16 ms·

Microsoft pitched facial recognition to the DEA

297 points by tech-historian 6y ago

gentleman11 6y ago
Speaking of racial and class injustice, the war in drugs has incentivized a lot of crime over the years while also brutally punishing poor people who turn to it out of desperation. To propose adding another layer of facial recognition that both attempts to strip privacy from people, but also falsely identifies many black people, is in extremely bad taste by Microsoft
- bredren 6y ago
  The war on drugs is also a way to fund LE using civil forfeiture. So assisting LE with this tech indirectly helps fund the continued war on drugs. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/710456736/defining-whats-excessive-in-police-property-seizures-remains-tricky https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/710456736/defining-whats-exce...
  - tech-historian 6y ago
    Sorry, what is LE?
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      Law enforcement
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    The thing that always gets left out here is that you can just show up to court and ask for your property back, and 99 times out of 100, the judge will give it to you - because it's still up to the state to demonstrate that the property was the proceeds of a crime. ...but 99 times out of 100, the property owner doesn't show up to court.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      That doesn't appear to be true. Several examples here: ... and here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/they-fought-the-law-who-won/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/t... > Costello hired a local attorney to get the money back. After making a few calls, the lawyer told him to accept a deal from the government for half of the money. Costello agreed. But his legal fees were $9,000 — leaving him with only about $7,000. > In one respect, Guerrero was lucky. His construction firm paid a small amount to make his legal struggle possible, and Stone had agreed to do much of the work without pay. Given the time involved, the legal bills would have been $50,000, Stone said. But he agreed not to press for his fee from the government as part of the settlement. > He wanted to get his money back, but he had no idea how to sort through the intricacies of the federal civil forfeiture system, an arcane corner of the American legal world. Though he was never charged with a crime, he would have to prove, in effect, that he made the money legally. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-police-use-a-legal-gray-area-to-rob-suspects-of-their-belongings/495740/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-p... > In New York, the multi-step process required to get the NYPD to release possessions can be opaque and circuitous. When the Bronx Defenders circulated a questionnaire in 2014 among its clients who had possessions taken from them at the time of arrest, nearly half said they were never even given the itemized voucher that Clavasquin received. > Even with that voucher in hand, petitioning the district attorney’s office for the necessary forms to release items categorized as evidence can be fruitless: More often than not, requests to the district attorney’s office—whether phoned in, written, or emailed—go unanswered, said Adam Shoop, a Bronx Defenders attorney who helped bring the class-action lawsuit against the city. The only reliable way to force a response is to file an administrative appeal, a legal tool that the average non-lawyer almost certainly wouldn’t be able to use on his or her own, Shoop said.
      - koheripbal 6y ago
        Anecdotes that were raised in the media don't prove anything other than that there are exceptions.
        6y ago
- the-dude 6y ago
  War in drugs. Love the typo. From the other side of the pond, the US fixation on wars is ... remarkable. Marking these policies as wars wouldn't fly in the EU. Circling back, the use of 'war' for civil matters normalizes the word, making real war easier to swallow.
  - decebalus1 6y ago
    America is a (remote) 'warrior' nation. We don't suffer from a disease, we 'fight' the disease, we 'lose the fight' with cancer, we fight 'wars on poverty' and 'wars on crime'. There's no need to normalize the word in America. Aside from some short periods, we've been fighting an armed conflict somewhere in the world (except the homeland) since forever. This is important. Because Europeans still have some well deserved collective memories about what war means, considering it happened in their backyard. It's harder to swindle the word 'war' around Europe as people know what it means way better than the American collective mind.
    - throwaway91914 6y ago
      Despite the idiotic downvotes you are spot on. In most languages and societies in Europe and Asia people don't use words like "fight", "war", "kill" so easily or as euphemisms.
      - squarefoot 6y ago
        > In most languages and societies in Europe and Asia people don't use words like "fight", "war", "kill" so easily or as euphemisms. Not sure about Asia, but over here in Europe some politicians leaning far right often use the above military words. But that comes to no surprise given the mindset.
  - vianneychevalie 6y ago
    Macron declared that France was in a state of war during a presidential speech at the start of the Covid-19 crisis EU also has its share of word over utilization
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- chr1 6y ago
  On the other hand it may help the society to understand that the law is wrong and fix it. The fact that police is enforcing poor laws poorly does not help anyone, and instead of trying to ban police from using modern tools, in hope that police will not be able to fully enforce the stupid laws, we need to focus on fixing the laws.
jimbob45 6y ago
