34 ms·

Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

304 points by atg_abhishek 6y ago

apples_oranges 6y ago
For the sake of our kids.. I have no idea how we will avoid a complete surveillance state in the future. Tracking devices in every pocket. And algorithms that can turn every camera into a tracking device.
- switch007 6y ago
  What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state? I.e. what would be different from now.
  - lb1lf 6y ago
    Not OP, but presumably advances in machine learning which will make it simpler to identify patterns and gleam useful, actionable information from the vast troves of data being collected. Today, it is my impression that much data is only used to reconstruct events after the fact, rather than gaining a priori knowledge to prevent an incident in the first place. (And, to make it clear - I am not suggesting 'progress' as outlined above is desirable...)
  - lm28469 6y ago
    Not OP but I believe most of the surveillance derives from third parties. The government doesn't directly control or monitor most of the surveillance tools (google, telecoms, geoloc, &c.), or at least not in most advanced countries. But it's getting easier and easier for them to access these data and there will probably be less and less safeguards. For example in France we're in a permanent "state of emergency" since the attacks in 2015 (and now with covid), which grants more rights to the government/police and let them bypass some legal safeguards for "the greater good" but of course it's already being abused, not against terrorists, but against protesters, people squatting land to protest against projects that would have a negative impact on the environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend), &c.
    - the_other 6y ago
      It cannot be for “the greater good”, or the law would not have been written that way before the “emergency”.
      - AmericanChopper 6y ago
        Any government action that relies on emergency powers is an admission from that government that they have failed to govern using their prescribed legislative mandate. Any government that uses such power should be held to account for their failure to govern, because it’s almost never necessary, and is always abused.
      - subaquamille 6y ago
        The tools necessary to achieve this good light not be the same in all corconstancies and you only want to extend the law when strictly necessary, not always. See food ratio in war times.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    The CCP already has that: - QR code required to board public transit - facial surveillance when you use a traffic light which monitors your appearance and expression - moving towards digital-only currency to track purchases.
  - fuzzy2 6y ago
    We don’t have mandatory in-home surveillance, for the moment.
    - switch007 6y ago
      I get that. But I'm wondering if that really is what needs to occur before we consider a a state to be a complete surveillance state, if, for example, almost every home has some kind of device that can be exploited for surveillance, e.g landline, mobile phone, television, smart devices, laptops/desktops/tablets, internet routers/modems, smart meters, smart heating, rubbish collectoin etc? I.e. have we opted in to in-home surveillance to a sufficient level to make mandatory surveillance almost of no use.
  - dmos62 6y ago
    Compare surveillance in US and China. Both have a lot of it, but one has orders of magnitude more of it. Also China is more open about it. In US there's attempts to be sneaky about it, not so in China, though that's probably just the dictatorial aspect.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    "What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state?" Ratcheting up automation is what would make it different to me. While there are exceptions, for the most part, police look at all this data after they know about a crime. They have most of what they need to use the info to discover crime and automatically cite people. As a simple example, ANPR in two places could issue a speeding ticket if the time elasped between two scans is low enough. I'm sure it's happening somewhere, maybe a toll road. The difference would be when it's widespread.
- ben_w 6y ago
  We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption. All we can do is try to make a society where that doesn’t matter. IMO such a society is as anarchic as possible, though “as possible” is still well short of the level in, say, The Culture; the exact level is dynamic and tech-dependent.
  - krspykrm 6y ago
    > We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption. I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible). It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."
    - ben_w 6y ago
      The reason I say it is unavoidable is not laws of nature, it is the ease with which it can be done with current technology, and the advantages that our current technology brings to societies which do not reject it. Indeed we could, as you say, construct societies without that capacity — Amish, etc. already do so — but such a society is outcompeted by every society which embraces tech, and any society with tech at the level of the Stasi (i.e. both old and the wrong side of the Iron Curtain) can surveil whoever it wants whenever it wants. Now? Now it doesn’t matter if you decentralised all the infrastructure, the tech is too cheap to avoid total surveillance. Now, laser mics are school projects, and the hardware cost for pointing one at each and every window in London 24/7 is significantly lower than the annual cost of the Metropolitan Police Service in the same city. Now, your WiFi can be converted into a wall-penetrating radar, do pose detection, heart rate and breathing detection. Now, my wristwatch knows when I walk past the charging station to turn on its screen and remind me of its existence. I don’t even know how it knows when I’m walking past. Now, I have an IR camera that can see through some opaque-to-visible-light materials for no good reason and at pocket-money prices. “Centralised” has its problems, but getting rid of centralisation isn’t enough.
IAmAtWork 6y ago
Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually. Its same with deepfakes. I am not happy or supporting either but with rise in computational power some things are unavoidable. Police always used photo id databases in manhunts. And deepfakes existed in Victorian era. We need to make sure that auditing agencies monitoring the government and offices and non profits protecting civil rights also gets technological and financial boost. Everything else is just attacking the windmills.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  It’s not the same though, because when done manually it is possible to be overloaded with the sheer volume of imagery to comb through. Like saying someone is able to manually throw a grenade so we might as well just carpet bomb everything.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Guns existed before machine guns, you do have to consider the consequences of a bifurcation (loose speak)
