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Portland passes broadest facial recognition ban in the US
- stevespang 6y agoFEDS are laughing at this, they do whatever they want to.
- Kednicma 6y agoThis is the sort of regulation that our industry has earned. We wanted to build this sort of thing, and it turns out that what we wanted to build is harmful to society.
- mistersquid 6y agoI've visited Portland a handful of times, each time marveling at its beauty, charm, and small-metro vibe. Even so, I fell into the California-nativist trap of seeing it as a the lesser sister city of the Bay Area. In the last year, Portland has shown a commitment to the American ideals of justice, equality, and freedom that place it among cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Birmingham. Portland does the US proud.
- teddyh 6y agoIt sounds like you have Portland-itis: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1919 https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1919
- ashtonkem 6y agoPortland also promised that they’d stop using teargas, 24 hours before the police tear gassed several square blocks. I am dubious of Portland’s ability to actually enforce such a ban, given that their police department doesn’t seem responsive to political control.
- dragontamer 6y agoLayers upon layers. The Sheriff holds more power than most people realize. You can change the laws, but if you don't change the sheriff, then you get the same old police tactics. Let's put it this way: if the Sheriff breaks the law, who will arrest them? --------- This is in contrast to a Commissioner, like in NYC. If the commissioner breaks the law, the Mayor can fire them. Then the next commissioner can arrest them.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Let's put it this way: if the Sheriff breaks the law, who will arrest them? State or federal law enforcement officers, or, even city police. Depending on the specific structure of the department, possibly his own deputies. Sheriffs are not, in theory or practice, immune to arrest, e.g.: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/embattled-rio-arriba-county-sheriff-s-career-dotted-with-legal-issues/article_658eb13a-caaf-11ea-bcb3-c7da1b3f0f44.html https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/embattled-...
- dragontamer 6y agoLets bring it back to the practice that was initially discussed. * Portland city passes a law, where its now illegal for police to use tear gas (https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/09/10/911531561/portland-ore-mayor-bans-police-use-of-tear-gas-at-protests https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...) * The use of tear gas remains legal in the State, and Federal governments. (This appears to be a local law and/or ordinance). * Local Sheriff decides the law is stupid, uses tear gas anyway. The Sheriff hasn't broken any state, or federal law. Only the local law. Literally no one can arrest him in this situation.
- indymike 6y agoSheriffs do have a lot of power, and are not immune from prosecution by federal or state authorities. Some states do have provisions for the arrest of the Sheriff. Here's an example from Indiana: "A warrant for the arrest of the county sheriff shall be served by the coroner or any other person to whom it may be legally directed. The coroner, who shall commit the sheriff to the county jail, has custody of the jail and its prisoners during the imprisonment of the sheriff."
- mensetmanusman 6y agoI read that as fecal recognition ban. Spent too much time on the streets of Portland...
- Pfhreak 6y agoGood. A model for the rest of the country. The idea that anyone should be allowed to track the movement of everyone in a city is incredibly dystopian. No one needs the power to automate tracking people, and the potential for abuse is overwhelmingly high.
- matthewfelgate 6y agoLuddite.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoThough funny, it doesn’t really move the conversation forward.
- klyrs 6y agoThere's a difference between being anti-technology and being anti-one-specific-application-of-a-technology. Analogously, saying "hey maybe cops shouldn't shoot citizens to death" is not a fundamentally anti-gun stance. For example, the Black Panther Party famously had patrols, armed with long guns, who directly challenged police brutality.
- Pfhreak 6y agoYeah, funny, I've been in the tech industry for a decade working on some of the highest scale systems there are. But yeah, Luddite, lol. Fun fact, Luddites were not anti technology. They destroyed machines because they were worried (correctly) that capitalists would race to the bottom in pay, firing all the people who were trained in producing textiles.
- Lammy 6y agoThese laws sound good, but I don’t trust that any layer of government would willingly give up that data source, and definitely not the more secretive agencies. I fear these types of laws will only further disarm the general populace and even activists, since we will not feel any pressure to develop awareness of and countermeasures for something that “can’t be used”. If this tech exists then it will be used, just maybe not admitted to.
- xref 6y agoIANAL but seems like you could get a case against you thrown out if it was found facial recognition was involved in your identification.