Maybe I’m not very creative but I don’t really see the use cases for this. I skimmed the article thinking it would have some and I didn’t see one.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  As always with facial recognition, the use case is total surveillance & tracking of a population.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  The theoretical use case is that somehow it helps tracks suspects. Obviously that's only reality in a case where you either have broad facial recognition profiles across the population, or you have additional facial recognition cameras in an area of interest, both of which raise additional concerns. In reality I suspect this is a solution in search of a problem. I was witness to a serious hit and run, caught video of the person who fled - clear pictures of the person, car, license plate. Should have been the easiest case in the world to handle but leos didn't even ask for the footage. Only group that has ever accepted dashcam footage from me is insurance. Most law enforcement agencies have a lot more data than they can reasonably handle, but it's easier to complain about a lack of data than explain you can't actually analyze it.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Use cases that are pretty valuable: - Black box that will confirm authority's bias about who is guilty, and who isn't. - Black box to absolve authority of accusations of bias by offloading the bias to another biased party. - Black box to absolve authority of responsibility, because they were just following the black box's orders. - Dragnet identification of people in order to investigate, charge, serve warrants or make arrests. The latter is their most likely stated reason, there are several reports of law enforcement going through footage and pictures to identify people with outstanding warrants and to issue others with new charges. There is also a strong desire to identify everyone a suspect interacts with, because they must be guilty by association. Law enforcement is very paranoid, in general, and like most of the general public, think what they see computers do on CSI is real.
bgorman 6y ago
This is about as evil as it gets for a software company. Using your technology to put people behind bars for victimless crimes Microsoft products are generally such low quality that I avoid them anyway, but I'm going to try to disable all my Microsoft cloud accounts after this revelation.
- kick 6y ago
  It gets worse. Google what IBM did for a certain country in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s (yes, after the invasion of Poland).
  - the-dude 6y ago
    But Poland fired first!
  - tracker1 6y ago
    Absolutely... we should burn every IBM, VW, BMW and every other corporation that worked with WWII Germany to the ground!
    - whymauri 6y ago
      Not sure if this in bad faith, but... What we should study is how these companies successfully laundered their reputations, such that we can hold modern corporations accountable for conspiring with genocidal or dictatorial state actors. This does not solve every ethical problem that underlies the contemporary corporation, but I believe that companies that are complicit in the mass extermination of human life should face the consequences. Hopefully, we're on the same bandwidth here.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Or, maybe address the systematic realities that make companies act this way over and over for centuries.
        deleted 6y ago
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Company wanting to make money attempts to sell product!
- c22 6y ago
  People with lots of ways to make money pursue morally questionable market in ongoing futile attempt to collect all of the money.
  - decebalus1 6y ago
    Not a fan of the DEA or any TLA for that matter. However, I believe we need to do this right and police everything which is morally questionable. Including but not limited to health insurers, student loan companies, high frequency trading and wage slavers (which is most retailers). I think people have their heart in the right place. But the hate shouldn't be directed at MSFT in my opinion but on the legislators and ultimately at the DEA. Boycotting Microsoft for trying to get a government contract will not solve shit. Ultimately, the government can (and does) seed private companies to do their shady tech shit if Microsoft or some tech giant refuses to provide it.
spideymans 6y ago
I feel like everyone should read up on the War on Drugs, and how people of colour (Blacks and Latinos in particular) are over policed and receive far stiffer sentences (we’re talking on the order of decades here) than their white counterparts. Call it social grandstanding, but it’s unconscionable that I’d willingly assist in the development of such technologies if I knew it would be used by the DEA and law enforcement. I’d rather be unemployed
MintelIE 6y ago
I mean this is good, right? There are a LOT of illegal aliens involved in the drug trade. These people aren't known for their propensity to have correct ID. The only practical way to ID them is with facial recognition, DNA, and fingerprints.
- caseyohara 6y ago
  Or, you know, just end the War on Drugs altogether? The war is lost and continuing to fight it is a net negative for society.
  - MintelIE 6y ago
    No thanks! Currently China is using drugs to destabilize and damage the USA. Fentanyl is a weapon.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      You know, education is also a weapon, as is financial enablement. Both are cheaper and have better results than arming the likes of the DEA and ICE, both of which have mixed results at best. Heck, even with all the money that they sink in to that, only a small part goes to the education of the people within those organisations, making it a problem stuck in a perpetual state of marginal benefits to keep it running in vicious circles. There will always be people that do bad things for the sake of doing bad things, but most of the abusive situations stem from a lack of basic physical and mental safety and the capability to resolve one's own problems.
      - MintelIE 6y ago