- donpott 6y ago
  "Sometimes a difference in scale makes a difference in kind" (heard in a CGPGrey video, but I'm sure the quote predates it)
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    Something like it goes back a couple of thousand years or more, see the note about Stalin and "Quantity has a quality all its own." at https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&oldid=1993027 https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&old...
- howaboutnope 6y ago
  Yeah, and the difference between drinking a glass of water and drowning is also just one of scale and rate. Same for a pat on the back, and being violently attacked -- it's just physical impact, the only difference is the speed. > I am not happy or supporting either Then don't.
breakfastduck 6y ago
The perfect event (the capitol) to normalise the practice even further. And those who should be opposing it most passionately will be applauding it’s use, because they started with ‘the bad guys’.
- mnd999 6y ago
  We saw the same in London after the 2012 riots. Instead of stopping the rioting and looting the police let it go on and then took all the cctv and arrested the perpetrators after the event. It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.
  - pdkl95 6y ago
    > lazy policing From Susan Landau's 2016 testimony[1] before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone: >> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques." >> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations." >> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based." Whenever law enforcement complains that they need tools that give them access to more data they never mention that they have access to far more data than any point in history. Yes, some types of data they have used in the past may be going dark, but they have gained an incredible breadth of new tools. Unfortunately, learning new investigation techniques requires money, training, and effort. Shoveling as much data as possible onto the problem makes the actual investigation more difficult, but they do it anyway when it also acts de facto as another source of power. ~sigh~ This crap needs to be reigned in. Fast. [1] (pdf) https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG-114-JU00-Wstate-LandauS-20160301.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG...
Bostonian 6y ago
When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people. "We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story). But it keeps being used as "there is a <19 times in 20> 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go <violently> arrest that guy"
  - Jkvngt 6y ago
    Is this actually true though? It sounds great, but where’s the data? * we need more than just the occasional anecdote to determine if this is a real issue
    - keiferski 6y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
    - Ensorceled 6y ago
      There are literally dozens of news stories about the wrong person being arrested for a crime they could not have committed. It's literally why cities have been banning the practice in the original news story.
    - giardini 6y ago
      Facial recognition software fails legal tests if used with large datasets. It does so b/c software does not discriminate in the same way the human mind does. For example, some facial recognition software identifies this picture of a man wearing glasses as actress Milla Jovovitch: https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/01160657/unknown.jpg?width=800 https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/0... [The New Scientist article from which the above picture is taken is "Glasses make face recognition tech think you're Milla Jovovich": https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-face-recognition-tech-think-youre-milla-jovovich/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-fa... ] The (PDF) original paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf Steven Talley was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in two bank robberies using a facial recognition algorithm. He had an iron-clad alibi, but the police and FBI weren't convinced. In court one of the bank tellers said Talley definitely wasn't the robber. Nonetheless Talley lost his job, his wife and his family and was held in prison for months. For more details read: "LOSING FACE: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life" https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition-mismatch-can-ruin-your-life/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition... I found out about the facial recognition failures from he outstanding book "Hello World" by Hannah Fry. Fry tells the story of Steven Talley as part of a chapter on crime, AI and facial recognition. https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp/039363499X https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp... Fry's book shows how/why facial recognition software simply does not work well enough to use in police work. She provides the studies and footnotes them. As Fry says: "If you're searching for a particular criminal in digital line-up of millions...the best-case scenario is that you won't find the right person one in six times...". That is not nearly good enough for law enforcement and the courts. -from "Hello World" by Hannah Fry
Jkvngt 6y ago
Everybody just keep wearing masks. It’s not like we have much of a choice, haha!
sys_64738 6y ago
A ban is ineffectual without consequences. Criminal prosecution of police chiefs is what's needed, IMO.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  There are more types of consequences than just penal ones. For example, I imagine if they are indeed banned, and a case against a defendant is built around the usage of the technology, then that case would get dropped. That is a consequence in of itself as it wasted valuable prosecutorial resources, department resources, etc.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Unfortunately, you have situations where cases are started using inadmissible investigation tactics, but presented to a jury without them. In those situations, the prosecution may succeed, which actually adds incentive to conduct the illegal investigations.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Do individuals care about wasted taxpayer’s resources? They’re getting paid to do their job, regardless of dropped case or not. The defendant spends their time and money and has to live a stressful life.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    It is obvious that waste of public resources is not an effective deterrent of police lawlessness. Police leaders should go to prison if they willfully violate the law.