- Lammy 6y agoI imagine you wouldn’t find out. Parallel construction would be easy with city-wide CCTV plus face recognition. Maybe an officer would “just happen” to be walking by and think you look suspicious for some reason.
- vaccinator 6y agoBut they are trained to lie about their sources when illegal tools were used (parallel construction)...
- tal8d 6y agoHere is what will happen: the task will be outsourced to some nebulous SaaS that has no FOIA obligations.
- unishark 6y agoOr the law will have exceptions for special emergency circumstances. And the government will operate under a permanent state of special emergency circumstances due to the threat to their safety (whatever it is that particular day). Meanwhile levying big fines against any local stores who use the technology for their own security.
- tzs 6y agoNote: I shall talk of politics in this comment. I am not offering any opinion on the politics of either Biden and Democrats or Trump and Republicans. Regardless of the merits of such a ban or the lack thereof, why do it right now? Maybe I've missed some subtleties in Portland politics, but the impression I've gotten is that the people there and the politicians that win elections there would greatly prefer that Biden beat Trump in the US presidential election that is 23 days from now. One of the points Trump has been trying to run on is that he supports law and order and the Democrats support crippling law enforcement to aid anarchists and far left extremists who want to destroy everything good about America. I will not be at all surprised if this ban becomes part of Trump's message at rallies and in ads and helps drive some votes to him. There is no good way for Biden to counter that. If he comes out in agreement with the ban, it helps Trump's law and order message. If he comes out against the ban to appeal to the law and order voter, without a long explanation of subtle tradeoffs involved, he'll alienate some voters on the left. If he comes out against the ban with a long and subtle explanation, he'll still alienate those voters because who the heck is going to actually read the long and subtle explanation? We are at the "sound bites are all that matters" stage of the election, and Portland is giving Trump a great sound bite. The damage minimizing option for Biden is to just ignore it, ceding those law and order voters to Trump. What about facial recognition in Portland is so urgent that they could not wait a month on this?
- t-writescode 6y agoPortland has been under protests and many of the articles written about what’s happening in Portland regularly reference police and federal police brutality in those protests. That is, law enforcement officers doing harm to the general public in those protests. These laws probably spawn out of that. It’s dealing with the manifestations they’re seeing in the protests at that local level. I don’t live in Portland and I don’t read the articles closely. This is an uneducated guess.
- tadfisher 6y agoI live here and would generally agree with your assessment. You bring up a good point about dealing with local issues. This movement is centered around a municipal budget concern, which is diverting funds from the police department to other forms of emergency response and community support programs. That our city is now the poster-child of the Trump campaign is telling.
- bsenftner 6y agoI'd need to see the specific wording of the law, but it sounds like the exceptions need to be carefully examined. The ban in Boston enables the police to simply contract a private agency, for example; creating private surveillance companies with less oversight than the police. FR is a Pandora's Box, and it is already out in the public's hands. With legal exceptions and a history of simply ignoring legal transgressions when it comes to law enforcement, the situation does not look positive.
- convery 6y agoIndeed, it's a hard philosophical problem. On one hand we need to respect peoples privacy, but on the other FR would allow the police to act faster and catch dangerous people before they do more harm to society. I just hope they don't add a clause about dismissing evidence if FR was somehow part of the process, nothing is sadder than reading the "we have evidence of X doing Y, but the evidence was sent via improper channels so we can't prosecute"-stories.
- bsenftner 6y agoAn issue that concerns me is the necessity for an understanding of racial blindness. This is the inability to distinguish between subtle facial differences, such as seen in siblings and near age cousins of an ethnicity other than one's own ethnicity. It is becoming clear the human operators of FR systems need to be screened for racial blindness. I work in FR myself, and from my perspective the management of and operators of FR systems are simply unaware this is an issue and the obvious solution.
- supernova87a 6y agoWhat is the difference between facial recognition "technology" and having a group of people with good memories and access to photos / videos of past events? Just the scale of it? How far back they can remember? The fact that they can't sit on every street corner? Is it just a practical argument? And for example, does this prevent a hotel from implementing facial recognition so that they could greet a guest by name when they walk up to your check-in counter?
