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How the Police Use AI to Track and Identify You

217 points by kungfudoi 6y ago

andreyk 6y ago
Don't think it's cited in this piece, there is also this recent piece of news - "Controversial facial-recognition software used 30,000 times by LAPD in last decade, records show" https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-21/lapd-controversial-facial-recognition-software https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-21/lapd-con... I guess it's reasonable for police to use this technology, but not without more transparency and accountability... Feels like this year that's becoming very clear.
- moate 6y ago
  >>I guess it's reasonable for police to use this technology... Depends on your interpretation on the 4th amendment. I personally feel it's extremely unreasonable.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    You're not the only one. If you read the opinions in United States v. Jones, the supreme court makes a pretty big distinction between the kinds of surveillance a police officer could reasonably do on their own, versus the scaling up that technology allows, and how that might kick otherwise allowed surveillance without a warrant to requiring a warrant just about the sheer amount of information being acquired. And that's even with data that could be available from watching from public streets, if there were enough officers to watch everyone.
stanrivers 6y ago
China perfected this all for us and now the U.S. government can piggyback off of their practices... great. Serious note - the below is such a scary concept. There is a line somewhere and this feels like you are starting to cross it... both place-based and person-based predictive policing sound ripe for profiling / instigating actions that police can use as a reason to arrest an otherwise harmless person. "Predictive policing programs are another illustrative example showing how data, surveillance technology, and a system of automated policing work together to spy on, search, and, ultimately, control Americans who have not committed or been convicted of a crime. Predictive policing is premised on the idea that historical data of crime, demographics, socioeconomics, and geography can be used to forecast future incidents. Knowing where crime is likely to occur again, police try to intervene beforehand and prevent it. Broadly there are two kinds of “heat maps” produced by predictive policing models: place-based, which uses less data to try to avoid systemic pitfalls of relying on crime and demographic data and surges police into specific areas, and person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network. "
- jancsika 6y ago
  > person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network. There is no way the software actually achieves this. If it did we would have already heard about a well-off target identified by the software, a target with the means to mount a loud defense against such tracking. And it cannot be that the software accurately returns such results but LE simply ignores them if the target seems to be too powerful. In that case we would have already heard from a leaker about a murder from a perpetrator that such a system correctly identified but LE neglected to follow up on. (Think of the value to the company of such evidence!) No, I'm guessing this system gives LE cover for the same flawed systems they've historically used to target and harass people who don't have the means to loudly mount a defense. Just take the same process that a court has ruled against as unconstitutional, use its data as input to your ML algo, and voila! You've probably got at at least one more decade before society figures out you're just appending the words "through a sophisticated AI system" to your outlawed policing.
  - moate 6y ago
    >>There is no way the software actually achieves this. If it did we would have already heard about a well-off target identified by the software, a target with the means to mount a loud defense against such tracking. I mean it's more likely that the system is going to informing you about likely targets for certain crime types (less murder which is frequently singular and more drug dealing since repeated). It's going to help create lists of suspects to pursue on a matter. If one of them is also a senator's son or a CEO, you'd likely go in softer than Joe Poorperson
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Why would we have heard about any of the failures? Part of the 'blue wall' is intended to hide policing failures from the general populace. Particularly when * in the case of targeting a well off person who they decide to further investigate, they can simply use it as reason to look harder at someone, use parallel construction to build the case that the defense sees, and simply drop any cases where the defense happens to get too close. This is what they do with stingrays. * in the case of targeting a well off person who they decide not to investigate, they can simply tell themselves that the person is a paragon of society and it must be one of the failures of the technology. Like when a boy escaped Jeffrey Dahmer's house heavily drugged, running down the street, bleeding out of his anus, begging anyone who would listen to not let Jeffrey take him back, the police got involved and gave him back since Jeffrey was such a paragon of the town. That cop later became head of the police union.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
With rare exceptions, police are strongly addictive personalities. There's no bit of power over the public that cops can use in a reliably responsible way. Surveillance & control are drugs, ones that they are not capable of putting down.
- tal8d 6y ago
  That is true of almost everybody, not just police. Petty tyrants are a dime a dozen, they just lack the ability to legally kidnap you. People are bad, so we need a government comprised of people are bad, so we... I already hear the cries of "But who will build the roads?!"
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    So we come together as a democratic society to hold each other accountable.
    - tal8d 6y ago