        I’m just going to have to disagree with you there my Marxist-leaning friend. ICE and the DEA both serve extremely useful functions. You might feel that your opinion reflects the majority because of over-socialization with your in-group, but the majority of Americans believe in and support ICE, the DEA, and police and law enforcement. The Internet propagates messages to the contrary, reinforced by Marxist opinion shapers and hard lefties who seem to curate much of the digital content, but outside a few large metro areas these kinds of opinions aren’t valued at all.
gundmc 6y ago
This stands in stark contrast to IBM who announced halting facial recognition offerings, Google who has prohibited use of facial recognition against non-public figures from the start, and Amazon who just announced a moratorium on facial recognition use by law enforcement. Not a good look for MSFT.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Voloskaya 6y ago
  You should probably click on the article before commenting though. Microsoft also announced halting sells of facial recognition tech to law enforcement. This is about a pitch that happened 2 years ago.
- Aloha 6y ago
  "Newly released emails show the company has tried to sell the controversial technology to the government for years, including to the Drug Enforcement Administration in late 2017." I dont think Microsoft is selling it now, even though they might have been in 2017
  - darzu 6y ago
    Microsoft should put out a statement clarifying this then.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Are there any useful applications for face recognition that don't have massive potential for abuse? I have thought about this for a while and it seems all cloud based face recognition can (and probably will) be abused. I think we are building a scary future. Just wait until microphone technology is good enough to listen to every public conversation.
- flattone 6y ago
  Complete blind assumption: Gov LEO tech Probably way ahead of us. The status of a problem doesn’t change need to address and resolve.
- bluedino 6y ago
  What about something like: extremely dangerous, wanted criminal is on the loose. He's known to be a in a large city, and you use facial recognition to find/track him before he can commit a bombing or something like that.
  - ninjaturtlez 6y ago
    He said that "didn't have potential for abuse", I think the situation you gave defines abuse. Tracking everyone to catch one person is not acceptable in my opinion.
  - f1refly 6y ago
    Yeah but what about: Some guy you really hate for his speeches hides in the city. Why not go there and suicide him before he goes and tells the people how their lifes can be much better or nonsense like that. Or related to that: Let's assume you really hate the Jews for, I dont know, existing maybe. Why not track them all down and put them in camps? It's not like they can hide from you you, you know where everyone is all the time after all.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    That’s exactly the situation that has the potential for massive abuse. There is a central institution that’s tracking all movements of all people. What’s stopping them from going after inconvenient people or selling information?
danielovichdk 6y ago
Microsoft is not controlled by a force that leaves sales personal with no responsibility to take action. Of course someone is trying to sell this, they are hired to sell it
- flattone 6y ago
  I think that’s obvious. That value/point of this article for a concerned citizen might be not ‘why are sales people doing this?’ But instead ask ‘should this be happening, will it damage civilian life, us economy/future, bleed into the rest of the world in a damaging way.?’
  - danielovichdk 6y ago
    Yes it's obvious. No one should think that any very large company is controlled by one person. So even though it might seem as a bad move, it's more likely a sales person 'down in EPG that had a good idea, and pitced it'. I would encourage free action towards making an impact at any given time
oarabbus_ 6y ago
End the War on Drugs. Invest in harm reduction and rehabilitation centers. Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs. Unrestrict researchers from performing research on psychedelic compounds.
- 3131s 6y ago
  > Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs. But then you haven't ended the war on drugs. We need legalization, not decriminalization.
  - oarabbus_ 6y ago
    Eh, maybe in the long-run. We need decriminalization for personal use in the short term (the next 20 years).
    - 3131s 6y ago
      We don't have twenty years. It's inhuman and stupid to put people in prison for selling drugs. In the meantime the US is going to crumble under policies like this, while gangs will become increasingly powerful.
megaman821 6y ago
I am not fan of the DEA, but this trend of generating bad PR for tech providers of governmental agencies ridiculous. Attack the agency or vote in politicians to change or dismantle them. As of 2020 Millennials are the largest adult generation. They have more voting power than the Boomers, if they actually get out and vote.
- gowld 6y ago
  When we have vote-by-Twitter, young people will vote.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Why would I involve Twitter? The USPS takes care of that for me. Or I just use a ballot drop by my office or grocery store.
- durkie 6y ago
  What's ridiculous about it? Why is attacking the agency fair game but you can't attack the company?
  - megaman821 6y ago
    It just such a poor solution to the problem. The DEA has hundreds of suppliers. I don't think attacking GM for selling them Suburbans is going to make much of a difference. Plus, from the commenting here of HN, it appears there is a large group of people that want more regulations on facial recognition irregardless of its use within the DEA. These conflations of messages do resonate very well with me. Reforming the DEA and adding regulations to facial recognition are two important issues that stand on their own. The solutions to the issues are more the responsibility of government rather than corporations.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      > It just such a poor solution to the problem. That's a strawman though, nobody thinks "the solution" is attacking only Microsoft, nobody proposes that, and nobody is doing that. The question is whether both the DEA and Microsoft should be criticized, or if Microsoft should get a free pass for some reason. Microsoft isn't being singled out either, numerous government contractors have been criticized for taking those contracts. Criticism of military contractors in particular is very common, you know that.
