbally related to the active officers in the field. My point being, this practical use of FR is unaddressed by this new law. The law is nothing.
- _caw 7y ago
  For what it's worth, the assertion that policy body cameras are simply dumb recording devices is not true. At least one body camera on the market now is fully capable of running FR software and has full networking built in - essentially a smartphone.
  - bsenftner 7y ago
    If you're referring to the DirectView cameras, they are closer to being practical, but not really. They cannot run 3rd party software, and don't even have an SDK for external development. The body camera industry produces recording devices, not mobile video enhanced computing devices.
eloff 7y ago
Is this really good news? Are we safer for it or less safe? I'm not sure we even know the answer to that because the tech is so young. I hate to see immature tech banned before it gets refined into something useful, because version one of something always sucks. I know that people here have a knee-jerk privacy big-brother is watching reaction, and I have that too. But beyond that I want to think if it was something that could have been beneficial to society or not.
- hgoel 7y ago
  Even if it were safer, we do genuinely need to draw a line between privacy and safety.
- Jach 7y ago
  Fortunately California law is not universal law, so the populations that want to further explore the possibilities of the tech can continue to do so, and perhaps cause California to reverse the decision in the future.

137 points by danso 7y ago

Great news, but I want to get rid of those face recognition border-pass less gates by airports. It scares me that the DHA has a picture of my face without my knowledge

mtgx 7y ago
This should be a much larger scandal. It's beyond creepy, and it seems like something only a government that intends to abuse this sort of power would do. Otherwise, they'd hold a public debate, pass a law, and then ask people to come and give them their facial profiles, like you would a photo ID. But the US gov goes ahead and collects everyone's facial profiles, when even something like photo IDs is super controversial with Americans. I think most American would be outrage to discover this has been happening -- most probably assume that it's the airlines that has gotten their photo when they signed-up or something.
mlindner 7y ago
What are these? I've never heard of such a thing.
kyboren 7y ago
> Great news, but I want to get rid of those face recognition border-pass less gates by airports. I have not yet had to deal with that, but CBP tries very hard to capture your facial biometrics when you cross the US border. FYI, US citizens are not required to use those kiosks with the facial biometric scanners. You can simply present yourself directly to a CBP officer with your passport and completed Form 6059B and they must admit you. The most recent time I entered the US, CBP insisted repeatedly that they had to use facial biometrics in order to assess the validity of my claim to US citizenship (i.e., to authenticate me against my passport) and that without submitting they would not admit me into the country. I refused, as CBP has neither the constitutional nor the statutory authority to seize my biometrics. In the end, the CBP supervisor went into his office, presumably called CBP lawyers, and then one particularly dull CBP officer did a literally minute long theatrical hexadecimal-take looking back and forth at my face and at my passport photo. Again, CBP tries really hard to collect all the data they can, and they do everything possible, including outright lying and threatening, to make people think they just have to go along with it. If you're a US citizen, you don't, and I encourage you to join me in resisting their tyranny-building.
vinay427 7y ago
I don't understand why this is a comcern, to be honest. Government agencies already have your photo if you enter the US (among other countries) legally, and they presumably have CCTV in airports that can be used to identify people after the fact. They also know when and where you entered the US regardless of whether you use the kiosk. What is so special about the kiosk taking another picture of you to compare?

someonehere 7y ago

For the record if anyone didn’t know, they ran the software against the state politicians. It misidentified 26 (I think) state politicians as existing criminals. Which I see irony in there.

daenz 7y ago
Being misidentified as a criminal is a feature not a bug.
mc32 7y ago
There are likely more than 26 state politicians who are criminals who have not been discovered yet. It’s gotta be more than 26. The hard part is figuring out which ones are the criminals and which ones are politicians doing their thing.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Yes, they're probably all authoritarian crooks but that's not the point. The point is they haven't been convicted so they weren't in the data set yet the software thought they were. The false positive rate is unacceptably high.
ChuckNorris89 7y ago
>It misidentified 26 (I think) state politicians as existing criminals. It's both funny and sad at the same time on multiple levels.
briandear 7y ago
Misidentified?
- hasahmed 7y ago
  Tuche
jklontz 7y ago
The AWS Rekognition study I believe you are referring to was fundamentally flawed in two ways. First, the threshold used was the default suggested for one-to-one matching (lower false reject rate, higher false accept rate). It doesn't make sense to use this threshold for search applications, and when the study was reproduced with a more appropriate (higher) threshold there were 0 mis-identifications. Second, law enforcement use of face recognition doesn't even involve the algorithm making a lights-out identification decision. Instead, the most similar faces are presented to the user in ranked order by similarity (like a search engine). It's a tool for generating investigative leads, often preferable to publishing the face image of a wanted perpetrator on local news.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

Designed in California.

