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This is some excellent research! It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup that made the rounds a while ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/fea

• toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > If everyone is breaking so many laws that the police and courts can't keep up it doesn't mean that humanity is broken. It means that the law has gotten so far out of sync with humanity that the law is broken. People make the laws, not the other way around. The world would be a much better place if more people realized this.
  • mikeash 12y ago
    This always frustrates me when discussions of plea bargaining and the right to trial come up, and the argument is given that plea bargaining is a necessity because the courts would be horribly overloaded if every case went to trial. If the system doesn't have the resources to give every accused criminal a fair trial, then either you're making too many criminals, the system doesn't have enough resources, or both. Bypassing trials is just a way to cover your ears and shout "la la la" to ignore the problem.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • vinceguidry 12y ago
      The problem is that you can't get very far into the discussion before all the available options involve overhauling the entire system. And there's no way, realistically, to do that.
      • toomuchtodo 12y ago
        > And there's no way, realistically, to do that. Yes, yes there is. We start with the most victimless crimes (drug possession for personal consumption) and go from there. Police unions will fight it. Prison unions will fight it. The court system will fight it. Nevertheless, it must be done.
        • pc86 12y ago
          None of what you just said is an argument against "And there's no way, realistically, to do that." which many people (myself included) believe when you're talking about a systematic overhaul of the entire criminal justice system. Saying "oh well it must be done" doesn't negate the fact that practically speaking, it's impossible.
          • toomuchtodo 12y ago
            We start with the most victimless crimes (drug possession for personal consumption) and go from there. Did I not call that out enough? My apologies if so. Stop wasting time prosecuting what doesn't provide value in prosecuting.
        • mellavora 12y ago
          In support of your position, how did we ever let people convince us that victimless "crimes" were crimes? The definition of crime rests on the concept of harm, which requires a victim.
          • deleted 12y ago
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          • dragonwriter 12y ago
    • incongruity 12y ago
      While I largely agree with you, it strikes me that you've missed an option -- It might be that there's something inefficient in the trial process that holds no weight on "fairness". I'm not a legal expert by any means, so it may not be the case, but it seems as though it's a possibility.
      • mikeash 12y ago
        You certainly could be right. The way trials are run does not seem very efficient at all, and maybe a lot of the fat could be cut out without impacting outcomes. On the other hand, if you can get the number of accused criminals down to a reasonable level, it wouldn't matter too much if there was waste in the smaller number of trials. No doubt the problem can be attacked from many directions.
        • chongli 12y ago
          The inefficiency stems from the complexity of the law. We have built up over many years an unfathomably large codex and an equally staggering infrastructure devoted to training legions of people (lawyers) in how to read, interpret and apply it. How do we address this? One emerging solution employs advanced AIs to pore over the reams of evidence in order to better inform lawyers of the legal situation. I can imagine extrapolating this particular methodology far enough into the future such that the entire process subsequent to arrest (processing, pre-trial hearing, trial and sentencing) might be automated to the degree that it could be accomplished within minutes instead of months. What would society look like if we had such an "efficient" judicial system? That's a potentially terrifying possibility. It may be that we'd end up incarcerating orders of magnitude more people; a dystopian reality. How would we then rein in such a powerful system? I have no idea.
          • wwweston 12y ago
            > The inefficiency stems from the complexity of the law. Not just that, though -- it also comes from the inherent inefficiencies in trying to recover exactly what happened from any given situation in which the question of whether a crime was committed. We could start recording everything that happens, but... that's also a potentially terrifying possibility.
    • happyscrappy 12y ago
      > you're making too many criminals 80% of property crime goes unsolved, so unless you legalize vandalism and theft there are going to be criminals.
      • toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Or fix the underlying problems that causes vandalism and theft.
      • jessaustin 12y ago
        Perhaps this is another way out of our problem? We could encourage police to "solve" property crimes rather than drug crimes? In analogy to their awful drug-war asset seizures, perhaps they could get a cut of items recovered/reimbursed? I'm sure they would eventually twist such an incentive structure into something else that's awful and unconscionable, but at least in the meantime they might stop with the SWAT raids?
        • toomuchtodo 12y ago
          Could we not just outlaw SWAT raids?