      Well yeah, that is the solution that was arrived upon hundreds of years ago, and has been the norm ever since. Like Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others. Declaring cops to be inherently powermad junkies is not an expression of accountability, it is a flawed value judgement that can only serve to justify very bad policy decisions (defund the police!).
      - mindfulhack 6y ago
        I think it's an insightful observation. All humans are subject to being corrupted in by power. It's explained by our biology. Until our biology is no longer a meaningful problem, we need systems that hold those in power accountable. No one should be above the law. We need true equality.
        tal8d 6y ago
        "...police are strongly addictive personalities... Surveillance & control are drugs, ones that they are not capable of putting down." That is insightful, when you acknowledge the fact that it is actually part of the human condition? Okey-dokey. If you mean "equality under the law" then I have good news: no need to wait for robotization - we are already have that equality (unless you want to marry a tree, sue a massive corporation, or some other edge case). True equality would be the end of us all, the death of art, the halt of social progress. Any action that could yield a change to one's circumstances would need to be coordinated and executed with every other human at the same time. I can't think of a scenario where that could happen that doesn't involve a complete loss of personal identity.
Animats 6y ago
Can this be used against employers to detect wage theft? "Time shaving" should be easy to detect. If cell phone tracking, W-2 payments, and employer time records are in substantial disagreement, wage theft has been found.
- moate 6y ago
  By whom? The government has shown time and time again they aren't interested in policing attacks against labor (see: the toothlessness of the NLRB, the gig economy, weakening of unions/organizing, etc) so it wouldn't be them. The companies aren't going to do it because LOL wut? So how are you going to get labor to do that? And if they do, who do they take it to (because again, NLRB is underfunded and relatively weak)
  - Animats 6y ago
    We'll have to see how pro-labor the next administration is. Labor law enforcement could be run as a profit center, like drug enforcement, if the fines were higher.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      The same issue as drug enforcement arises - how does it stay a profit center when those you punish are those that fund your election? It may be a profit center for the vault of the State, but it is very much not so for pockets of the campaigns. The reason why wage theft is inexplicably and reliably the biggest and yet the most overlooked shape of theft seems to me to be that one.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- klenwell 6y ago
  I initially read this the other way: used by employers to detect wage theft. Supervisor Drone: You are allotted two government-mandated 15-minute breaks a day, but our third-party right-to-work service detected you away from your work sector for an average of 16.8 minutes per break period over your past 3 shifts. You are hereby terminated and liable for service fees you agreed to as part of your original employment agreement.
aaron695 6y ago
I know HN isn't very technical so this might be hard to understand, but this isn't AI. It's just computer power. All this was possible 40 years ago but it cost orders of magnitude more.
- notsuoh 6y ago
  It's true that AI is a bit of an overloaded term these days, but in the modern usage of AI you have all types of machine learning and neural networks, which this certainly is. The AI you're thinking of is usually referred to as AGI. But all that aside, in the end your comment is still a little off the mark because what is any flavor of AI but computer power.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    No one is using neural nets or machine learning I can see here. AI is just computer power, hard disk space, big databases, fast networks, cheap cameras etc sums up the 'AI' community though. Letting cheap hardware make it look like they can do something. I will agree to that.
geraldkleber 6y ago
This is why we built Trix (trix.co). It's a consumer-facing photo editing app that uses adversarial AI to manipulate your photos in such a way that companies like Clearview AI can't train facial recognition algorithms off your data. You can download the Android or iOS version at trix.co - we're in beta right now. Would love to get anyone's feedback!
- chance_state 6y ago
  Do you have any data on how effective this technique is?
  - geraldkleber 6y ago
    Not yet - much of this research came out of U Chicago this summer and we just launched our beta. You can download at trix.co (iOS and Android).
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      So you're Theranosing it?
      - geraldkleber 6y ago
        Nope - you should check out the research! https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/ https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/
- polishdude20 6y ago
  Hmm trying to download it on Android, I click the link and it starts to take me to google play but it just loads forever. Never gets to the page to download it
  - geraldkleber 6y ago
    Hmm, lemme do some bug squashing. Will reply when it's dealt with!
ape4 6y ago
And why do they scan the demonstrations asking for police accountability - right away that sounds like a conflict of interesting. You never hear about the AI scanning faces at places where actual criminals hang out - like maybe a pawn shop (possibly selling stolen goods).
- tal8d 6y ago
  Because the "demonstrations" have devolved into riots where "asking" means firebombing. Combine that with local prosecutors refusing to pursue charges, and you've got a situation where the police a highly motivated to identify everybody in black bloc chic.
heavyset_go 6y ago
If you want to see the horrors that result from law enforcement's use of AI and predictive policing, look no further than here[1]. It's several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes. The videos are from a story that made the front page on HN about a month ago[2], if you want more details. [1] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/body-cam-footage/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  It there any "AI" in the Tampa issue? Or "predictive"? The Tampa program is vindictive policing to harass undesirables into leaving town.
