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At the Private Internet Access Blog, Glyn Moody writes how Amazon and US schools are following in China's footsteps to normalize automatic facial recognition and constant surveillance. Materials gained Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU have documented that Amazon has been marketing in its hosted "Rekognition" products to both police forces and schools to facilitate mass surveillance inside the US and to inure the coming generations to it.
Amazon has developed a powerful cloud-based facial recognition system called "Rekognition", which has major implications for privacy. It is already being used by multiple US police forces to carry out surveillance and make arrests, the ACLU has learned.
Amazon claims that Rekognition offers real-time face matching across tens of millions of individuals held in a database, and can detect up to 100 faces in a single photo of a crowd. Rekognition can be used to analyze videos, and to track people even when their faces are not visible, or as they go in and out of the scene.
As a result of these disclosures, a coalition of organizations including the ACLU has sent a letter to Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that the company stop providing its facial recognition tool to the government. The ACLU has also launched a petition that calls for the same.
Emails obtained through freedom of information requests submitted by the ACLU show that Amazon has worked with the city of Orlando, Florida, and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon to roll out Rekognition in those locations. In addition, law enforcement agencies in California, Arizona, and multiple domestic surveillance "fusion centers" have indicated interest in Rekognition, although it is not clear how many of these have gone on to deploy the system. Orlando has used Rekognition to search for people in footage drawn from the city's video surveillance cameras. Washington County, meanwhile, has built a Rekognition-based mobile app that its deputies can use to run any image against the county's database of 300,000 faces.
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:04PM (16 children)
And the paradoxical thing is the older generation, who should have know better, mock [soylentnews.org] and curse [soylentnews.org] the Europeans for doing something to protect the privacy of their citizens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:32PM (9 children)
Pretty much. It's like 9/11 snipped everybody's balls off.
The correct solution to school violence would involve a combination of better support for students and reducing access to the weapons being used in those attacks by restricting access to firearms whose primary use is killing other people. But, we can't have that because freedom, so we get to enjoy having our freedoms curtailed so that a bunch of dickless blunders can have their penis enlarging devices.
(Score: 2, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:43PM (2 children)
Lobes, the brain uses lobes to function, not balls (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 29 2018, @04:52PM (1 child)
You'd never know it, listening to a lot of the government, OR the male populace in general...I'm reminded of that Robin Williams sketch where he says "God gave men a brain, and a penis, and only enough blood to operate one at a time."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @06:03AM
On these matters, women don't seem to be any better in general. It's a human problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:44PM
Its pretty obvious the endgame is to have pervasive surveillance and restricting access to buying literally anything because weapons, or pollution, etc.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:51PM
You would kill hundreds of millions to save a couple hundred. Because feels. Typical woman solution. There's a reason why you belong chained in the basement.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:16PM
these fucking "schools" don't even bother to lock the fucking doors but i'm supposed to give away my right to defend my homestead?
and most people aren't scared after 9/11. they are just too stupid. they think that giving the government more power(even when they are the ones that fucked things up to begin with) will fix things. just like you want to do with guns. you're just like them. another dumb slave.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:37PM
Okay, let's analyze this.
Now: Potential shooter looks over pistols, rifles, shotguns, some of which are cool-looking assault weapons. "I'll use that one!" (points at cool-looking assault weapon). Many people die.
Then, we implement your solution measure:
After that: Potential shooter looks over pistols, rifles, shotguns, some of which are cooler-looking than others. (Guns AC does not approve of for murder purposes are not included here.) "I'll use that one!" (points at cool-looking shotgun). Many people die. Ironically, none of the dead had as a dying thought "Well, at least it was a hunting or target-shooting sporting weapon I was murdered with."
What does this half-baked idea accomplish to protect people? Nothing.
What was accomplished at all, then? The advance of a gun-control agenda that does not have "protecting people" as its goal has banned another category of weapons, and is ready to target the next one.
No thanks.
It's already illegal to "shoot people to death".
There is no benefit in turning this into "illegal to shoot people to death with a [certain] gun."
Seriously, think about it. If you got all the guns banned, then acid attacks, knife attacks, and the like would increase, maintaining net violence. Idiot shooters now can just grab a gun, shoot a couple people, get shot themselves saving everyone else--but if they had no guns, they would have time and inclination to do something like google "anarchist cookbook bomb poison etcetera", where they would learn how to kill the entire building/area full of people at a stroke, which they wouldn't have thought of before. Be careful what you idiots wish for.
Instead of monkeying with the numbers to change "how" some of the people are murdered, it would probably be better to work on intervention between would-be murderers and potential victims, with the goal of fewer prematurely dead people.
This targeting, attacking, of the guns is a result of self-selection bias. If you look at violence throughout history, you see as commonalities violent people in either a culture or state of mind that led them to thinking they would get away with it to the degree they wanted to. But if you look at only, say, people bludgeoned to death, you see the problem there as bludgeons. Examine poisonings? You see the terrible free availability of poisonous things.
And if you look at shootings? Duh, you see guns. Knock it off; you're making yourself look stupid and you're perpetuating the cycle of violence. (If you see someone on about "gun violence" or "the shootings" please point this out to them.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:08AM
And personally the DMCA trumped both of those for the 'respect mah authoritah' don't look behind the curtain crap.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:25AM
This is a false dichotomy. I won't accept any violations of our liberties. I would gladly sacrifice safety for freedom, even assuming that some authoritarian policy definitely would increase our safety.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:59PM (4 children)
Let's not get hasty here. We have yet to see if Europeans will carry through (particularly, their intelligence agencies). Surely, you're aware that appearance and words don't always match reality.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:12PM (3 children)
Typical khallow. Let's take a broad brush, soak it copiously in FUD and get to work under the guise of precaution.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:15PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @04:01PM (1 child)
Like?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @10:11PM
They're also on board with the abusive copyright protection schemes pushed by Disney and other US businesses (and willing to make things worse with their own zany ideas [boingboing.net]). Nor do the alleged protection schemes of this story extend to the efforts of the national and supernational intelligence agencies of the EU (they get to continue to collect data from their citizens).
Austerity was only a thing once banks of other member countries were threatened. And of course, that happens in the middle of a recession. And there was some bullying of small countries such as Iceland and Cyprus in recent years due also to this mess.
The EU let its immigration (from outside of the EU) policy be decided by one country, Greece who pulled in well over a million refugees from the Syrian civil war (and probably did it in retaliation for the austerity initiatives against Greece). A good portion of the European far right's increase in strength in recent years comes from the resulting mess.
The EU plays a lot of lip service to climate change alarmism (and is by far the most powerful entity backing propaganda for that budding ideology), but its policies (such as carbon emissions credit markets, renewable energy white elephants, and several climate treaties such as Kyoto) are notorious for doing little to address any actual problems in that area. But they get to spend more money [bloomberg.com].
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:20PM
And rightly so.
Because knowing who is in the school, (or in the street) has NOTHING AT ALL to do with protecting other people, and facial reco is hopelessly inaccurate.
Knowing every face as they walk in the school house door says nothing about what is in the back pack or under the trench coat.
Facial Reco is security theater and hopelessly useless theater at that. And the people who defend it are idiots.
But a security guard and a metal detector at school house doors (just like at rock concerts and ball parks) is a deterrent that actually works.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.