          • jessaustin 12y ago
            It's difficult (not impossible!) to directly oppose politically well-connected factions on their bread-and-butter issues. We might have more luck saying to police departments "here is another way you can have lots of money to spend" rather than "we're taking away federal support for the Drug War, which for some time has been the only way you can hire more cops and procure more equipment". The trick would be to make sure that the existing force is redirected into more benign directions, rather than simply growing to handle new activities while perpetuating the Drug War.
            • toomuchtodo 12y ago
              Can we not just defund them? Can't "Stave The Beast" be used for good?
    • frobozz 12y ago
      Why should every crime go to trial? If the offender says "Fair cop, guv, you've got me bang to rights", why waste everyone's time proving that (s)he did it? It's basically the same as setting up your conditions to take advantage of short-circuit evaluation. You don't put the time-consuming and resource-hungry part first. Were there even the slimmest chance of acquittal, few defendants would utter that phrase without there being either a benefit to owning up, or an extra penalty for not doing so. This is what plea bargaining and TICs are for. If there's a suspicion of false confession, meaning that the suspect may not be the offender, that should normally be sorted out before court, so that the correct offender is tried for the correct offence (e.g. wasting police time if voluntary, or some kind of intimidation/coercion offence if not)?
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        > If there's a suspicion of false confession, meaning that the suspect may not be the offender, that should normally be sorted out before court How? Court is the process for sorting that out and assessing whether there is doubt, and the extent of that doubt.
      • bmm6o 12y ago
        The issue isn't whether every case should go to trial. A plea bargain is an exchange of (forgoing) a trial for a reduced charge or sentence. The undesirable outcome (for pretty much everyone but the prosecutor) is that an innocent person accepts a plea bargain to avoid the worst outcome, and we should do more to prevent this from happening. > If there's a suspicion of false confession, meaning that the suspect may not be the offender Are you assuming that this represents a minority of cases? Who has to suspect that the accused is not really guilty, a jury of his peers?
        • Lawtonfogle 12y ago
          >The issue isn't whether every case should go to trial. A plea bargain is an exchange of (forgoing) a trial for a reduced charge or sentence. In reality it becomes a punishment for demanding a fair trial.
      • 12y ago
    • edison_carter 12y ago
      You're right; there is tremendous pressure from both district attorneys and judges to cop a plea. Trials piss everyone off because they are "such a waste of time." Criminal defense attorneys have to contend not just with the facts of the case and legal precedents, but also the extent to which demanding a jury trial turns the court against your client -- and your other clients, by association. The other issue is police overcharging crimes. For example, suppose you, in a fit of pique, cut your roommate's arm with a knife. Not cool; that's aggravated assault. But the police then charges you with attempted second degree murder -- or even first degree (eg, premeditated). Now your defense attorney has to work hard just to get your charges down to a reasonable level; the agg assault you should have been charged with in the first place. This is what a huge majority of plea bargaining is about; not getting away with it, but getting the charge down to something that describes your actual offense. (Source: longtime criminal defense nerd)
    • wmil 12y ago
      This is a big issue in the US and it actually goes back to the Warren court. They issued a long series of rulings making it difficult to prosecute cases, without worrying about the consequences. By the 70s crime had skyrocketed and it was clear that they had gone too far. But instead of issuing a mea culpa and reexamining past rulings, the various courts started allowing prosecutors to claim broad new powers and take extremely aggressive tactics. By this point there's no real way to fix it. The legal system is based strongly on precedent. It can't just undo major rulings of the past and replace the with something sane.
      • trhway 12y ago
        >By this point there's no real way to fix it. The legal system is based strongly on precedent. It can't just undo major rulings of the past and replace the with something sane. sounds exactly like the point where a major fix must be done. Life changes faster and faster. The precedent system was great in 15th century when things look pretty much the same like in the 14th or 13th century.
      • joe_the_user 12y ago
        By the 70s crime had skyrocketed and it was clear that they had gone too far. Any claim that court ruler enabled crime is highly debatable. Factors causing increases and decreases in crime rates are difficult to pin-point. One argument is returning Vietnam veterans lead to the increase in violent crime - post-war eras have a history of being associated with crime-increases from the return of veterans habituated to violence.