- bigphishy 6y agoQuite obviously this involves computers and software with code designed to identify faces.
- throwawaysea 6y agoThis news is over a month old. Portland needs facial recognition. It has criminal rioters regularly breaking the law without any consequence. The city’s leadership is allowing violence in the name of political goals to continue unchecked, and is weakening their police department’s ability to uphold the law and enforce it equally upon everyone. Having facial recognition would at least help a department with limited resources act more efficiently. Instead of relying on random luck and memory to spot a suspect while on patrol, it reduces the search to potential matches that have a much higher likelihood of being apprehended and charged. Those concerned about false positives should keep in mind that there is always a human in the loop to confirm matches - which makes the overall system ultimately no less accurate than a human’s ability to spot a suspect randomly. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily limit the use of technology here any less than it would to ban a police department’s access to electricity or other utilities. You either believe in having a police department (in which case you want it to be effective and efficient) or you don’t believe that and are okay with police being abolished. The gray space in the middle doesn’t make logical sense to me.
- vaccinator 6y agoThey have cops breaking the law everywhere... on video sometime taken by their own camera... and often suffer no consequenses. Not sure how facial recognition would help since they already know who they are.
- toomim 6y agoIn Portland the District Attorney actually has a policy to not punish people breaking the law in protests. So the surveillance video isn't going to matter for protests anyway.
- tadfisher 6y agoThe policy is to drop charges that do not involve violence or destruction of property. 70% of charges resulting from the protest were for city ordinance violations such as trespass.
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- drusepth 6y agoEmbarrassed for my city. Whether you agree or disagree with this ban seems to fall on two divisive opinion sets: 1) Facial recognition does more (less) good than harm 2) The police should (shouldn't) be given tools to do their job better I'm very firmly in the "agree with both" camp, and it might make people that disagree on one or both opinions happy to hear that I'm starting to think the world is not heading in (what I view as) a good direction.
- Kednicma 6y agoI'm embarrassed that you live in my city, too. Get off the fence already. By framing the problem as whether the police need tools to do their job, you've accepted the idea that heavy-handed police-driven violence is a necessary part of our society.
- masterphilo 6y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but you don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Not to be more violent, but to be better policemen. If that involves using facial recognition to be able to detect threats of rioting and violence, then so be it, as long as that technology is used in accordance with laws and regulations protecting your civil liberties. Why is that wrong?
- drusepth 6y agoI find that the typical missing link to understand this response is trust in the police. If you trust them to do their job (and trust that their job is actually to protect the community, not attack it), you also typically trust in them to properly use the tools at their disposal. In that case, you typically think about the benefits of those tools and how they can let police do their job _better_ instead of how they could be abused or used for wrong. If people don't trust the police (or think that their job/role is a negative one), then they probably tend to focus more on the potential downsides or bad possibilities that could come with new or improved tools (of which there are many with facial recognition). If you don't like what the police are already doing, it's easy to assume giving them the tools to do it better would be a Very Bad Bad thing. You definitely don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence (which I don't) to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Ironically, I think that physically unobtrusive information-based solutions (like FR) that let officers do their job with more information and less unpredictability would result in _less_ physical violence.
- drusepth 6y agoMore HN discussion on this from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24427417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24427417
- pnw_hazor 6y agoLocal police and sheriffs will partner with Feds in so-called task forces to get around these limitations. That is what local police in Washington State do to get around the state's long standing restrictions on wire-tapping.
- vaccinator 6y agoWhenever they ban facial recognition, they should make it broader and also ban license plate tracking, bluetooth tracking, wifi tracking, TPMS tracking, etc... Because they are as bad, if not worst, then facial recognition.
- golemiprague 6y agoI don't understand that, what's the difference between letting a computer search or a human search? at the end a human looks at the result and can confirm if the match looks the same or not. This will just make police work slower and will let criminal elements flourish. Another thing, if we ban government and the police using it, why not ban it for everybody? Why Google can use it but not the government? At least with the government I can vote them out if they miss use it but what power do we have ver those huge corporates? It seems to me like it it a power grab by those corporates, they want to have this power but not the government which might prevent them from taking over the world while preaching to us how good they are and on "the right side of history".