  - bitdestroyer 6y ago
    Just a note, that's Pasco county which is north of Tampa. I believe you're referring to this story that broke a few weeks ago: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
- maze-le 6y ago
  This incredibly disturbing. I grew up with family members telling me horror stories about state abuse like this, from more than 30 years past in a country that doesn't exist anymore: The German Democratic Republic. If this isn't classic Stasi Zersetzungstaktik, I don't know what it is. Aren't there any laws against abuse like this? How the hell is this legal?
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    I'm glad you've pointed this out. Comparisons to GDR and the Stasi often get ridiculed for being excessive and hyperbolic when in fact what's currently implemented would've been the Stasi's dream. If anyone needs a good weekend movie recommendation, Das Leben der Anderen[1] is excellent and quite relevant. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
blantonl 6y ago
It won't be long before we see more and more escalating instances of the population using traditional electronic and physical warfare techniques against law enforcement in these "battles." I predict we'll see someone in the general public shoot down a collection drone, or start to actively target these physical collection nodes installed on poles, posts, buildings etc. There were already numerous documented cases of electronic warfare being deployed during protests at law enforcement - the jamming of their public safety 2-way radio systems. Whenever there is an escalation of techniques against the "enemy" - the enemy fights back. There will be interesting developments in this space the next decade with regard to this. Law enforcement already needs advanced direction finding equipment - which is traditionally a military operation.
Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
> Last month, it was revealed the Department of Homeland Security authorized the domestic surveillance of protestors and journalists, training a system usually reserved for hunting terrorists overseas with drones on American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. wait wat edit: the articles linked source doesn't actually say that but instead talks about “Baseball card” dossiers.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  My History teacher once remarked that a hallmark of imperial collapse is the use of the tools of empire at home.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    My iron rule of human relations. If you see someone do something shitty to someone else, stick around long enough and they'll do it to you to. That's why watching the US's power elites callously using the nations resources to screw smaller hapless nation states scares me. Not to mention they keep grudges.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  This is where policing in America has been headed for at least a decade now. Everything is so polarized that people who would normally be opposed to this view those being tracked as their enemies, and thus fair targets. (For example, I'd imagine that right wing or libertarian types would normally consider surveillance to be a real bad thing. But if it gets deployed against George Floyd protestors... Ehhh... nbd) When you hear politicians talking about being "tough on crime" or "law and order", this is exactly the program they are pushing for.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Please don't conflate conservative with libertarian. They are partially similar in economic policy but opposites in social policy.
    - 6y ago
Pfhreak 6y ago
I'm not going to say ACAB, but many who do believe that no matter how nice of an individual a cop might be, they are still working within an organization that pushes for privacy shredding technologies like this. You can be a sweet, community oriented beat cop out there doing your best, but behind you stands surveillance, militarization of police, and the tragedy of prisons in America. Maybe this isn't a generalization that's fair -- should/do we fault all FAANG employees because their parent companies are doing unethical things? I don't know the answer, but articles like this definitely make me think a whole lot more about whether individual police can be ethical while operating in the way the departments do today.
- ssklash 6y ago
  I don't think you can separate the individual from the organization when the organization either fundamentally or in practice is engaged in negative/harmful activities. Policing is broken in the US, and though its original intention is good, the daily practice of it today is systemically flawed and no longer has the original intent as its goal. The same applies to companies like Facebook and Google. They fundamentally exist to extract data from their users. They never had another legitimate mission that was corrupted over time, unlike the police. Apple, Netflix, Amazon at least have services that do not revolve around taking advantage of their users and manipulating their behavior. Organizations are made up of individuals at the end of the day. If you are a cop or work at companies like Palantir, Google, Facebook, you are helping prop up organizations that actively do harm to many people. You may not be as responsible as cops that murder or decision makers at the top, but their guilt would not be possible without you. Please think long and hard about where you work and why you work there.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Are you honestly saying that FB and Google don't provide anything that users value?
    - kchr 6y ago
      Sure they do. But at a huge cost for our society.
HashingtheCode 6y ago
