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.”
Related Stories
London to deploy live facial recognition to find wanted faces in a crowd:
Officials at the Metropolitan Police Service of London announced last Friday that the organization will soon begin to use "Live Facial Recognition" (LFR) technology deployed around London to identify people of interest as they appear in surveillance video and alert officers to their location. The system, based on NEC's NeoFace Watch system, will be used to check live footage for faces on a police "watch list," a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said.
[...] In Las Vegas, a number of casinos have used facial-recognition systems for decades—not only to spot potential criminals but to also catch "undesirables" such as card counters and others who have been banned from the gaming floors. (I got a first-hand look at some of those early systems back in 2004
[...] private companies' own databases of images have begun to be tapped as well. Amazon's Rekognition system and other facial-recognition services that can process real-time streaming video have been used by police forces in the US as well as for commercial applications
[...] These systems are not foolproof. They depend heavily on the quality of source data and other aspects of the video being scanned. But Ephgrave said that the Metropolitan Police is confident about the system it's deploying—and that it's balancing its deployment with privacy concerns.
[...] Areas under the surveillance of the system will be marked with signs.
Previously:
America Is Turning Against Facial-Recognition Software
ACLU Demonstrates Flaws in Facial Recognition
Amazon and US Schools Normalize Automatic Facial Recognition and Constant Surveillance
Amazon Selling Facial Recognition Systems to Police in Orlando, FL and Washington County, OR
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Friday May 24 2019, @10:46PM (4 children)
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?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 24 2019, @10:51PM (3 children)
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday May 24 2019, @11:01PM (2 children)
I didn't disagree with that. Still, its use will be arbitrarily/politically driven, and that reduces its credibility for use as evidence.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday May 24 2019, @11:29PM (1 child)
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
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)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Friday May 24 2019, @10:48PM (2 children)
Typical cop bullshit. I'm generally on their side and always give them the benefit of the doubt when possible, but this is simply ridiculous. They used the same argument for speed radar, those yellow stars folks wore in Germany in the good old days, and red light cams. Give them about five years and people will be getting tossed in prison "because the software said their face tried to steal the Declaration of Independence (a la "National Treasure" movie) and the software never lies and we're tough on crime so too bad have fun in prison unless you can prove your innocence better than software that is never wrong P.S. its all a trade secret so you just have to trust us when we say its error free"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday May 24 2019, @10:53PM (1 child)
In between "establishing guilt" and "lead to be investigated" are both "sufficient for generating a warrant" and "usable as evidence in court". And "sufficient danger to send out preliminary armed response" rather than, say, a phone call.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday May 24 2019, @11:10PM
I would agree with and extend your remarks such that my example of stealing the Declaration of Independence ("National Treasure" movie plot) is unlikely, the more likely trajectory would resemble private red light camera fundraising abuse... the software says you were seen on camera buying weed last week, you can either pay your ticket or we can send you to collections or put out a warrant and you can rot in jail for a couple weeks at which point you might be innocent, but wouldn't it be easier to pay protection money to make it all go away? Its your choice.
Maybe some strange civil forfeiture stuff too. Software says this was you walking around drunk downtown, supposedly drunk, anyway, and the video shows someone getting into a car and driving away, so now your car is our car under forfeiture rules, too bad. Maybe in court you can prove that wasn't you, wasn't your (well, now its our) car, maybe you can prove you were not drunk... probably not. We'll enjoy your car, too bad for you. Don't complain, either, or we'll shoot your dog or kid for "resisting arrest".
So yeah I do think the thin edge of the wedge will be similar to red light cam enforcement or civil forfeiture laws.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 24 2019, @11:21PM
sales droid sez:
"mgr of Panasonic’s public-safety products, called it “short-sighted and reactive”
keep your invasive spy shit on your island, son of Tojo.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Booga1 on Friday May 24 2019, @11:56PM (3 children)
I've been told multiple times by various people that they knew someone who looked exactly like me. I always dismissed it until someone finally showed me a picture of someone who looked just like me and had the same hair style. If I hadn't known I never went to that location and never wore those clothes, I would have believed it was me.
Now the cops will have another tool that they trust to identify someone. False positives from eye witnesses will change from "is this the guy" to "Oh yeah, this is our guy. We even got a match from the computer to prove it." Juries will be instructed to accept it as fact.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 25 2019, @01:17AM
Don't worry, Booger. We've heard your concerns and will implement mandatory DNA collection from the entire population.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 26 2019, @04:11PM (1 child)
Define "exactly like me". Sophomore year of high school, I was informed of a doppelganger in my home town. It didn't seem likely, really. I wasn't especially unique, in any way. But, I was the only underweight runt around who either ran everywhere, or bicycled everywhere. I seldom walked anywhere. Yet, this guy was always walking when anyone saw him. Weight? Nobody knew, just that he wasn't fat. Eye color? Oh, nobody got close enough to look at his eyes. Height? About your height. Any other details? Well, he looks like you. HOW does he look like me? Never any good answers. Not even what he was wearing. If anyone had ever said "He was wearing some kind of psychodelic hippy T-shirt", that would have shot him down as "looking just like you".
I finally decided that people who saw my doppelganger and thought it was me were just a helluva lot more inattentive than I was. Chances are, I could have walked around a corner, and bumped into this guy, and neither of us would have given the other a second thought.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:14PM
I'm right there with you. Those are a lot of the reasons I dismissed all the people saying they saw someone that looked like me. Never any details.
Anyway, there was the one time that someone finally had a picture of my supposed doppelganger. I couldn't tell how tall he was, but he had approximately the same build as me, looked about the same age range, had the same hair style and color, and facial structure. If they dressed up like me and posed next to me, I might actually have to think about it before picking which one is which. It was really spot on.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday May 25 2019, @04:26AM (1 child)
Because we have the very special camera that whistles. Crook looks at the camera. Because of the whistle. And that's when it takes the picture. Smart!!!! foxnews.com/tech/5-ai-gadgets-that-think-for-you [foxnews.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 25 2019, @04:29PM
Not everyone looks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday May 29 2019, @03:09PM
I took an international flight leaving from ATL 1.5 weeks ago, and they had a facial recognition setup in use. I'm pretty sure that all of the other sheeple submitted to it without thinking. Unfortunately it was slow as hell, and held up the checkin process immensely.
Apparently it was optional, so I told the gate attendant that I do not consent to facial recognition. Apparently their system doesn't think it's optional because I was told "Don't stand there - it'll take your picture!" It takes pictures any time there's something in its field of view - in other words, the only way to opt out is to wear a facemask (that's not suspicious) or approach the gate walking backwards. The opt-out procedure? Scan my boarding pass like normal. Including the "I don't consent" and "don't stand there" conversations, it was faster by a factor of at least 10 than the stupid camera.
Here's the real question: Where did Delta get the source image to compare my photo against??
I'm betting the Feds gave them access to the passport photo database.