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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: 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.)