How an accused drug dealer revealed Jacksonville's facial recognition network

Overnight? Thiel has been building Palantir for a long time now. It's older than Twitter.

It sucks, but I'm not sure what can be done. The technology is only going to get better and cheaper and more accessible.

I am reminded of this talk by Sid Meier: https://youtu.be/bY7aRJE-oOY?t=19m27s

People don't understand probabilities. They don't accept that if someone has a 75% chance of being guilty, they may very well not be.

It happened again with FiveThirtyEight when everybody accused their "70% chance of Mrs Clinton winning" of being wrong, when it doesn't preclude Mr Trump winning.

I don't see how it would be any different than traditional lineups, where if a witness selects one of the foils, they've just failed to select the police suspect. Police don't just stack a lineup with potential suspects in order to decide who to investigate.

Don't drive? I know that sucks, but with self-driving cars on the horizon, these sort of "capitulation of rights" scenarios should not need to exist.

We are very vulnerable (in terms of rights) when driving in the US.

The problem of course is that those scores aren't very good either, because they don't distinguish between e.g. libertarian peaceniks, right-wing anarchists, and biker gang bangers. But the solution is just more data; cross-referencing with a consumer purchase database, for example. Eventually the police will get their responses well-calibrated. I'd assume this sort of thing is what Trump is referring to when he says he supports profiling.

What's its accuracy? How was the surveillance obtained? Is the time of the photo accurate or was the server clock set incorrectly? Was it obtained constitutionally or through an illegal investigation? What if it's incorrect, can I have the algorithm to help mount a legal defense

Edit: manually searchable footage is in-between. Manual search has natural throttling which makes it a bit less invasive against privacy.

Similarly, you can hit phase transitions in capability where more of the same isn't just the same any more. That's why we let police look at things by eye from public space, but count it as a search if they use technology to enhance their view (such as IR).

The main concern is that technology is allowing police to expend more policing effort than we want them to. Their powers aren't supposed to be perfect, and pushing their success rate too high is dangerous for society.

Police would get their human staff cut if they sat them down to build a cross correlation database of citizen activity out of photos from all around town. They'd be called the Stasi and worse.

Why is it any different because they use computers instead of humans?

Ed: I think of modern policing in the US as a sort of autoimmune disease, prompted by a combination of natural proclivity and particularly nasty, if brief, shock to the system a decade-and-a-half ago. Policing in the abstract is good for society; policing like we are now is not.

Make no mistake, they do lie to judges, or at minimum give incantations with no regard to their truth value ("I noticed a furtive movement"). But easily-disproven lies are riskier.

And the fact as (many of us are) programmers we know just how buggy, generally unreliable and flaky software can be.

Much like my instinctive recoil from IoT - "You want to put lowest cost manufactured network devices that have access to tonnes of personal data on my internal network and connect them to the internet..!", I find this trend deeply worrying, people who aren't techies tend to put undue weight on computer systems that usually give the correct results but can fail in subtle and not subtle ways with "Well it worked last time".

I've had people tell me "Well that's not what the computer says" when I absolutely knew that what the computer says is wrong, most recently that I'd submitted electricity meter readings (I had a screenshot of both the submission and the corresponding "Your meter reading was recieved" success message, not my first rodeo..).

To quote Jurassic Park "You where so busy figuring out if you could no one stopped to consider if they should".

One problem is there just aren't enough killers etc. anymore, crime rates are way down from their peaks not so many decades ago. But, somehow, where this has happened, it hasn't resulted in a reduction in the size of what I like to call the police-judicial complex. This book's underlying thesis is that too avoid unthinkable layoffs, the complex needs a steady diet of "the clueless" to keep running at it's current tempo: Arrest-Proof Yourself (https://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/d...) I haven't read the 2nd edition I linked to, but I can't recommend the 1st highly enough in every respect, theory to practice.

Every law an ethical implication, written by a culture frozen in a frail moment of history or worse, by the cultural detritus of corporate ownership, malignant power, or shady backrooms. Every line of code written by a human, with bias and imbalance.

The "efficiency" of such a system is carved out of the bedrock of dystopian science fiction.

The non-rhetorical answer, according to how the system is supposed to work, is none of them. It's not possible for four independent actors to each have a 95% chance of being the perpetrator. If one has a 95% probability then the combined probability of all the others has to be <5%. And if the probability of the "most likely suspect" to have done it is e.g. 40%, that clearly isn't "beyond a reasonable doubt."

But this was all true even before computers. The system doesn't care about the math. A crime is committed, someone is to be punished, they put the most likely suspect in front of a jury and most of the time the jury will convict regardless.

In reality most of the time the accused will plead guilty to take a six month sentence over the 90+% chance of getting five years from a jury who doesn't understand (and is not given an opportunity to understand) how the probabilities actually work. And that incentive to plead guilty for a shorter sentence and lower legal bills is the same whether you're guilty or innocent.

And let me quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The GULAG Archipelago on the general question of "whistling" vs. resisting:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!