> In Miami, a protestor who allegedly threw something at police officers was later identified and arrested using Clearview AI’s facial recognition system Very good police work using AI to arrest this transgressor > In 2018, in response to more protests and riots, Baltimore police used facial recognition through the city's CCTV camera network to identify and later arrest protestors. Similarly, the New York Police Department arrested more than 3,000 people using facial recognition technology Excellent use of technology to arrest rioters > According to the ACLU, the pervasive and precise surveillance system built in Baltimore Does the ACLU even have any credibility left? Left....oops :-) > Researchers would like to think that their work in AI or robotics can be separated from politics of the moment. They are wrong. Please explain why they are wrong....oh you didn't, just skipped that part. > However, the surveillance systems built by police in New York, Baltimore, and Minneapolis are not isolated examples of excessive policing How is using technology like A.I. to apprehend criminals, rioters etc, excessive policing? If you look at how we use technology today in our daily lives and places of work, that could also be said to be excessive. Does the OP want the police to go back to pre-computer days of mountains of paper work and inefficiency? > ... expanding surveillance apparatus that is granting law enforcement unprecedented powers to watch, search, and seize the sensitive data of American citizens without a warrant or even suspicion of a crime. Well, you actually have to vote in congressional elections to make a change in the system in your state, but citizens of the US of A don't like voting. Anywhere between 21% to 61% depending upon the state. Guess you better vote next time and get your senator to not endorse these types of data collections. > State, local, and national police have access to more than 20 databases that cover a person's criminal history and his or her interactions with the state (e.g., drivers licenses) to build a “pattern of life” of the targeted individual, who may or may not have committed a crime. So the OP thinks that there should be no data correlation between different datasets for any person? The OP's article is an exhausting mess of emotive statements with no facts to back them up. This article could have been something, but it is really just a rant. Waiting for the lefties to vote me down because i don't have a problem with the police doing police work and catching criminals.
avs733 6y ago
I'm usually not the 'reduce it to math' person but this seems like a perfect example. Facial recognition in policing fails at a mathematical level because of Bayes. Let's say I have a database of 10,000 people's faces and I'm looking to match 1 accused criminal from a good quality image. Let's also say my algorithm is 99.99% accurate with 100% specificity (i.e., I always ID the bad guy as the bad guy). So I get a true positive, I can correctly ID the guy. But in doing so I am 10 times as likely to get a false positive. at 99.99% accuracy. Scale it to 1,000,000 people and that likelihood of a false positive is 100x. Because you are looking for a small number of people as your database gets larger the value of a positive match (i.e., your positive predictive value) rapidly approaches zero. Yes this is a simplification but the basic idea stands. These algorithms used at scale are flat out unacceptable because the concept of their use makes false positives more likely than true positives.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Something feels a bit off about this article. The content, the name of the website, the logo they use — all make me initially trust them as my kind of people. I want to read this without questioning who the author is. It has the look and feel of something I might align with, instinctively. Alas, this is a dangerous thing in the world of bogus news. The author and his editors then refer to Founder Fathers (not Founding) and “tying” police powers (instead of “tying the hands of the police” or “curtailing the powers of the police”.) People learning English as a second language are, of course, allowed to make mistakes, but written journalism about US public policy isn’t. That’s the point where one stops and does due diligence on who these people are. This is hard, because the The Gradient’s team don’t really introduce themselves very clearly. It would be great to have just a little bit more information about what this site is before delving into this article more. The about page suggests it’s a student/college magazine: https://thegradient.pub/about/ https://thegradient.pub/about/ Somewhere between the end of the article and the bottom of the page is a mini bio on the author. They work in policy / politics, including working in DC. They also have a public bio on LinkedIn with more details. I don’t mean to cast unfair aspersions, but am I reading a nudge piece from a lobbying think tank? I feel guilty for even asking. How did the internet make me so skeptical?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Why wouldn't such a deeply political article be written by someone in politics, given the context certainly in consultance with people from the field? And which kind of lobbying think tank is against giving more power to the police?
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    I’m fine with think tank nudge pieces as long as they aren’t pretending to be news editorial. On today’s internet, there is a strong requirement for being up front out one’s agenda otherwise how do we differentiate interesting opinion/blogging from the fake news bunkers? In this case, a buried bio on a think piece I’ve never heard of wasn’t enough to suppress the “is this manipulative blogging dressed up to look like reputable journalism?” alarm bells. (Even though, in fairness, this author does seem to be closer to the Bob Woodward end of the spectrum than the Ghanaian/Russian troll farm end.)
sebow 6y ago
This has been de facto in practice done for almost 2 decades. It seems the west doesn't care about what's happening to them domestically, but this is news & very bad when it happens to them in China; It's universally bad, and just because the side effects are smaller in the west doesn't justify tracking & the police state of not having the "wrong opinions"(yes it obviously happens everywhere, and not just for the sake of national security) By the way don't bring Europe up in this, because i can assure you that as an european it is not true what americans & others are fed to them, that somehow we are being respected in terms of privacy & tracking. We're not, in some cases it's way worse over here(see Germany and especially UK).
known 6y ago
AI is not immune to Garbage In = Garbage Out