- sneak 6y ago
  Police in the US don't enforce the laws against other police or other powerful figures in governments, for the most part. This results in two different sets of laws, one that applies to police and government officials, and a much broader set that applies to you and I. The idea that the law is applied equally is a total fiction.
- 6y ago
ceilingcorner 6y ago
When it comes to distributed/local technologies, does a ban really accomplish anything? I'm dubious that facial recognition technology will disappear because some random governments passed laws against it. Especially because it's nearly impossible to punish when police can just use parallel construction. "We received an anonymous tip and followed it up." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction The solution instead might be the same with deepfakes: fill everything with junk data.
- netizen-9748 6y ago
  Parallel construction sounds an awful lot like lying
  - octostone 6y ago
    They’re allowed to do that too
    - netizen-9748 6y ago
      They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens. A defense attorney can't get evidence stricken when it came from dubious sources when they lie in court about the source.
      - sneak 6y ago
        > They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens. That's only true in theory. In practice, police lies are one of the pillars of the US "justice" system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-police-perjury-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-polic... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilying.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilyin...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Simulacra 6y ago
Police seem to do many things despite bans, or at least despite court rulings that tell them repeatedly not to. Photography of police is the one that comes to mind, and maybe even the Stingray.
zupreme 6y ago
At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room. Across much of the globe, modern police forces have been empowered and emboldened to such a degree that many departments, and their members, feel institutionally above the law. In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police. Its frankly insulting to see, again and again, that people we (civilians) fund the salaries of, see us as beneath them - as evidenced by how we are held to the letter of ordinances and laws by them, while they break ordinances and laws with seemingly wanton abandon. This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.
- rendall 6y ago
  > we (civilians) I just want to remind everyone that police are civilians too. I also sometimes forget
  - qntty 6y ago
    civilian noun 2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
    - thatguy0900 6y ago
      Why would firefighters not be civilians?
      - qntty 6y ago
        I don't know exactly, but it sounds like the word is context-dependent. During war, it means people who aren't in the military, but during peacetime it means people who aren't expected to risk their lives in more ordinary ways. [If the jobs of firefighters seems irreproachable or lacking authority compared to military or police, then maybe it would help to remember that firefighters turned their hoses on civil rights protesters in the 60s. No doubt there are many similar examples of firefighter's behavior being clearly outside of the what is thought to be typical of civilians.]
offtop5 6y ago
What a horrible thing. I guarantee this will constantly find incorrect matches. Just like follicle investigators of the past, if it's completely inaccurate who cares because you can just scare some 19-year-old into a plea bargain. People with money won't be affected, they'll have high price lawyers who will get this ' evidence' thrown out.
stakkur 6y ago
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
carapace 6y ago
Yes, (Duh, wouldn't you?) I've said this before so I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Whether we like it or not ubiquitous surveillance is the new order of the day. You cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. You can't enforce rules against using it without using it. We're stuck with what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy"[1]. The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime. Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted? I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain. If it would prevent a kid from getting kidnapped, or someone getting raped, or murdered, or even just getting hit by a hit-and-run driver, that I would agree to have my life JenniCam'd[2]. The fact is, it's already happening. E.g. your smart phone uploads your location data which is then sold off. Your smart TV sends pictures of the screen to the cloud. Your smart router listens to your conversations. Your smart electricity meter sends telemetry. Smart streetlights know where the cars are, smart cars know where the people are (a fleet of networked self-driving cars (auto-autos) is a ubiquitous surveillance system.) Etc. Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry. [1] "Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy ("Grundiocracy"? Ew.) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream)
- t-writescode 6y ago
  > Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry. As a country, the United States has decided that the Bill of Rights was important enough to write down, even if some bad people get to go free. As a country, the United States also decided that wiretapping is illegal except when permitted in a specific instance, with approval from a judge. You may think it's okay, but our Founding Fathers and our predecessors decided that these things weren't okay, likely do to immediate dangers they had just been experiencing. Arguably, the software and practices that Snowden exposedallow after-the-fact wiretapping, where everything was recorded, but not looked at prior to the fact. I argue that is against the spirit of the wiretapping laws, myself.
maedayx 6y ago
Whaaaaaat police departments breaking the law? Never!
urda 6y ago
Of course they do, the Union is far too powerful and nobody holds them accountable.
cwkoss 6y ago
I wonder if the Facial Recognition software or the police humans have a higher racial bias?
kevinmm 6y ago
Here come the lawsuits

