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posted by janrinok on Friday May 24 2019, @10:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the facing-up-to-it dept.

Until recently Americans seemed willing to let police deploy new technologies in the name of public safety as they saw fit. But crime is much rarer than it was in the 1990s, and technological scepticism is growing. On May 14th San Francisco became the first American city to ban its agencies from using facial-recognition systems. That decision was profoundly unpopular at the police conference. Jack Marks, who manages Panasonic’s public-safety products, called it “short-sighted and reactive”. The technology exists, he said; “the best thing you can do is help shape it.” Other cities, including Somerville in Massachusetts, may soon follow San Francisco’s lead all the same.

Companies are under scrutiny, too. On May 22nd Amazon saw off two challenges by activist shareholders. They wanted the board to commission an independent study to determine whether Rekognition, its facial-recognition platform, imperils civil, human and privacy rights. The activists also wanted to ban the firm from selling Rekognition to governments until the company’s board concludes, “after an evaluation using independent evidence”, that it does not erode those rights.

Senior police officers argue that the technology is a useful crime-fighting tool. Daniel Steeves, chief information officer for the Ottawa Police Service, says that a robbery-investigation unit spent six months testing a facial-recognition system. It lowered the average time required for an officer to identify a subject from an image from 30 days to three minutes. The officers could simply run an image through a database of 50,000 mugshot photos rather than leafing through them manually or sending a picture to the entire department and asking if anybody recognised the suspect. Other officers stress that a facial-recognition match never establishes guilt. It is just a lead to be investigated.

Yet officers sense that the technology is in bad odour. A deputy police chief from an American suburb with a security system that uses facial recognition around the local high school says: “We knew that facial recognition wasn’t going to fly, so we called it an Early Warning Detection System.”

[...] Chris Fisher, executive director of strategic initiatives for the Seattle Police Department, recently oversaw the building of a data system linking previously siloed streams of information, such as emergency-call records, stops based on reasonable suspicion, and police use of force. This let the department know precisely where disparities occur. Before, says Mr Fisher, they often relied on guesswork and anecdotal evidence to fill in the blanks. “Now we can know: in how many of our dispatches did it end up that a person was in crisis, and in that subset, how often did we use force?”

Axon, which makes body-worn cameras and Tasers (the police weapon that gave the firm its former name) is building a system for managing records. Jenner Holden, the firm’s chief information-security officer, says that “what we can do to help officers improve most isn’t the sexy stuff. It’s helping them be more efficient and spend more time on the street.” 


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Friday May 24 2019, @10:46PM (4 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday May 24 2019, @10:46PM (#847394) Journal

    It's too easy to fake. There is no way to verify the chain of custody. It would be just as bad as witness testimony.

    Kinda puts us in a bind, doesn't it?

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    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 24 2019, @10:51PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday May 24 2019, @10:51PM (#847397) Journal

    As long as they can use it to identify and/or locate somebody, they can come up with a way to arrest and charge. Normal people do illegal stuff (insert Cardinal Richelieu here), and actual criminals are usually dumb and say too much.

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    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday May 24 2019, @11:01PM (2 children)

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday May 24 2019, @11:01PM (#847403) Journal

      I didn't disagree with that. Still, its use will be arbitrarily/politically driven, and that reduces its credibility for use as evidence.

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      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday May 24 2019, @11:29PM (1 child)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 24 2019, @11:29PM (#847411)

        Don't forget that such a treasure trove of data will be used for corrupt / criminal purposes unrelated to reported crimes, either officially or unofficially.

        It'll always be marketed as preventing violent crime, but thats not the problem. Look, I'm just saying, there's a small number of people in the world who are experts on the new (ish) 'jupiter' field in Brazil and a small number of energy company HQs and I know people who would pay good money for a feed of who's talking to who before the official SEC approved news releases are made. Lets say a specific stock pops 10% on some surprising news about jupiter, but you need to know exactly which stock and when... well I'm sure some beat cop in Houston would accept perhaps one percent of that trading profit if that one percent is maybe fifty times his lifetime cop earnings... Not to mention every divorced cop will have a special eye on his ex- and maybe a couple others, etc...

        I'm sure we'll be told it'll never be used for corrupt purposes. Sure. Just like Wall Street, or the internet, DMV records, gun registries and gun control laws in general, etc.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @12:46AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @12:46AM (#847443)

          For official use against the public it's fascism all the way. It will be abused, money back guaranteed!

          But to avoid trudging through 50 hours of b-roll, it's a godsend! (shameless plug for Davinci Resolve, doesn't catch everything, but it's better than nothing)