217 points by kungfudoi 6y ago

Don't think it's cited in this piece, there is also this recent piece of news - "Controversial facial-recognition software used 30,000 times by LAPD in last decade, records show" https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-21/lapd-controversial-facial-recognition-software https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-21/lapd-con... I guess it's reasonable for police to use this technology, but not without more transparency and accountability... Feels like this year that's becoming very clear.

moate 6y ago
>>I guess it's reasonable for police to use this technology... Depends on your interpretation on the 4th amendment. I personally feel it's extremely unreasonable.
- monocasa 6y ago
  You're not the only one. If you read the opinions in United States v. Jones, the supreme court makes a pretty big distinction between the kinds of surveillance a police officer could reasonably do on their own, versus the scaling up that technology allows, and how that might kick otherwise allowed surveillance without a warrant to requiring a warrant just about the sheer amount of information being acquired. And that's even with data that could be available from watching from public streets, if there were enough officers to watch everyone.

stanrivers 6y ago

China perfected this all for us and now the U.S. government can piggyback off of their practices... great. Serious note - the below is such a scary concept. There is a line somewhere and this feels like you are starting to cross it... both place-based and person-based predictive policing sound ripe for profiling / instigating actions that police can use as a reason to arrest an otherwise harmless person. "Predictive policing programs are another illustrative example showing how data, surveillance technology, and a system of automated policing work together to spy on, search, and, ultimately, control Americans who have not committed or been convicted of a crime. Predictive policing is premised on the idea that historical data of crime, demographics, socioeconomics, and geography can be used to forecast future incidents. Knowing where crime is likely to occur again, police try to intervene beforehand and prevent it. Broadly there are two kinds of “heat maps” produced by predictive policing models: place-based, which uses less data to try to avoid systemic pitfalls of relying on crime and demographic data and surges police into specific areas, and person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network. "

jancsika 6y ago
> person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network. There is no way the software actually achieves this. If it did we would have already heard about a well-off target identified by the software, a target with the means to mount a loud defense against such tracking. And it cannot be that the software accurately returns such results but LE simply ignores them if the target seems to be too powerful. In that case we would have already heard from a leaker about a murder from a perpetrator that such a system correctly identified but LE neglected to follow up on. (Think of the value to the company of such evidence!) No, I'm guessing this system gives LE cover for the same flawed systems they've historically used to target and harass people who don't have the means to loudly mount a defense. Just take the same process that a court has ruled against as unconstitutional, use its data as input to your ML algo, and voila! You've probably got at at least one more decade before society figures out you're just appending the words "through a sophisticated AI system" to your outlawed policing.
- moate 6y ago
  >>There is no way the software actually achieves this. If it did we would have already heard about a well-off target identified by the software, a target with the means to mount a loud defense against such tracking. I mean it's more likely that the system is going to informing you about likely targets for certain crime types (less murder which is frequently singular and more drug dealing since repeated). It's going to help create lists of suspects to pursue on a matter. If one of them is also a senator's son or a CEO, you'd likely go in softer than Joe Poorperson
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- monocasa 6y ago
  Why would we have heard about any of the failures? Part of the 'blue wall' is intended to hide policing failures from the general populace. Particularly when * in the case of targeting a well off person who they decide to further investigate, they can simply use it as reason to look harder at someone, use parallel construction to build the case that the defense sees, and simply drop any cases where the defense happens to get too close. This is what they do with stingrays. * in the case of targeting a well off person who they decide not to investigate, they can simply tell themselves that the person is a paragon of society and it must be one of the failures of the technology. Like when a boy escaped Jeffrey Dahmer's house heavily drugged, running down the street, bleeding out of his anus, begging anyone who would listen to not let Jeffrey take him back, the police got involved and gave him back since Jeffrey was such a paragon of the town. That cop later became head of the police union.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

With rare exceptions, police are strongly addictive personalities. There's no bit of power over the public that cops can use in a reliably responsible way. Surveillance & control are drugs, ones that they are not capable of putting down.