304 points by atg_abhishek 6y ago

For the sake of our kids.. I have no idea how we will avoid a complete surveillance state in the future. Tracking devices in every pocket. And algorithms that can turn every camera into a tracking device.

switch007 6y ago
What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state? I.e. what would be different from now.
- lb1lf 6y ago
  Not OP, but presumably advances in machine learning which will make it simpler to identify patterns and gleam useful, actionable information from the vast troves of data being collected. Today, it is my impression that much data is only used to reconstruct events after the fact, rather than gaining a priori knowledge to prevent an incident in the first place. (And, to make it clear - I am not suggesting 'progress' as outlined above is desirable...)
- lm28469 6y ago
  Not OP but I believe most of the surveillance derives from third parties. The government doesn't directly control or monitor most of the surveillance tools (google, telecoms, geoloc, &c.), or at least not in most advanced countries. But it's getting easier and easier for them to access these data and there will probably be less and less safeguards. For example in France we're in a permanent "state of emergency" since the attacks in 2015 (and now with covid), which grants more rights to the government/police and let them bypass some legal safeguards for "the greater good" but of course it's already being abused, not against terrorists, but against protesters, people squatting land to protest against projects that would have a negative impact on the environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend), &c.
  - the_other 6y ago
    It cannot be for “the greater good”, or the law would not have been written that way before the “emergency”.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      Any government action that relies on emergency powers is an admission from that government that they have failed to govern using their prescribed legislative mandate. Any government that uses such power should be held to account for their failure to govern, because it’s almost never necessary, and is always abused.
    - subaquamille 6y ago
      The tools necessary to achieve this good light not be the same in all corconstancies and you only want to extend the law when strictly necessary, not always. See food ratio in war times.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  The CCP already has that: - QR code required to board public transit - facial surveillance when you use a traffic light which monitors your appearance and expression - moving towards digital-only currency to track purchases.
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  We don’t have mandatory in-home surveillance, for the moment.
  - switch007 6y ago
    I get that. But I'm wondering if that really is what needs to occur before we consider a a state to be a complete surveillance state, if, for example, almost every home has some kind of device that can be exploited for surveillance, e.g landline, mobile phone, television, smart devices, laptops/desktops/tablets, internet routers/modems, smart meters, smart heating, rubbish collectoin etc? I.e. have we opted in to in-home surveillance to a sufficient level to make mandatory surveillance almost of no use.
- dmos62 6y ago
  Compare surveillance in US and China. Both have a lot of it, but one has orders of magnitude more of it. Also China is more open about it. In US there's attempts to be sneaky about it, not so in China, though that's probably just the dictatorial aspect.
- tyingq 6y ago
  "What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state?" Ratcheting up automation is what would make it different to me. While there are exceptions, for the most part, police look at all this data after they know about a crime. They have most of what they need to use the info to discover crime and automatically cite people. As a simple example, ANPR in two places could issue a speeding ticket if the time elasped between two scans is low enough. I'm sure it's happening somewhere, maybe a toll road. The difference would be when it's widespread.