pluc 6y ago
I'm genuinely curious why some of you think they wouldn't try? They're a company with a product to sell to few industries, even fewer where it can be leveraged as completely as in law enforcement.. so why wouldn't they?
- Aqua 6y ago
  Indeed, some comments here are ridiculous. They are a company, they want to earn Money. Contrary to what people might think, just because a company tweets they support the BLM movement, that doesn't immediately mean(in fact, it almost never means) that they're genuinely interested in being benevolent. Stop being naive.
  - blantonl 6y ago
    I guarantee you MS has enormous software and support contracts in place doing all kinds of work for the federal government with regards to surveillance. There is just too much funding out there to ignore that space. I can't think of any enterprise IT firm that could be take seriously by shareholders if they planted some stake in the ground that they were going to NOT go after that business. There is no way.
kolbe 6y ago
The cynic in me says that Microsoft/Amazon/Google will not be selling to police agencies, but instead to wholesalers who then sell the services to them.
1v1id 6y ago
This wasn't just Microsoft. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-recognition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-... Not saying it wasn't wrong pitch to DEA, but it seems strange that it's Microsoft being called out when, concretely, they were probably the earliest adopters of not selling due to human rights concerns https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai-idUSKCN1RS2FV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai-idUSKCN1RS2F... https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial-recognition-its-time-for-action/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial-...
- stepstop 6y ago
  > Not saying it wasn't wrong pitch to DEA, but it seems strange that it's Microsoft being called out when It’s not strange, this is exactly the story that’s being called out. The behavior is incongruous
- gentleman11 6y ago
  They have come out to say some very good things, as you say. But is it still principled if it only comes right after failing to win a big contract to do the opposite? Not as clear
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  People are yelling about Microsoft hypocrisy after they made noise on their feel-good achieve-nothing move at Github. In my opinion, people have been complaining about the change too much, and the hypocrisy too little. The PR was probably positive, when it shouldn't be.
mikece 6y ago
Back in 2012 I was chatting with a co-worker whose side hustle was owning/running convenience store gas stations (he had two and was looking to expand). He was talking about the issues he was facing with shoplifters and I mentioned that Facebook had, in the previous 12 months, acquired the #2 company in facial recognition -- then did it again when the #3 company moved up to #2. I asked him if paying $200/month per store for a digital surveillance system that not only captured video but ran biometric matches against Facebook's database of images would be of interest to him. "Hell yes!" was the answer without any hesitation (I think he would have gladly paid more because insurance rates would possibly go down -- I forget the rest of the conversation). The point being: whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo, these services aren't developed just because it's cool but in order to generate revenue at some point. Why is there so much shock and surprise that Microsoft tried to sell a digital security/surveillance/law enforcement tool to the DEA? To me the major story would be if someone internally suggested it and it was nixed on principle.
- blantonl 6y ago
  Not to mention, there are literally billions of dollars of grants and other funds available just waiting to be full-filled in search of problems. The surveillance industrial complex that was kicked off after 9/11 has more money available then can possibly be spent. Any major software and infrastructure provider would be foolish not to develop armies of teams to go after that funding. Don't think for a second that IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and ANY other enterprise hardware and software organization hasn't put huge resources in place to address these "needs." These feel good press releases do just that - but I guarantee you the Fed divisions of these companies are still plugging away selling billions to the government for software, hardware, and services around all kinds of surveillance technology.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I think people underestimate the degree to which most companies cooperate with the law enforcement. When I was a teenager working for my Dad's small insurance agency, investigators would come in about once per year and ask for files on customer xyz. When I was old enough, I asked my dad if they needed a warrant. His answer was "Yes, but why the hell would I want to fight that battle?". In my 30s, I worked for a major financial bank running tech for their US compliance/legal/regulatory departments. The mountains of data that we give local, state, and federal authorities on a daily basis is enormous. I mean you wouldn't believe how much data we handed over - or made available during an inspection. There was a documented official process for both the ad-hoc requests or the regular dumps, but we absolutely never fought with them about what we provided.
romualdr 6y ago
Do NOT misunderstand this. Recognition != Identification. Microsoft just pushed how to detect faces, they don't know who they are.