tal8d 6y ago
That is true of almost everybody, not just police. Petty tyrants are a dime a dozen, they just lack the ability to legally kidnap you. People are bad, so we need a government comprised of people are bad, so we... I already hear the cries of "But who will build the roads?!"
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  So we come together as a democratic society to hold each other accountable.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    Well yeah, that is the solution that was arrived upon hundreds of years ago, and has been the norm ever since. Like Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others. Declaring cops to be inherently powermad junkies is not an expression of accountability, it is a flawed value judgement that can only serve to justify very bad policy decisions (defund the police!).
    - mindfulhack 6y ago
      I think it's an insightful observation. All humans are subject to being corrupted in by power. It's explained by our biology. Until our biology is no longer a meaningful problem, we need systems that hold those in power accountable. No one should be above the law. We need true equality.
      - tal8d 6y ago
        "...police are strongly addictive personalities... Surveillance & control are drugs, ones that they are not capable of putting down." That is insightful, when you acknowledge the fact that it is actually part of the human condition? Okey-dokey. If you mean "equality under the law" then I have good news: no need to wait for robotization - we are already have that equality (unless you want to marry a tree, sue a massive corporation, or some other edge case). True equality would be the end of us all, the death of art, the halt of social progress. Any action that could yield a change to one's circumstances would need to be coordinated and executed with every other human at the same time. I can't think of a scenario where that could happen that doesn't involve a complete loss of personal identity.

Animats 6y ago

Can this be used against employers to detect wage theft? "Time shaving" should be easy to detect. If cell phone tracking, W-2 payments, and employer time records are in substantial disagreement, wage theft has been found.

moate 6y ago
By whom? The government has shown time and time again they aren't interested in policing attacks against labor (see: the toothlessness of the NLRB, the gig economy, weakening of unions/organizing, etc) so it wouldn't be them. The companies aren't going to do it because LOL wut? So how are you going to get labor to do that? And if they do, who do they take it to (because again, NLRB is underfunded and relatively weak)
- Animats 6y ago
  We'll have to see how pro-labor the next administration is. Labor law enforcement could be run as a profit center, like drug enforcement, if the fines were higher.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    The same issue as drug enforcement arises - how does it stay a profit center when those you punish are those that fund your election? It may be a profit center for the vault of the State, but it is very much not so for pockets of the campaigns. The reason why wage theft is inexplicably and reliably the biggest and yet the most overlooked shape of theft seems to me to be that one.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
klenwell 6y ago
I initially read this the other way: used by employers to detect wage theft. Supervisor Drone: You are allotted two government-mandated 15-minute breaks a day, but our third-party right-to-work service detected you away from your work sector for an average of 16.8 minutes per break period over your past 3 shifts. You are hereby terminated and liable for service fees you agreed to as part of your original employment agreement.

aaron695 6y ago

I know HN isn't very technical so this might be hard to understand, but this isn't AI. It's just computer power. All this was possible 40 years ago but it cost orders of magnitude more.

notsuoh 6y ago
It's true that AI is a bit of an overloaded term these days, but in the modern usage of AI you have all types of machine learning and neural networks, which this certainly is. The AI you're thinking of is usually referred to as AGI. But all that aside, in the end your comment is still a little off the mark because what is any flavor of AI but computer power.
- aaron695 6y ago
  No one is using neural nets or machine learning I can see here. AI is just computer power, hard disk space, big databases, fast networks, cheap cameras etc sums up the 'AI' community though. Letting cheap hardware make it look like they can do something. I will agree to that.

geraldkleber 6y ago

This is why we built Trix (trix.co). It's a consumer-facing photo editing app that uses adversarial AI to manipulate your photos in such a way that companies like Clearview AI can't train facial recognition algorithms off your data. You can download the Android or iOS version at trix.co - we're in beta right now. Would love to get anyone's feedback!

chance_state 6y ago
Do you have any data on how effective this technique is?
- geraldkleber 6y ago
  Not yet - much of this research came out of U Chicago this summer and we just launched our beta. You can download at trix.co (iOS and Android).
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    So you're Theranosing it?
    - geraldkleber 6y ago
      Nope - you should check out the research! https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/ https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/
polishdude20 6y ago
Hmm trying to download it on Android, I click the link and it starts to take me to google play but it just loads forever. Never gets to the page to download it
- geraldkleber 6y ago
  Hmm, lemme do some bug squashing. Will reply when it's dealt with!

ape4 6y ago

And why do they scan the demonstrations asking for police accountability - right away that sounds like a conflict of interesting. You never hear about the AI scanning faces at places where actual criminals hang out - like maybe a pawn shop (possibly selling stolen goods).

tal8d 6y ago
Because the "demonstrations" have devolved into riots where "asking" means firebombing. Combine that with local prosecutors refusing to pursue charges, and you've got a situation where the police a highly motivated to identify everybody in black bloc chic.