ben_w 6y ago
We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption. All we can do is try to make a society where that doesn’t matter. IMO such a society is as anarchic as possible, though “as possible” is still well short of the level in, say, The Culture; the exact level is dynamic and tech-dependent.
- krspykrm 6y ago
  > We can’t avoid that any more than the government can avoid criminals having unbreakable encryption. I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's something baked into the laws of math that says your society is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption, where the laws of math do say this is always possible). It is absolutely within the realm of technological possibility to build a society with largely decentralized infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."
  - ben_w 6y ago
    The reason I say it is unavoidable is not laws of nature, it is the ease with which it can be done with current technology, and the advantages that our current technology brings to societies which do not reject it. Indeed we could, as you say, construct societies without that capacity — Amish, etc. already do so — but such a society is outcompeted by every society which embraces tech, and any society with tech at the level of the Stasi (i.e. both old and the wrong side of the Iron Curtain) can surveil whoever it wants whenever it wants. Now? Now it doesn’t matter if you decentralised all the infrastructure, the tech is too cheap to avoid total surveillance. Now, laser mics are school projects, and the hardware cost for pointing one at each and every window in London 24/7 is significantly lower than the annual cost of the Metropolitan Police Service in the same city. Now, your WiFi can be converted into a wall-penetrating radar, do pose detection, heart rate and breathing detection. Now, my wristwatch knows when I walk past the charging station to turn on its screen and remind me of its existence. I don’t even know how it knows when I’m walking past. Now, I have an IR camera that can see through some opaque-to-visible-light materials for no good reason and at pocket-money prices. “Centralised” has its problems, but getting rid of centralisation isn’t enough.

IAmAtWork 6y ago

Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually. Its same with deepfakes. I am not happy or supporting either but with rise in computational power some things are unavoidable. Police always used photo id databases in manhunts. And deepfakes existed in Victorian era. We need to make sure that auditing agencies monitoring the government and offices and non profits protecting civil rights also gets technological and financial boost. Everything else is just attacking the windmills.

breakfastduck 6y ago
It’s not the same though, because when done manually it is possible to be overloaded with the sheer volume of imagery to comb through. Like saying someone is able to manually throw a grenade so we might as well just carpet bomb everything.
mhh__ 6y ago
Guns existed before machine guns, you do have to consider the consequences of a bifurcation (loose speak)
donpott 6y ago
"Sometimes a difference in scale makes a difference in kind" (heard in a CGPGrey video, but I'm sure the quote predates it)
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Something like it goes back a couple of thousand years or more, see the note about Stalin and "Quantity has a quality all its own." at https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&oldid=1993027 https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&old...
howaboutnope 6y ago
Yeah, and the difference between drinking a glass of water and drowning is also just one of scale and rate. Same for a pat on the back, and being violently attacked -- it's just physical impact, the only difference is the speed. > I am not happy or supporting either Then don't.

breakfastduck 6y ago

The perfect event (the capitol) to normalise the practice even further. And those who should be opposing it most passionately will be applauding it’s use, because they started with ‘the bad guys’.