Speaking of racial and class injustice, the war in drugs has incentivized a lot of crime over the years while also brutally punishing poor people who turn to it out of desperation. To propose adding another layer of facial recognition that both attempts to strip privacy from people, but also falsely identifies many black people, is in extremely bad taste by Microsoft

bredren 6y ago
The war on drugs is also a way to fund LE using civil forfeiture. So assisting LE with this tech indirectly helps fund the continued war on drugs. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/710456736/defining-whats-excessive-in-police-property-seizures-remains-tricky https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/710456736/defining-whats-exce...
- tech-historian 6y ago
  Sorry, what is LE?
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    Law enforcement
- koheripbal 6y ago
  The thing that always gets left out here is that you can just show up to court and ask for your property back, and 99 times out of 100, the judge will give it to you - because it's still up to the state to demonstrate that the property was the proceeds of a crime. ...but 99 times out of 100, the property owner doesn't show up to court.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    That doesn't appear to be true. Several examples here: ... and here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/they-fought-the-law-who-won/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/t... > Costello hired a local attorney to get the money back. After making a few calls, the lawyer told him to accept a deal from the government for half of the money. Costello agreed. But his legal fees were $9,000 — leaving him with only about $7,000. > In one respect, Guerrero was lucky. His construction firm paid a small amount to make his legal struggle possible, and Stone had agreed to do much of the work without pay. Given the time involved, the legal bills would have been $50,000, Stone said. But he agreed not to press for his fee from the government as part of the settlement. > He wanted to get his money back, but he had no idea how to sort through the intricacies of the federal civil forfeiture system, an arcane corner of the American legal world. Though he was never charged with a crime, he would have to prove, in effect, that he made the money legally. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-police-use-a-legal-gray-area-to-rob-suspects-of-their-belongings/495740/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-p... > In New York, the multi-step process required to get the NYPD to release possessions can be opaque and circuitous. When the Bronx Defenders circulated a questionnaire in 2014 among its clients who had possessions taken from them at the time of arrest, nearly half said they were never even given the itemized voucher that Clavasquin received. > Even with that voucher in hand, petitioning the district attorney’s office for the necessary forms to release items categorized as evidence can be fruitless: More often than not, requests to the district attorney’s office—whether phoned in, written, or emailed—go unanswered, said Adam Shoop, a Bronx Defenders attorney who helped bring the class-action lawsuit against the city. The only reliable way to force a response is to file an administrative appeal, a legal tool that the average non-lawyer almost certainly wouldn’t be able to use on his or her own, Shoop said.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      Anecdotes that were raised in the media don't prove anything other than that there are exceptions.
      - 6y ago
the-dude 6y ago
War in drugs. Love the typo. From the other side of the pond, the US fixation on wars is ... remarkable. Marking these policies as wars wouldn't fly in the EU. Circling back, the use of 'war' for civil matters normalizes the word, making real war easier to swallow.
- decebalus1 6y ago
  America is a (remote) 'warrior' nation. We don't suffer from a disease, we 'fight' the disease, we 'lose the fight' with cancer, we fight 'wars on poverty' and 'wars on crime'. There's no need to normalize the word in America. Aside from some short periods, we've been fighting an armed conflict somewhere in the world (except the homeland) since forever. This is important. Because Europeans still have some well deserved collective memories about what war means, considering it happened in their backyard. It's harder to swindle the word 'war' around Europe as people know what it means way better than the American collective mind.
  - throwaway91914 6y ago
    Despite the idiotic downvotes you are spot on. In most languages and societies in Europe and Asia people don't use words like "fight", "war", "kill" so easily or as euphemisms.
    - squarefoot 6y ago
      > In most languages and societies in Europe and Asia people don't use words like "fight", "war", "kill" so easily or as euphemisms. Not sure about Asia, but over here in Europe some politicians leaning far right often use the above military words. But that comes to no surprise given the mindset.
- vianneychevalie 6y ago
  Macron declared that France was in a state of war during a presidential speech at the start of the Covid-19 crisis EU also has its share of word over utilization
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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chr1 6y ago
On the other hand it may help the society to understand that the law is wrong and fix it. The fact that police is enforcing poor laws poorly does not help anyone, and instead of trying to ban police from using modern tools, in hope that police will not be able to fully enforce the stupid laws, we need to focus on fixing the laws.

jimbob45 6y ago

Maybe I’m not very creative but I don’t really see the use cases for this. I skimmed the article thinking it would have some and I didn’t see one.