heavyset_go 6y ago

If you want to see the horrors that result from law enforcement's use of AI and predictive policing, look no further than here[1]. It's several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes. The videos are from a story that made the front page on HN about a month ago[2], if you want more details. [1] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/body-cam-footage/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871

srtjstjsj 6y ago
It there any "AI" in the Tampa issue? Or "predictive"? The Tampa program is vindictive policing to harass undesirables into leaving town.
- bitdestroyer 6y ago
  Just a note, that's Pasco county which is north of Tampa. I believe you're referring to this story that broke a few weeks ago: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
maze-le 6y ago
This incredibly disturbing. I grew up with family members telling me horror stories about state abuse like this, from more than 30 years past in a country that doesn't exist anymore: The German Democratic Republic. If this isn't classic Stasi Zersetzungstaktik, I don't know what it is. Aren't there any laws against abuse like this? How the hell is this legal?
- kyuudou 6y ago
  I'm glad you've pointed this out. Comparisons to GDR and the Stasi often get ridiculed for being excessive and hyperbolic when in fact what's currently implemented would've been the Stasi's dream. If anyone needs a good weekend movie recommendation, Das Leben der Anderen[1] is excellent and quite relevant. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

blantonl 6y ago

It won't be long before we see more and more escalating instances of the population using traditional electronic and physical warfare techniques against law enforcement in these "battles." I predict we'll see someone in the general public shoot down a collection drone, or start to actively target these physical collection nodes installed on poles, posts, buildings etc. There were already numerous documented cases of electronic warfare being deployed during protests at law enforcement - the jamming of their public safety 2-way radio systems. Whenever there is an escalation of techniques against the "enemy" - the enemy fights back. There will be interesting developments in this space the next decade with regard to this. Law enforcement already needs advanced direction finding equipment - which is traditionally a military operation.

Jon_Lowtek 6y ago

> Last month, it was revealed the Department of Homeland Security authorized the domestic surveillance of protestors and journalists, training a system usually reserved for hunting terrorists overseas with drones on American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. wait wat edit: the articles linked source doesn't actually say that but instead talks about “Baseball card” dossiers.

sudosysgen 6y ago
My History teacher once remarked that a hallmark of imperial collapse is the use of the tools of empire at home.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  My iron rule of human relations. If you see someone do something shitty to someone else, stick around long enough and they'll do it to you to. That's why watching the US's power elites callously using the nations resources to screw smaller hapless nation states scares me. Not to mention they keep grudges.
Pfhreak 6y ago
This is where policing in America has been headed for at least a decade now. Everything is so polarized that people who would normally be opposed to this view those being tracked as their enemies, and thus fair targets. (For example, I'd imagine that right wing or libertarian types would normally consider surveillance to be a real bad thing. But if it gets deployed against George Floyd protestors... Ehhh... nbd) When you hear politicians talking about being "tough on crime" or "law and order", this is exactly the program they are pushing for.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Please don't conflate conservative with libertarian. They are partially similar in economic policy but opposites in social policy.
  - 6y ago

Pfhreak 6y ago

I'm not going to say ACAB, but many who do believe that no matter how nice of an individual a cop might be, they are still working within an organization that pushes for privacy shredding technologies like this. You can be a sweet, community oriented beat cop out there doing your best, but behind you stands surveillance, militarization of police, and the tragedy of prisons in America. Maybe this isn't a generalization that's fair -- should/do we fault all FAANG employees because their parent companies are doing unethical things? I don't know the answer, but articles like this definitely make me think a whole lot more about whether individual police can be ethical while operating in the way the departments do today.

ssklash 6y ago
I don't think you can separate the individual from the organization when the organization either fundamentally or in practice is engaged in negative/harmful activities. Policing is broken in the US, and though its original intention is good, the daily practice of it today is systemically flawed and no longer has the original intent as its goal. The same applies to companies like Facebook and Google. They fundamentally exist to extract data from their users. They never had another legitimate mission that was corrupted over time, unlike the police. Apple, Netflix, Amazon at least have services that do not revolve around taking advantage of their users and manipulating their behavior. Organizations are made up of individuals at the end of the day. If you are a cop or work at companies like Palantir, Google, Facebook, you are helping prop up organizations that actively do harm to many people. You may not be as responsible as cops that murder or decision makers at the top, but their guilt would not be possible without you. Please think long and hard about where you work and why you work there.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Are you honestly saying that FB and Google don't provide anything that users value?
  - kchr 6y ago
    Sure they do. But at a huge cost for our society.