mnd999 6y ago
We saw the same in London after the 2012 riots. Instead of stopping the rioting and looting the police let it go on and then took all the cctv and arrested the perpetrators after the event. It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.
- pdkl95 6y ago
  > lazy policing From Susan Landau's 2016 testimony[1] before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone: >> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques." >> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations." >> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based." Whenever law enforcement complains that they need tools that give them access to more data they never mention that they have access to far more data than any point in history. Yes, some types of data they have used in the past may be going dark, but they have gained an incredible breadth of new tools. Unfortunately, learning new investigation techniques requires money, training, and effort. Shoveling as much data as possible onto the problem makes the actual investigation more difficult, but they do it anyway when it also acts de facto as another source of power. ~sigh~ This crap needs to be reigned in. Fast. [1] (pdf) https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG-114-JU00-Wstate-LandauS-20160301.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG...

Bostonian 6y ago

When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Ensorceled 6y ago
Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people. "We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story). But it keeps being used as "there is a <19 times in 20> 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go <violently> arrest that guy"
- Jkvngt 6y ago
  Is this actually true though? It sounds great, but where’s the data? * we need more than just the occasional anecdote to determine if this is a real issue
  - keiferski 6y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    There are literally dozens of news stories about the wrong person being arrested for a crime they could not have committed. It's literally why cities have been banning the practice in the original news story.
  - giardini 6y ago
    Facial recognition software fails legal tests if used with large datasets. It does so b/c software does not discriminate in the same way the human mind does. For example, some facial recognition software identifies this picture of a man wearing glasses as actress Milla Jovovitch: https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/01160657/unknown.jpg?width=800 https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/0... [The New Scientist article from which the above picture is taken is "Glasses make face recognition tech think you're Milla Jovovich": https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-face-recognition-tech-think-youre-milla-jovovich/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-fa... ] The (PDF) original paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf Steven Talley was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in two bank robberies using a facial recognition algorithm. He had an iron-clad alibi, but the police and FBI weren't convinced. In court one of the bank tellers said Talley definitely wasn't the robber. Nonetheless Talley lost his job, his wife and his family and was held in prison for months. For more details read: "LOSING FACE: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life" https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition-mismatch-can-ruin-your-life/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition... I found out about the facial recognition failures from he outstanding book "Hello World" by Hannah Fry. Fry tells the story of Steven Talley as part of a chapter on crime, AI and facial recognition. https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp/039363499X https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp... Fry's book shows how/why facial recognition software simply does not work well enough to use in police work. She provides the studies and footnotes them. As Fry says: "If you're searching for a particular criminal in digital line-up of millions...the best-case scenario is that you won't find the right person one in six times...". That is not nearly good enough for law enforcement and the courts. -from "Hello World" by Hannah Fry

Jkvngt 6y ago

Everybody just keep wearing masks. It’s not like we have much of a choice, haha!

sys_64738 6y ago

A ban is ineffectual without consequences. Criminal prosecution of police chiefs is what's needed, IMO.

dimitrios1 6y ago
There are more types of consequences than just penal ones. For example, I imagine if they are indeed banned, and a case against a defendant is built around the usage of the technology, then that case would get dropped. That is a consequence in of itself as it wasted valuable prosecutorial resources, department resources, etc.
- smt88 6y ago
  Unfortunately, you have situations where cases are started using inadmissible investigation tactics, but presented to a jury without them. In those situations, the prosecution may succeed, which actually adds incentive to conduct the illegal investigations.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Do individuals care about wasted taxpayer’s resources? They’re getting paid to do their job, regardless of dropped case or not. The defendant spends their time and money and has to live a stressful life.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  It is obvious that waste of public resources is not an effective deterrent of police lawlessness. Police leaders should go to prison if they willfully violate the law.
sneak 6y ago
Police in the US don't enforce the laws against other police or other powerful figures in governments, for the most part. This results in two different sets of laws, one that applies to police and government officials, and a much broader set that applies to you and I. The idea that the law is applied equally is a total fiction.
6y ago

ceilingcorner 6y ago

When it comes to distributed/local technologies, does a ban really accomplish anything? I'm dubious that facial recognition technology will disappear because some random governments passed laws against it. Especially because it's nearly impossible to punish when police can just use parallel construction. "We received an anonymous tip and followed it up." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction The solution instead might be the same with deepfakes: fill everything with junk data.