ahelwer 6y ago
As always with facial recognition, the use case is total surveillance & tracking of a population.
vorpalhex 6y ago
The theoretical use case is that somehow it helps tracks suspects. Obviously that's only reality in a case where you either have broad facial recognition profiles across the population, or you have additional facial recognition cameras in an area of interest, both of which raise additional concerns. In reality I suspect this is a solution in search of a problem. I was witness to a serious hit and run, caught video of the person who fled - clear pictures of the person, car, license plate. Should have been the easiest case in the world to handle but leos didn't even ask for the footage. Only group that has ever accepted dashcam footage from me is insurance. Most law enforcement agencies have a lot more data than they can reasonably handle, but it's easier to complain about a lack of data than explain you can't actually analyze it.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Use cases that are pretty valuable: - Black box that will confirm authority's bias about who is guilty, and who isn't. - Black box to absolve authority of accusations of bias by offloading the bias to another biased party. - Black box to absolve authority of responsibility, because they were just following the black box's orders. - Dragnet identification of people in order to investigate, charge, serve warrants or make arrests. The latter is their most likely stated reason, there are several reports of law enforcement going through footage and pictures to identify people with outstanding warrants and to issue others with new charges. There is also a strong desire to identify everyone a suspect interacts with, because they must be guilty by association. Law enforcement is very paranoid, in general, and like most of the general public, think what they see computers do on CSI is real.

bgorman 6y ago

This is about as evil as it gets for a software company. Using your technology to put people behind bars for victimless crimes Microsoft products are generally such low quality that I avoid them anyway, but I'm going to try to disable all my Microsoft cloud accounts after this revelation.

kick 6y ago
It gets worse. Google what IBM did for a certain country in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s (yes, after the invasion of Poland).
- the-dude 6y ago
  But Poland fired first!
- tracker1 6y ago
  Absolutely... we should burn every IBM, VW, BMW and every other corporation that worked with WWII Germany to the ground!
  - whymauri 6y ago
    Not sure if this in bad faith, but... What we should study is how these companies successfully laundered their reputations, such that we can hold modern corporations accountable for conspiring with genocidal or dictatorial state actors. This does not solve every ethical problem that underlies the contemporary corporation, but I believe that companies that are complicit in the mass extermination of human life should face the consequences. Hopefully, we're on the same bandwidth here.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Or, maybe address the systematic realities that make companies act this way over and over for centuries.
      - deleted 6y ago

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Company wanting to make money attempts to sell product!

c22 6y ago
People with lots of ways to make money pursue morally questionable market in ongoing futile attempt to collect all of the money.
- decebalus1 6y ago
  Not a fan of the DEA or any TLA for that matter. However, I believe we need to do this right and police everything which is morally questionable. Including but not limited to health insurers, student loan companies, high frequency trading and wage slavers (which is most retailers). I think people have their heart in the right place. But the hate shouldn't be directed at MSFT in my opinion but on the legislators and ultimately at the DEA. Boycotting Microsoft for trying to get a government contract will not solve shit. Ultimately, the government can (and does) seed private companies to do their shady tech shit if Microsoft or some tech giant refuses to provide it.

spideymans 6y ago

I feel like everyone should read up on the War on Drugs, and how people of colour (Blacks and Latinos in particular) are over policed and receive far stiffer sentences (we’re talking on the order of decades here) than their white counterparts. Call it social grandstanding, but it’s unconscionable that I’d willingly assist in the development of such technologies if I knew it would be used by the DEA and law enforcement. I’d rather be unemployed

MintelIE 6y ago

I mean this is good, right? There are a LOT of illegal aliens involved in the drug trade. These people aren't known for their propensity to have correct ID. The only practical way to ID them is with facial recognition, DNA, and fingerprints.

caseyohara 6y ago
Or, you know, just end the War on Drugs altogether? The war is lost and continuing to fight it is a net negative for society.
- MintelIE 6y ago
  No thanks! Currently China is using drugs to destabilize and damage the USA. Fentanyl is a weapon.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    You know, education is also a weapon, as is financial enablement. Both are cheaper and have better results than arming the likes of the DEA and ICE, both of which have mixed results at best. Heck, even with all the money that they sink in to that, only a small part goes to the education of the people within those organisations, making it a problem stuck in a perpetual state of marginal benefits to keep it running in vicious circles. There will always be people that do bad things for the sake of doing bad things, but most of the abusive situations stem from a lack of basic physical and mental safety and the capability to resolve one's own problems.
    - MintelIE 6y ago
      I’m just going to have to disagree with you there my Marxist-leaning friend. ICE and the DEA both serve extremely useful functions. You might feel that your opinion reflects the majority because of over-socialization with your in-group, but the majority of Americans believe in and support ICE, the DEA, and police and law enforcement. The Internet propagates messages to the contrary, reinforced by Marxist opinion shapers and hard lefties who seem to curate much of the digital content, but outside a few large metro areas these kinds of opinions aren’t valued at all.