li4ick 7y ago
Dataset assembled in China
dang 7y ago
Nonetheless, please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  I support this decision by California. I support a lot of what comes out of California. Its okay if you don't agree with me. Can you point me to your definition of 'substantive comment'?
  - dang 7y ago
    It should contain information that isn't obvious and not read like a snarky toss-off.

m0zg 7y ago

Sounds dumb, but typical for CA. I think it's dangerous to have pervasive, Chinese-style always on face recognition surveillance. But I see no problem whatsoever with face recognition on body cams, because the officer is actually there, and if they could recognize faces well, they would. The cam is just providing an assist - even trained humans are pretty terrible at matching against a large number of faces. Even if the system doesn't work super well now, systems like these improve as they are fed more data and told when they guessed wrong. That's why it's called "machine learning".

hokumguru 7y ago
Fun fact, some humans are in fact better than even our best computer algorithms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/11/super-recognisers-police-the-people-who-never-forget-a-face https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/11/super-recogn... But obviously the required resources between these two solutions vary wildly.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  That guardian article got posted here back when it was new and the general consensus was "sure there's some people who are that good but they're so few and far between it's probably just a front for parallel construction"
newnewpdro 7y ago
It's not a useful assist if it's misinformation. There's a tendency to trust what comes out of a machine as infallible. I certainly don't want anyone armed carrying a badge getting notified in real-time of false-positives for potentially violent, armed, most-wanted criminals. It just becomes a green light for use of excessive force. "The officer feared for his safety, the automated identification system reported the driver with the busted tail light as being the violent drug lord known as El Chapo. Our condolences go out to the substitute teacher's friends and family."
- m0zg 7y ago
  >> It's not a useful assist if it's misinformation. You're making a typical mistake by thinking these systems will not improve over time as they get more training data. They will, and given enough time, data, and elbow grease they will eventually reach superhuman levels of accuracy. But for them to get there they need to be exposed to the world under realistic circumstances.

mullingitover 7y ago

The ACLU has some weird goals - arguing that businesses should be forced to deal in cash, forcing cities to allow slums on their streets, and now preventing automated detection of wanted criminals. I know they do some good things, but they're definitely not hitting home runs when it comes to making the world a better place.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
Can you link to the specific cases that the ACLU was advocating for and the exact legal arguments on both sides? Law tends to be exceptionally rigorous and technical on language, and not linking to the specific cases in question and how their formal arguments conclude in your claims makes them sound like bad faith oversimplifcations.
- mullingitover 7y ago
  I honestly don't care about the justifications. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm just observing the outcomes.
  - Falling3 7y ago
    >I honestly don't care about the justifications. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Do you not see the irony in that statement in the context of discussing whether further infringements on our civil liberties are worth it because "bad guys"?
    - mullingitover 7y ago
      The world isn't black and white. Giving everyone freedom to camp wherever they want takes away people's freedom from disease and crime. Giving everyone freedom to transact purely in untraceable cash takes away freedom to transact how you want, and also enables fraud and money laundering. Taking facial recognition tools away from law enforcement prevents crime victims from bringing their victimizers to justice.

bsenftner 7y ago

This law and media surrounding it is the CA state pandering to misinformed and reactive public pressure. First off, police body cameras are dumb recording devices. They cannot run FR software without being completely different devices, probably requiring a completely different set of hardware and software producers than now. Police body cameras are little more than GoPro like compact cameras with holsters for wearing while recording. They are not designed with any feedback capability, no networking, and no load and run some software capability at all. If they could run FR software, which they can't, their expense would prevent their adoption. And if they could, they would need to have wireless FR synchronization between officers and command to make any tactical sense. They probably should have AR to actually be of use in the field. Sounds too expensive to be affordable by police. At that level, keeping the technology an officer wears down starts to make sense; the body cam sends video to command and command is where FR is run on more economical and faster servers for all the officer video feeds. Any meaningful FR or related information is digested with command and verbally related to the active officers in the field. My point being, this practical use of FR is unaddressed by this new law. The law is nothing.

_caw 7y ago
For what it's worth, the assertion that policy body cameras are simply dumb recording devices is not true. At least one body camera on the market now is fully capable of running FR software and has full networking built in - essentially a smartphone.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  If you're referring to the DirectView cameras, they are closer to being practical, but not really. They cannot run 3rd party software, and don't even have an SDK for external development. The body camera industry produces recording devices, not mobile video enhanced computing devices.

eloff 7y ago

Is this really good news? Are we safer for it or less safe? I'm not sure we even know the answer to that because the tech is so young. I hate to see immature tech banned before it gets refined into something useful, because version one of something always sucks. I know that people here have a knee-jerk privacy big-brother is watching reaction, and I have that too. But beyond that I want to think if it was something that could have been beneficial to society or not.

hgoel 7y ago
Even if it were safer, we do genuinely need to draw a line between privacy and safety.
Jach 7y ago
Fortunately California law is not universal law, so the populations that want to further explore the possibilities of the tech can continue to do so, and perhaps cause California to reverse the decision in the future.