netizen-9748 6y ago
Parallel construction sounds an awful lot like lying
- octostone 6y ago
  They’re allowed to do that too
  - netizen-9748 6y ago
    They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens. A defense attorney can't get evidence stricken when it came from dubious sources when they lie in court about the source.
    - sneak 6y ago
      > They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where parallel construction happens. That's only true in theory. In practice, police lies are one of the pillars of the US "justice" system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-police-perjury-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-polic... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilying.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilyin...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Simulacra 6y ago

Police seem to do many things despite bans, or at least despite court rulings that tell them repeatedly not to. Photography of police is the one that comes to mind, and maybe even the Stingray.

zupreme 6y ago

At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room. Across much of the globe, modern police forces have been empowered and emboldened to such a degree that many departments, and their members, feel institutionally above the law. In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police. Its frankly insulting to see, again and again, that people we (civilians) fund the salaries of, see us as beneath them - as evidenced by how we are held to the letter of ordinances and laws by them, while they break ordinances and laws with seemingly wanton abandon. This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.

rendall 6y ago
> we (civilians) I just want to remind everyone that police are civilians too. I also sometimes forget
- qntty 6y ago
  civilian noun 2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    Why would firefighters not be civilians?
    - qntty 6y ago
      I don't know exactly, but it sounds like the word is context-dependent. During war, it means people who aren't in the military, but during peacetime it means people who aren't expected to risk their lives in more ordinary ways. [If the jobs of firefighters seems irreproachable or lacking authority compared to military or police, then maybe it would help to remember that firefighters turned their hoses on civil rights protesters in the 60s. No doubt there are many similar examples of firefighter's behavior being clearly outside of the what is thought to be typical of civilians.]

offtop5 6y ago

What a horrible thing. I guarantee this will constantly find incorrect matches. Just like follicle investigators of the past, if it's completely inaccurate who cares because you can just scare some 19-year-old into a plea bargain. People with money won't be affected, they'll have high price lawyers who will get this ' evidence' thrown out.

stakkur 6y ago

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

carapace 6y ago

Yes, (Duh, wouldn't you?) I've said this before so I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Whether we like it or not ubiquitous surveillance is the new order of the day. You cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. You can't enforce rules against using it without using it. We're stuck with what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy"[1]. The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime. Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted? I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain. If it would prevent a kid from getting kidnapped, or someone getting raped, or murdered, or even just getting hit by a hit-and-run driver, that I would agree to have my life JenniCam'd[2]. The fact is, it's already happening. E.g. your smart phone uploads your location data which is then sold off. Your smart TV sends pictures of the screen to the cloud. Your smart router listens to your conversations. Your smart electricity meter sends telemetry. Smart streetlights know where the cars are, smart cars know where the people are (a fleet of networked self-driving cars (auto-autos) is a ubiquitous surveillance system.) Etc. Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry. [1] "Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy ("Grundiocracy"? Ew.) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream)

t-writescode 6y ago
> Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all their dirty laundry. As a country, the United States has decided that the Bill of Rights was important enough to write down, even if some bad people get to go free. As a country, the United States also decided that wiretapping is illegal except when permitted in a specific instance, with approval from a judge. You may think it's okay, but our Founding Fathers and our predecessors decided that these things weren't okay, likely do to immediate dangers they had just been experiencing. Arguably, the software and practices that Snowden exposedallow after-the-fact wiretapping, where everything was recorded, but not looked at prior to the fact. I argue that is against the spirit of the wiretapping laws, myself.

maedayx 6y ago

Whaaaaaat police departments breaking the law? Never!

urda 6y ago

Of course they do, the Union is far too powerful and nobody holds them accountable.

cwkoss 6y ago

I wonder if the Facial Recognition software or the police humans have a higher racial bias?

kevinmm 6y ago

Here come the lawsuits