gundmc 6y ago

This stands in stark contrast to IBM who announced halting facial recognition offerings, Google who has prohibited use of facial recognition against non-public figures from the start, and Amazon who just announced a moratorium on facial recognition use by law enforcement. Not a good look for MSFT.

deleted 6y ago
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Voloskaya 6y ago
You should probably click on the article before commenting though. Microsoft also announced halting sells of facial recognition tech to law enforcement. This is about a pitch that happened 2 years ago.
Aloha 6y ago
"Newly released emails show the company has tried to sell the controversial technology to the government for years, including to the Drug Enforcement Administration in late 2017." I dont think Microsoft is selling it now, even though they might have been in 2017
- darzu 6y ago
  Microsoft should put out a statement clarifying this then.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

Are there any useful applications for face recognition that don't have massive potential for abuse? I have thought about this for a while and it seems all cloud based face recognition can (and probably will) be abused. I think we are building a scary future. Just wait until microphone technology is good enough to listen to every public conversation.

flattone 6y ago
Complete blind assumption: Gov LEO tech Probably way ahead of us. The status of a problem doesn’t change need to address and resolve.
bluedino 6y ago
What about something like: extremely dangerous, wanted criminal is on the loose. He's known to be a in a large city, and you use facial recognition to find/track him before he can commit a bombing or something like that.
- ninjaturtlez 6y ago
  He said that "didn't have potential for abuse", I think the situation you gave defines abuse. Tracking everyone to catch one person is not acceptable in my opinion.
- f1refly 6y ago
  Yeah but what about: Some guy you really hate for his speeches hides in the city. Why not go there and suicide him before he goes and tells the people how their lifes can be much better or nonsense like that. Or related to that: Let's assume you really hate the Jews for, I dont know, existing maybe. Why not track them all down and put them in camps? It's not like they can hide from you you, you know where everyone is all the time after all.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  That’s exactly the situation that has the potential for massive abuse. There is a central institution that’s tracking all movements of all people. What’s stopping them from going after inconvenient people or selling information?

danielovichdk 6y ago

Microsoft is not controlled by a force that leaves sales personal with no responsibility to take action. Of course someone is trying to sell this, they are hired to sell it

flattone 6y ago
I think that’s obvious. That value/point of this article for a concerned citizen might be not ‘why are sales people doing this?’ But instead ask ‘should this be happening, will it damage civilian life, us economy/future, bleed into the rest of the world in a damaging way.?’
- danielovichdk 6y ago
  Yes it's obvious. No one should think that any very large company is controlled by one person. So even though it might seem as a bad move, it's more likely a sales person 'down in EPG that had a good idea, and pitced it'. I would encourage free action towards making an impact at any given time

oarabbus_ 6y ago

End the War on Drugs. Invest in harm reduction and rehabilitation centers. Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs. Unrestrict researchers from performing research on psychedelic compounds.

3131s 6y ago
> Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs. But then you haven't ended the war on drugs. We need legalization, not decriminalization.
- oarabbus_ 6y ago
  Eh, maybe in the long-run. We need decriminalization for personal use in the short term (the next 20 years).
  - 3131s 6y ago
    We don't have twenty years. It's inhuman and stupid to put people in prison for selling drugs. In the meantime the US is going to crumble under policies like this, while gangs will become increasingly powerful.

megaman821 6y ago

I am not fan of the DEA, but this trend of generating bad PR for tech providers of governmental agencies ridiculous. Attack the agency or vote in politicians to change or dismantle them. As of 2020 Millennials are the largest adult generation. They have more voting power than the Boomers, if they actually get out and vote.

gowld 6y ago
When we have vote-by-Twitter, young people will vote.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Why would I involve Twitter? The USPS takes care of that for me. Or I just use a ballot drop by my office or grocery store.
durkie 6y ago
What's ridiculous about it? Why is attacking the agency fair game but you can't attack the company?
- megaman821 6y ago
  It just such a poor solution to the problem. The DEA has hundreds of suppliers. I don't think attacking GM for selling them Suburbans is going to make much of a difference. Plus, from the commenting here of HN, it appears there is a large group of people that want more regulations on facial recognition irregardless of its use within the DEA. These conflations of messages do resonate very well with me. Reforming the DEA and adding regulations to facial recognition are two important issues that stand on their own. The solutions to the issues are more the responsibility of government rather than corporations.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > It just such a poor solution to the problem. That's a strawman though, nobody thinks "the solution" is attacking only Microsoft, nobody proposes that, and nobody is doing that. The question is whether both the DEA and Microsoft should be criticized, or if Microsoft should get a free pass for some reason. Microsoft isn't being singled out either, numerous government contractors have been criticized for taking those contracts. Criticism of military contractors in particular is very common, you know that.

pluc 6y ago

I'm genuinely curious why some of you think they wouldn't try? They're a company with a product to sell to few industries, even fewer where it can be leveraged as completely as in law enforcement.. so why wouldn't they?