HashingtheCode 6y ago

> In Miami, a protestor who allegedly threw something at police officers was later identified and arrested using Clearview AI’s facial recognition system Very good police work using AI to arrest this transgressor > In 2018, in response to more protests and riots, Baltimore police used facial recognition through the city's CCTV camera network to identify and later arrest protestors. Similarly, the New York Police Department arrested more than 3,000 people using facial recognition technology Excellent use of technology to arrest rioters > According to the ACLU, the pervasive and precise surveillance system built in Baltimore Does the ACLU even have any credibility left? Left....oops :-) > Researchers would like to think that their work in AI or robotics can be separated from politics of the moment. They are wrong. Please explain why they are wrong....oh you didn't, just skipped that part. > However, the surveillance systems built by police in New York, Baltimore, and Minneapolis are not isolated examples of excessive policing How is using technology like A.I. to apprehend criminals, rioters etc, excessive policing? If you look at how we use technology today in our daily lives and places of work, that could also be said to be excessive. Does the OP want the police to go back to pre-computer days of mountains of paper work and inefficiency? > ... expanding surveillance apparatus that is granting law enforcement unprecedented powers to watch, search, and seize the sensitive data of American citizens without a warrant or even suspicion of a crime. Well, you actually have to vote in congressional elections to make a change in the system in your state, but citizens of the US of A don't like voting. Anywhere between 21% to 61% depending upon the state. Guess you better vote next time and get your senator to not endorse these types of data collections. > State, local, and national police have access to more than 20 databases that cover a person's criminal history and his or her interactions with the state (e.g., drivers licenses) to build a “pattern of life” of the targeted individual, who may or may not have committed a crime. So the OP thinks that there should be no data correlation between different datasets for any person? The OP's article is an exhausting mess of emotive statements with no facts to back them up. This article could have been something, but it is really just a rant. Waiting for the lefties to vote me down because i don't have a problem with the police doing police work and catching criminals.

avs733 6y ago

I'm usually not the 'reduce it to math' person but this seems like a perfect example. Facial recognition in policing fails at a mathematical level because of Bayes. Let's say I have a database of 10,000 people's faces and I'm looking to match 1 accused criminal from a good quality image. Let's also say my algorithm is 99.99% accurate with 100% specificity (i.e., I always ID the bad guy as the bad guy). So I get a true positive, I can correctly ID the guy. But in doing so I am 10 times as likely to get a false positive. at 99.99% accuracy. Scale it to 1,000,000 people and that likelihood of a false positive is 100x. Because you are looking for a small number of people as your database gets larger the value of a positive match (i.e., your positive predictive value) rapidly approaches zero. Yes this is a simplification but the basic idea stands. These algorithms used at scale are flat out unacceptable because the concept of their use makes false positives more likely than true positives.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Something feels a bit off about this article. The content, the name of the website, the logo they use — all make me initially trust them as my kind of people. I want to read this without questioning who the author is. It has the look and feel of something I might align with, instinctively. Alas, this is a dangerous thing in the world of bogus news. The author and his editors then refer to Founder Fathers (not Founding) and “tying” police powers (instead of “tying the hands of the police” or “curtailing the powers of the police”.) People learning English as a second language are, of course, allowed to make mistakes, but written journalism about US public policy isn’t. That’s the point where one stops and does due diligence on who these people are. This is hard, because the The Gradient’s team don’t really introduce themselves very clearly. It would be great to have just a little bit more information about what this site is before delving into this article more. The about page suggests it’s a student/college magazine: https://thegradient.pub/about/ https://thegradient.pub/about/ Somewhere between the end of the article and the bottom of the page is a mini bio on the author. They work in policy / politics, including working in DC. They also have a public bio on LinkedIn with more details. I don’t mean to cast unfair aspersions, but am I reading a nudge piece from a lobbying think tank? I feel guilty for even asking. How did the internet make me so skeptical?

sudosysgen 6y ago
Why wouldn't such a deeply political article be written by someone in politics, given the context certainly in consultance with people from the field? And which kind of lobbying think tank is against giving more power to the police?
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  I’m fine with think tank nudge pieces as long as they aren’t pretending to be news editorial. On today’s internet, there is a strong requirement for being up front out one’s agenda otherwise how do we differentiate interesting opinion/blogging from the fake news bunkers? In this case, a buried bio on a think piece I’ve never heard of wasn’t enough to suppress the “is this manipulative blogging dressed up to look like reputable journalism?” alarm bells. (Even though, in fairness, this author does seem to be closer to the Bob Woodward end of the spectrum than the Ghanaian/Russian troll farm end.)

sebow 6y ago

This has been de facto in practice done for almost 2 decades. It seems the west doesn't care about what's happening to them domestically, but this is news & very bad when it happens to them in China; It's universally bad, and just because the side effects are smaller in the west doesn't justify tracking & the police state of not having the "wrong opinions"(yes it obviously happens everywhere, and not just for the sake of national security) By the way don't bring Europe up in this, because i can assure you that as an european it is not true what americans & others are fed to them, that somehow we are being respected in terms of privacy & tracking. We're not, in some cases it's way worse over here(see Germany and especially UK).

known 6y ago

AI is not immune to Garbage In = Garbage Out