      • voronoff 12y ago
        Do you know of any good sources to read up on this? I'd always thought that the rise of plea dealing was linked to minimum sentencing guidelines.
      • bsder 12y ago
        > They issued a long series of rulings making it difficult to prosecute cases, without worrying about the consequences. Um, so? Then we need to allocate more resources to prosecute cases. If I am falsely accused, I want my day in court. And I want it to be fair. The current system has problems on both fronts.
  • nickysielicki 12y ago
    The fact that can and does occur means the ideas of laws are broken. But that's just the anarchist in me speaking.
  • joe_the_user 12y ago
    Well, I think a large percentage of people do realize this. They just forget it as soon as the news media present whatever is the current horror story.
  • yutah 12y ago
    I think it is this way for 2 reasons... one, for-profit prisons and two, the ability for the government to put anyone away for a while
  • yuhong 12y ago
    Another thing I don't like is legislators making laws without thinking about enforcement, which is why I don't like anti-discrimination laws.
• platz 12y ago
  Someone talking about the kinect said that most all facial recognition algorithms require the face to be level horizontally; if the face is tilted at an angle then it doesn't work. not sure if true but interesting observation.
  • drpgq 12y ago
    That's really not that interesting. I work as a research scientist at a face recognition company. If you want, you can detect faces at any angle, but sometimes for speed you will only check upright faces.
    • platz 12y ago
      it might not be interesting to you as a researcher, but to me as a participant in in a world increasingly filled with face recognition products it's worth knowing that different products will have different capabilities based on their "speed" requirements.
      • clort 12y ago
        I am not a researcher, but I would suggest that perhaps you would find that in the case where a crowd was being parsed in realtime (looking out for somebody so we can catch them before they leave the station for example), the "speed" dial would be turned up as high as necessary, but that the video stream would be stored and the data set reprocessed at a later time with it at a better setting (so you can still say "yes she was here at x time, though we missed her") in other words, the bandwidth of the image recognition product is not the same as the bandwidth of the video storage.
        • platz 12y ago
          yes, highlighting what is possible is always needs to be taken into account. But again, what is possible is not the same as what happens in reality. Just because we can't rule something out, does not make it certain either. > the "speed" dial would be turned up as high as necessary It's possible, and probable given the situation (i.e. government, terror acts), but are there situations where this wouldn't happen in a different circumstance? Would mall security, or a marketing company operating an advertising product, have the ability, authorization, know-how, or financial incentive to do so if this wasn't a life/death situation? Not every application of facial recognition technology will be targeted to terror suspects/bombings.
• kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  It's not excellent research. All they did is create a naive NN without any feature recognition and noted that it has a high rate of false positives when presented with random imagery. Duh.
  • woah 12y ago
    Really? From the article: "They tested with two widely used DNN systems that have been trained on massive image databases." Is this wrong?
    • kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
      GIGO. Just because they used a "Deep" architecture doesn't mean it was suitable for the task.
      • jessaustin 12y ago
        Does your criticism extend to the whole enterprise of facial recognition, or did this research somehow fail to include the secret sauce that makes it work?
• eternalban 12y ago
  It's not just the recognition front end that is problematic. In context of the issue of mis-recognition, Aphyr's tear down of various backends [1] -- which for all we know are in use by the lettered agencies -- gives me the willies. [1]: https://aphyr.com/tags/Distributed-Systems https://aphyr.com/tags/Distributed-Systems
• lovemenot 12y ago
  >> It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup I had a similar thought. An app which takes the image of a target - Julian Assange say - and overlays it onto your facial image as thousands of virtual stickers. Gradually the evolutionary algorithm morphs this overlay towards your real facial image; its fitness function being fewer, more unobtrusive stickers. All the while maintaining compatibility with target facial recognition. One day, J.A. escapes from his embassy lair. Thousands of people simultaneously appear on the streets wearing physical stickers on their faces, addressing the London panopticon: "I am SpartAssange".
• JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Humanity isn't some static thing. Cultures become dysfunctional just like familes. Sometimes they have to be changed or they will collapse. Its disingenuous to suggest 'everybody would be happy if only the cops would quit hassling me'. That's sophomoric.