Aqua 6y ago
Indeed, some comments here are ridiculous. They are a company, they want to earn Money. Contrary to what people might think, just because a company tweets they support the BLM movement, that doesn't immediately mean(in fact, it almost never means) that they're genuinely interested in being benevolent. Stop being naive.
- blantonl 6y ago
  I guarantee you MS has enormous software and support contracts in place doing all kinds of work for the federal government with regards to surveillance. There is just too much funding out there to ignore that space. I can't think of any enterprise IT firm that could be take seriously by shareholders if they planted some stake in the ground that they were going to NOT go after that business. There is no way.

kolbe 6y ago

The cynic in me says that Microsoft/Amazon/Google will not be selling to police agencies, but instead to wholesalers who then sell the services to them.

1v1id 6y ago

This wasn't just Microsoft. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-recognition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-... Not saying it wasn't wrong pitch to DEA, but it seems strange that it's Microsoft being called out when, concretely, they were probably the earliest adopters of not selling due to human rights concerns https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai-idUSKCN1RS2FV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai-idUSKCN1RS2F... https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial-recognition-its-time-for-action/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial-...

stepstop 6y ago
> Not saying it wasn't wrong pitch to DEA, but it seems strange that it's Microsoft being called out when It’s not strange, this is exactly the story that’s being called out. The behavior is incongruous
gentleman11 6y ago
They have come out to say some very good things, as you say. But is it still principled if it only comes right after failing to win a big contract to do the opposite? Not as clear
marcosdumay 6y ago
People are yelling about Microsoft hypocrisy after they made noise on their feel-good achieve-nothing move at Github. In my opinion, people have been complaining about the change too much, and the hypocrisy too little. The PR was probably positive, when it shouldn't be.

mikece 6y ago

Back in 2012 I was chatting with a co-worker whose side hustle was owning/running convenience store gas stations (he had two and was looking to expand). He was talking about the issues he was facing with shoplifters and I mentioned that Facebook had, in the previous 12 months, acquired the #2 company in facial recognition -- then did it again when the #3 company moved up to #2. I asked him if paying $200/month per store for a digital surveillance system that not only captured video but ran biometric matches against Facebook's database of images would be of interest to him. "Hell yes!" was the answer without any hesitation (I think he would have gladly paid more because insurance rates would possibly go down -- I forget the rest of the conversation). The point being: whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo, these services aren't developed just because it's cool but in order to generate revenue at some point. Why is there so much shock and surprise that Microsoft tried to sell a digital security/surveillance/law enforcement tool to the DEA? To me the major story would be if someone internally suggested it and it was nixed on principle.

blantonl 6y ago
Not to mention, there are literally billions of dollars of grants and other funds available just waiting to be full-filled in search of problems. The surveillance industrial complex that was kicked off after 9/11 has more money available then can possibly be spent. Any major software and infrastructure provider would be foolish not to develop armies of teams to go after that funding. Don't think for a second that IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and ANY other enterprise hardware and software organization hasn't put huge resources in place to address these "needs." These feel good press releases do just that - but I guarantee you the Fed divisions of these companies are still plugging away selling billions to the government for software, hardware, and services around all kinds of surveillance technology.
koheripbal 6y ago
I think people underestimate the degree to which most companies cooperate with the law enforcement. When I was a teenager working for my Dad's small insurance agency, investigators would come in about once per year and ask for files on customer xyz. When I was old enough, I asked my dad if they needed a warrant. His answer was "Yes, but why the hell would I want to fight that battle?". In my 30s, I worked for a major financial bank running tech for their US compliance/legal/regulatory departments. The mountains of data that we give local, state, and federal authorities on a daily basis is enormous. I mean you wouldn't believe how much data we handed over - or made available during an inspection. There was a documented official process for both the ad-hoc requests or the regular dumps, but we absolutely never fought with them about what we provided.

romualdr 6y ago

Do NOT misunderstand this. Recognition != Identification. Microsoft just pushed how to detect faces, they don't know who they are.