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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: 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].